Main Design Trends to Follow in 2010

As 2009 came to an end and online business is evolving very fast nowadays, designers continue to push forward either by following and re-interpreting a trend that came out in the previous year or by moving on to a new undiscovered era.

2010 is already here and we are trying to follow a set of design trends that are leading us in the web design field.

Main Design Trends in 2010

Let's see what are these hot web design trends.

Minimalism and Lots of Whitespace

Minimalism is everything but a recent design trend, though designers adore this technique. It refers to simple designs that contain the most basic visitor needs.

The visitor’s attention is focused 100% on the content. Each design element should have lots of whitespace around for maximum visual impact. Solid colors should be used, avoiding web 2.0 color palette is highly recommended.

Also, in order to convey the minimalism tone, a grid based layout should be used.

Typography

Larger, bolder type. This one began in 2008 and will continue and improve every year. Typography is now playing a very important role in some websites overall look and feel. The usual system fonts will make way for more attractive ones as new technology make this less difficult than in the past.

In some cases, as illustrated in the examples above, typography as a main design element can be more expressive and more visually pleasant than photos.

One Page Layouts with Huge Headers

As screen resolution is no longer an issue, we shall see more websites following this trend. The big headers that could fill up the entire screen substitutes the so outdated splash pages and are also meant to help the visitor to remember your website.

Single page websites have less information than normal websites. This doesn’t necessarily mean insufficient information, it’s just having the right content for the visitors. People are anxious and unnecessary content must be put apart.

However, this trend will be mostly followed by personal or product websites rather than corporate ones with lots of information.

High contrast colors and textures

Purple, turquoise, pink, light blue, green and red. Neon colors are back. Bright colors are the “new black”, we might say.

Vintage feel, textures and serif / slab fonts

Websites with a retro look and feel aren’t something completely new. Many designers love this style and manage to break the line between former corporate websites and modern interactivity.

Slab typefaces and textures can also emphasize web copy and call-to-actions. Highlighting the most important message on a website in such manner can be very productive.

Designers were not so comfy when using serif fonts in the past as logos and system fonts were smaller and didn’t look so good.

Large images

Inserting large images in a website is somehow similar to using bold, big typography. Images should be very attractive to visitors, as this can be a technique to catch the visitor’s attention if the content fails to impress from the very beginning.

Websites with large photos look more consistent and trustworthy.

Illustration and hand drawn websites

There’s a false rumor out there that hand-drawn websites must be designed by “painters”. This trend isn’t referring to “state-of-the-art” websites, it’s just by creating websites totally differently.

Hand-drawn designs will be used more and more in corporate websites in 2010, as they give the website a unique standing out of the crowd look.

What is the Trend of the Future?

This trend may continue to be practiced for some time and during this course, new trends will also emerge. No matter what trend we are heading into, we should always try to keep ahead of it.

What's your prediction for the future trend in design? Please share your thoughts with us.