March 19, 2024

Web Design Trends for 2014

The start of a new year is always an exciting time for businesses to look ahead and wonder what the coming year will bring. There are a lot of changes in store in 2014, especially for people who work in technology and web design.

2013 saw a slew of new trends, some of which have begun to fade out and others that stuck around and are still going strong. While 2014 is just getting started, let’s take a look at some of the web design trends that have started to emerge or that we can expect to see in the coming year.

Flat Design

Web Design Trends for 2014

Flat Design was one of the biggest trends to emerge in 2013 and it is going strong into the new year. Companies from Taco Bell to Apple are dropping skeumorphism in favor of flat design by stripping their graphics of pretty much any design element that isn’t 100% purposeful in the function of the product. Apple, for example, launched their iOS7 with an extreme flat design, stripping the design elements until they were stark naked. This involves getting rid of 3-D graphics and gradients and basically just using flat shapes and indicators to help the user have a more accessible experience.

Experimental typography

experimental typography

More and more designers are having fun with fonts and injecting them with new personalities. These fonts have a little more pizazz than standard serif or san-serif fonts like Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc. We’ve already seen designers beginning to add uniqueness and personality to the fonts their using in logos and on websites. Some of these can be fun and playful while others are artistic but still professional. You can expect to see many more websites going the way of the less boring font in 2014.

Slide Out Menus

Web Design Trends for 2014

Want to view the content on a website crisply without distraction? Slide out menus allow you to do just that. A slide out menu can be toggled from the top or side of your screen to reveal the rest of the site’s content in a seamless way that doesn’t interrupt your browsing experience. It’s a nice way to get where you’re going without getting distracted. It’s minimalistic and simplicity 2.0.

Big Background Videos

Web Design Trends for 2014

Move over single page websites that feature big beautiful images, and hello background videos. This new trend is making waves, and it isn’t hard to see why! Imagine a beautiful video playing on your site that fills up the entire screen, providing your audience with an inside look and peak into your company or business. When done right big background videos can make your website stand out from others, and provide an in-depth user experience were customers and readers feel connected to you and your brand in a way never before possible.

Endless Scrolling

Web Design Trends for 2014

Scrolling through a website is faster and easier than having to click through links to access various information. They are not the content-cluttered long scrolling pages of the past, either. New design techniques allow the content to be impeccably organized and formatted in a way that’s super easy to read and digest. Long scrolling site can change layout and design as you’re scrolling, which makes it easy to forget that you’re actually scrolling through quite a bit of information.

Simple Color Schemes

Web Design Trends for 2014

2014 will see a lot more websites using only one or two colors instead of the eye-popping graphics and animation of the past. A new trend is to use one bright and clean background color, like red, orange or teal, and to include images or black or white text over it. The effect is super minimalist and user-friendly.

Focus on Mobile

Web Design Trends for 2014Image by Yecid Sanmartin

Responsive Web Design was another big trend in 2013 and now 2014 is seeing websites designed expressly for mobile use. Designers are working more and more on keeping sites functioning on mobile devices and developers are helping the cause along too. Things like logins, social media integration, email subscriptions, endless scrolling and many other features are making sites much, much easier to use on phones, which is where most users are turning these days.

Less Text, More Video

Web Design Trends for 2014

Instead of having blurbs about what a company does, businesses are instead opting for short videos. Because videos are easy to produce and share on your site and on social media and they also appeal to the modern attention span that wants to be wowed and entertained, videos are a great way to communicate with an audience effectively.

Scroll Activated Animations

Web Design Trends for 2014

Interactivity in web design is starting to go to an entirely new level. With scroll activated animations you can create incredible content that your audience can interact with and explore. It makes your web content truly come to life in a way never before possible. Sometime the web can feel distant and different than a person connection, but with scroll activated animations your audience can start to feel more in touch with the digital world.

Like a true San Franciscan, Maryam Taheri has a passion for dogs and the Giants. She heads up Content Marketing at creativemarket.com where she writes about all things creative.

32 Comments

  1. S.B. Reply

    Endless scrolling is a nightmare. I hate it and any website that uses it. It makes no sense at all, especially on e-commerce sites.

    1. Nick Reply

      I agree! One pager’s, well ok, not so much of a problem. But endless scrolling? Or websites that use illustrations that animate when you scroll? Yeah… It was funny in the beginning, now it’s just annoying and not user-friendly.

      Also less text, more video? Not sure about that one either. When you are checking out a website you want to choose between watching a video and reading something. I don’t always want to watch a video, reading is faster most of the times for example.

      Rest of the design trends are nice tho!

  2. Alexis Pratsides Reply

    Cracking article Maryam. My 2 cents worth is that the two points around video, Big Background Videos & Less Text, More Video, are what we will see more and more of in the coming months.

    Saying that, this does rely heavily on companies being able to deliver high quality, engaging video pieces, the likes of which we are really only currently seeing from top end business.

  3. Irene Reply

    Sorry, this sounds more like 2013. Thousands of these sites exist already.
    To have a “trend of 2014”, one would assume the current emerging trends are going to become popular.
    However I feel these trends have already had their 15 minutes.

  4. Martin Reply

    These might be designtrends for sure, but in the age of usability and not just UX, i find it hard to belive some of these trends will be long lived.

  5. BigJon Reply

    yet another repetition of the same myths…
    Many of these ‘trends’ are poor design repeated by the ‘trendy’

    First and foremost is usefulness for the user.
    Many of the above are great for middle class housewives window shopping. So if you’re designing a clothing shop website, well done.
    All other businesses need to avoid a lot of these ‘cool’ and lets face it, bloody annoying, designs!

    “endless scrolling” indeed!

  6. Marty Gruhn Reply

    Hi Maryam. Thanks for the summary. Spot on in our experience.

    Something I would add, however, which is a bit of the dark side of some of these trends.

    In the quest for less content in favor of more eye candy, too many sites are slashing their content to ribbons. This means they don’t provide enough information to educate prospects and visitors — and that increases the cost of sales.

  7. Joe Riviello Reply

    I especially like the scroll activated animations and how you can use them in your build to tell a story as the user scrolls. You can see a perfect example in onlycoin.com.

  8. Dallas Website Design Reply

    Flat Design should have been more correctly attributed to Microsoft’s Modern design theme it uses across Windows 8 devices, as it predated iOS7. It was correctly predicted that Apple would likely follows suit and implement a flat theme when WP8’s design was lauded. This time it was MS who was the trendsetter and Apple who followed suit!

  9. Nathan Brook Reply

    Great article. Very informative. I noticed the trend of flat design already in 2013 and was successfully implementing it in my work.

  10. Rob Reply

    Great post, I see many of these web design trends sticking around longer than usual. Mobile, Video and simple are here to stay for a while.

  11. Bryon Hutcheson Reply

    Thank you for posting this article. Some of your points were valid, but a few I would like to go over:

    First, endless scrolling is a nightmare. It was cool at first, but it became really annoying and frowned upon in the web design community. It is not user friendly in the sense that people can become easily lost in it, which effects how they enjoy the site. Trust me, if users do NOT enjoy being on the site, they will NOT come back.

    Secondly, large video backgrounds are a cool idea, but it does pose a problem when it comes to loading time. For some users, if a site takes too long to load, they will leave an go some. So if you are going to use a large video background, make sure it’s small enough to where it doesn’t make your site take forever to load.

    Thirdly, slide-out menus are also another great idea, especially for mobile; but for general sites, it will effect the user experience. In design, we don’t have any real “rules” that we are forced to follow other than the basic principles and elements we apply. But when it comes to the world of web design, user experience is everything. Website usability is the really the only real “rules” in web design, which is making sure your website is user friendly to where people can easily find what they are looking for with the least amount of clicks as possible. A lot of people will have a hard time with being able to use a website if the navigation is not obvious; so unless it’s going to be used for mobile, then I would not include it in the general functionality of the website for when it’s on computer screens.

  12. Scott Richardson Reply

    Personally, I think it’s time ‘trends’ go away. Instead, we just use what is RIGHT for the job. Does the brand and style of a business dictate a flat design style? If so, use flat. Inversely, is a brand edgy, grungy, and heavy? Then maybe flat and minimal isn’t really ideal. Sometimes, minimal is necessary because it’s the content that needs to be the hero, however in other projects, the style, theme and art is what creates the experience. For those projects, the experience solidifies the brand, and in that case, heavy graphics and complexity may suit instead of minimalist approaches.

    I guess, choose a style, method or ‘ahem’ trend that is RIGHT, rather than trendy. Otherwise you’re going to have clients that need a redesign every 18 months – which might be nice for your bank account, but not theirs.

    Scott

  13. Arianna Reply

    Thanks for your wonderful share and let us know the latest website designing trends that we should adopt for the better and attractive website design.
    Honestly speaking I was doing surfing and I was looking for some website design on scrolling. Then I found a website http://www.61designstreet which is also a very interesting website design for this 2014 year.
    The coding of jQuery behind the website is really awesome.

  14. Thomas Ulstrup Reply

    We completely overhauled our website and launched the brand new one today. It’s simple, has great big fonts that are easy on the eyes and the graphics are very simple and flat. Big and easy noticable CTA-buttons. The two main things for us this year are going to be responsive and flat designs.

  15. Rachel Gillevet Reply

    Hey Maryam,
    I thought this was a great collection of web design trends that you put together for the new year. I always think it’s important for these lists to be put together so that people know what’s out there. If it creates some discussion, even better 🙂 Anyway, I included your post in my roundup of the month’s best web design/devleopment, security, and CMS content. http://www.wiredtree.com/blog/januarys-best-web-designdevelopment-cms-security-content/ Thanks again for compiling this.

  16. Laura | Web Design Birmingham Reply

    I love the single page, infinite scrolling sites however I have to wonder what impact they’ll have on SEO? Best practice is always to have one page per priority, so having a single page with multiple priorities on could lead to some Google confusions.

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