Color plays a vital role when it comes to design, especially “web design.” Today, you can play around even with different formats of black and white color combination in terms of balance, contrast, hue, brightness, or more. Flat design has still maintained its prominence, and rainbow colors are in trend, with brighter tones coming up. Even the minimalist design is still popular as ever. With 2015 about to end, you can expect even more web design trends to show up in 2016.

• Unique UI patterns

Hamburger menu encompasses all the menu tabs within a hamburger like icon. When you click on that, you get to know all the hidden tabs present. The design looks clean with such type of menu and besides you can see only what you need to see.

You can use long scrolling to place most important elements above fold, while rest present beneath to give a storytelling feel to the users. When users see the critical things present above, they are intrigued to know the details present beneath the fold.

Discovered by Pinterest, card layout let you present the content present on your website in form of cards. This type of layout has a strong visual appeal that connects with users greatly, and they are attracted to see more present on other site pages. Such type of layout provides easy visual scanning, going through important or relevant content in just minutes. They can be rearranged easily due to their square or rectangular shapes.

Killer images present on homepage, give a heroic appeal to the entire website. First page that a user lands upon is homepage. If there is a strong image present above fold, the user will be intrigued to see what the website has to offer in particular. With advances in data compression as well as internet bandwidth, HD images can be used with ease without compromising on loading time and performance. After scroll, you can find a zig zag, card based, or other kinds of content arrangement.

• Rich interactive animations

Animations give rise to storytelling then can make the overall experience, entertaining, interactive, and with a storytelling approach. It can be diversified largely into two groups:

1. Large Scale Animation Pop-up notifications, parallax scrolling, and other types of primary animations require user action to perform.
2. Small Scale Animation Loading bars, hovering tools, and other types of secondary animations do not require user action to perform.

• Micro interactions

Liking, sharing, commenting, or following something is what micro interactions is all about. Even small actions such as turning off mobile alarm, setting reminders, and such other things comprise of micro interactions. They might look small; however, they play an important role in giving a human touch to the entire conversation rather than having things automated. However, keeping micro interactions as simple as possible is wise. Each micro interaction gives rise to a design that is highly human centered.

• Materialistic design “an enhanced alternative to flat design”

Last year, Google switched itself to Material Design. This type of design has the ability to present things in a more realistic manner by using the concepts of depth, movement, and shadow effects. The goal of such a design is to provide a modernized and clean appearance to flat design. Since material design is free of any particular frameworks, it can be easily implemented using various front-end tools, and it is lightweight when it comes to integrating with the code.

• Responsive design “an answer to all sizes working theme”

Responsive design is probably the evergreen trend in web design that is here to stay for quite a long time. A relatively cheap and simple way for all kinds of businesses to have a mobile friendly website applicable to all screen sizes, no matter seen on desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones. By looking at the current trends in web design, responsive design appears to be more of a practice now rather than just another trend. It seems to be almost mandatory for businesses planning to switch to a responsive design website. There is no doubt in regards to the versatility and usefulness that responsive design tends to offer.

• Flat design “most common web design theme of all”

Probably the most used design pattern by major businesses. It is so because it is highly compatible with other design patterns such as minimalist design, material design, or even responsive design. We do see some hot favorite trends in flat design and we can expect the same to continue even in 2016.

Long shadows give a tremendous amount of depth to the current flat designs.

Vibrant color schemes when used with varied templates and frameworks deliver a fresh look to user eyeballs. Hence, expect to see a potential rise even in the next year.

Use of extremely simple and legible typography make things clear, clean, and transparent ensuring that user reads them comfortably with great ease.

Ghost buttons serve purpose of delivering simple to use and easy to understand interface. They usually appear as outlined working as clickable links. As soon as user hovers over them, their appearance changes giving a stylized look, which you personally expect from a design.

Minimalist approach is making use of as few elements or components possible for letting users access only things that are useful without getting to know useless features or Call To Actions (CTAs). Such a design helps to keep things uncluttered without much cumbersome functionalities.

Would you like to expect more with 2016?

Do not follow trends thinking that they are in trend and needs to be in your design anyhow. Try to encompass only those ones that compliment your website and business objectives comfortably. Integrating trends is definitely worth giving a shot. However, what is more important to remember is how your users will perceive your website once things incorporated. If they are having a tough time dealing with things or are not able to comprehend things, then all your pain will go in vain. Make a right choice by being in users seat for a while when making a decision.

Recently, Google revealed a new design language for Android, Chrome OS and the Internet called Material Design. Actually, material design is a design language that is a combination of the successful classic design principles along with the latest innovations in technology. The aim of Material Design is to develop a system of design that allows users a unified experience across all of Google’s products on any platform.

Actually, a few years ago, Google products looked extremely annoying. Every single product that Google had made looked different on different platforms. However, in 2011, things began to change when Google started to think hard on this aspect and brought out a unification of the visual part of its ecosystem. This phase was called Project Kennedy.

Initially, Project Kennedy enhanced the web as well and a couple of application design. However, users still had to adjust and get used to the varied looks, controls, as well as layouts of the new interface, when they had to switch between the various devices as well as platforms. This led to the introduction of a new system and design approach called Material Design.

The new design language allows users to create a reliable steady and steady user experience across all devices such as desktops, smartphones, tablets, televisions, watches, etc. This design is actually an evolution of a precursor mobile OS called Holo. Actually, Android 5.0 brings Material design to Android along with an expanded UI tool kit, so that the new design patterns can be integrated easily into your apps.

This is a more flexible design language, which has been created for a global community of designers and developers. Thus, a more objective approach to the design adoption is possible With Material design.

The key principles of Material Design are based on the four basic principles:

1. Tactile Surface :

Also called quantum paper, this interface consists of tangible layers, thus giving it the name quantum paper. Stacked and arranged at different heights, these layers cast shadows on top of each other. Thus, users are able to understand the anatomy of the interface better and the related principles of interaction.

2. Print Design :

It can be assumed that the layers are pieces of digital paper. Thus, it becomes possible for digital ink to be displayed on these layers. This is akin to the approach used in traditional graphic design, such as posters, magazines, newspapers, CD covers, and so on.

3. Meaningful Animations :

Animations are meaningful and do not appear or disappear at whim. Therefore, while using Material Design, users need to think how ‘realistic’ the animation of the layers can be and in terms of ‘digital ink’.

4. Adaptive Design : –

This aspect is all about how three principles as well as concepts can be applied on devices with different screen sizes and with different resolutions.

According to Wikipedia, Material Design involves “more liberal use of grid-based layouts, responsive animations and transitions, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows”. Further, their digital material can expand as well as reform intelligently. Also, designer Matias Duarteexplained that “unlike real paper, their digital material could expand and reform intelligently. While seams and shadows provide meaning about what users can touch, material has physical surfaces and edges.”

Google has announced Material Design on June 25, 2014 at the 2014 Google I/O conference. Currently, most of Google’s mobile applications for Android have applied the new design language. This includes most of Google’s products such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and other Google products including

• Google Docs,
• Sheets and Slides,
• Google Maps,
• Inbox
• Google Play Branded Applications.

To a smaller extent, Google has applied material design to the Chrome Browser as well as Google Keep. Material design is incorporated in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Inbox, as well. According to Wikipedia, Material design will be gradually extended to all of Google’s web as well as mobile products. Thus, material design is aimed to provide a consistent experience across all platforms as well as applications. Additionally, The APIs for third party developers also have been released, so that they can incorporate the design language as part of their applications.