Web design trends for 2015

Published: March 2015

Here at Urban River we have decided to list some of the key web design trends that you can expect to see more of on the web this year.

Professional custom photography

Using inexpensive stock photography on your website can damage the branding and identity. Stock images have been overused to the point that they have lost their impact.

Using high quality, custom photography makes your website unique as you will not see these images on any other website. Custom photography creates a more personal view. A professional photographer will use their expertise to produce imagery that supports your brand.

Typography

Typography greatly affects usability and the overall aesthetics of a website. It is one of the means of delivering the brand message, and helps to create an experience for the user.

With typographic kits becoming more affordable, we can expect typography to continue to play a big role in web design in 2015.

We can expect to see very large, bold typography in order to make a visual statement.  This will also improve the visual hierarchy of a webpage by ensuring users read the largest type first.

Longer pages

The increasing popularity of using mobile devices to view the web means that users have become accustomed to scrolling. Many would argue that scrolling has won over clicking.

We can expect to see longer home pages so that users can get a preview of everything that the website has to offer.  Long web pages are more intuitive and allow for more dynamic interaction between the user and the website.

Take a look at our top picks of the full screen websites out there at the moment.

Animation

As web technologies advance, we can now create small size animations that load quickly and look pixel perfect on any size screen. For this reason, we can expect to see more and more UI animation.

At a time where storytelling across websites is becoming increasingly popular, the use of animation to help tell a story has a big role to play. Animation can make your website more appealing and put across a message more effectively than static images.

Cards

‘Cards’ is a popular design pattern for displaying information in bite-sized chunks.  The blog listing page of our website is an example of using the design pattern.

Cards are a great way to keep the information on your website organized. They can be used to easily browse a lot of information. Typical information that you would find on a card is a title, an image, icons and a brief amount of text. You can think of a card as a small web page.

Cards work well with all types of devices and offer a lot of versatility. You could choose to have small cards that expand when you click to show more, or you could have large cards that shrink when you click to show less. Cards which spread out on three or four columns on a desktop could be stacked vertically on a mobile device. The opportunities are endless.