Another year brings another set of trends in the world of design and all things cool. Often, the web and the offline fashion trends show a lot of similarity, so we’ve put together our top ten design trends (on and offline) for 2008 - come back and check how accurate our predictions are at the end of the year!
Adobe, the company behind products such as Acrobat (which is used for PDF files) and the players that allow users to view Flash files, has anounced a partnership with two of the major search engines to make it easier for Flash files (SWF) to be crawled and indexed. According to Adobe:
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an often debated topic simply because the dominant search engines hold their ranking secrets close their chests. In this blog, I aim to look at a model created to help you think about your website in relation to the Internet landscape and make use of the two simple underlying but powerful topics that are the foundation to the whole strategy - text and links. This principle focuses on natural search listings.
Like anyone, as you surf the internet you’re going to come across designs that you love and some that you just love to hate. That’s why trends continue to change. To keep things interesting and exciting. It’s just like decorating your front room, no one wants to sit around looking at the same wall for 10 years now… do they?!
In my eight years experience I can definitely say design trends have changed dramatically and I’m sure they will continue to do so. But of late the one trend that I love is the growing interest in typography, which can be seen larger than life at smashing magazine. Having come from a traditional print background I’ve always been frustrated at how limited we’ve been when using typography well online. But now with a bit of CSS things have changed - why, we can even make Times look sexy! Bet you’d never have heard that from a designer a year ago!? And what’s more we can even play around with the spacing, leading and the colour.
So for now it’s all about BIG bold fonts! Let’s face it, why keep squinting at your monitor and let’s embrace this new trend…
…for now at least!
Trends in 2008 for web design are still emerging. What seems to be consistent though is that the layouts are improving. Content is being presented far more clearly than ever before. As in the print world, it’s through the use of rigid grids. Yes you read that right: grids are making a comeback. Grid-oriented pages makes reading text and navigating a page much easier for the user and creates a more enjoyable experience. Designing to grids is not new and has always been a trusted tool in any traditional designers kit and improves the usability, especially on information-rich sites where delivering a large quantity of information is very important.
