What are the hottest new design trends emerging this year?

When you take a look backwards at design trends from recent years and compare them with those that are just now emerging, you can get a great feel for the way that user needs grow and change. It is the job of design to meet users where they need it. 

Over the past few years, the digital landscape has been filled with Flat Design and responsive, drag-and-drop web templates. The rise of Flat Design was hardly a surprise given that its minimalist appeal is super-easy to replicate and personalize. Flat Design was a simple and adaptable design innovation that really embraced the medium of the screen. In doing so, it created new expectations for the harmony of usability and aesthetics. 

But now that we're a few years past the heyday of Flat Design, we're starting to…

Flat Website Design: A Fad or the Web’s New Look?

Like the hottest fashion fads, website design trends come and go. The days when carousel sliders and sidebars ruled the Web are long gone. In the last few years, flat websites have taken over. The reason? Modern Internet users are savvier than their predecessors. They know how to navigate a webpage, so there’s no need to use shading and textures to guide their eyes. Flat designs also have faster load times and a clean, professional look. According to Bluehost, these sites offer perfect scalability for mobile devices. These attributes not only enhance UX but also improve a site’s PageRank. But is flat design a bottle-rocket fad that will burn out as fast as it took off? Or will it be the Web’s new wayfarer – a trend that remains popular through the decades…

The evolution of flat design and how its journey so far can shape your online presence

Whatever the goal of your site, it has to have style and substance to succeed, but what if I told you that following one web design trend could help you to achieve both? Increased browser support for CSS3 saw an explosion of gradients and box shadows, but the web development world is taking a huge leap away from these traditional design details and embracing the clean, crisp nature of flat design. The move sees less vendor prefixes and shorter style sheets, two factors that mean less kilobytes on page load. Here we will explore the key principles of flat design, its impact on user behaviour, experience and ultimately conversion, and unveil how this particular trend is likely to evolve throughout 2016.

Flat design at a glance

Thanks to its minimalistic nature, flat design has been the go-to concept…