Online Design Trends and Tips For Business Owners and Small Brands. Responsive trends, modular design, material design, hand-drawn illustrations, etc.

1. 16 Web & Graphic Design
Trends to Watch in 2016

2. 1. Usability
• In 2016, design is all about the user.
User experience (UX) is the new black.
• No one will care about how cool your design
looks, if it’s not usable.
• Your online business won’t grow if you don’t take
user experience into account.
• Your website needs to load fast and
be easy to use.
• Page Load Speed is a great issue. Adding just
one second of bloat to your site means sales
drop by 27%.

3. 2. Responsive Design
• Mobile is already the “first screen”.
• Google is literally crushing sites that don’t offer a
mobile-friendly experience.
• User experience on mobile phone is key.
• Hiding a desktop function for mobile users is not
an acceptable solution anymore.
• If your users can’t fully experience your website
on their daily metro conmutes, then your whole
site needs to be revised.

4. • In 2016 the meaning of responsive design goes
even further.
• Now, all your graphic design and artwork will
have to adhere to the rules of responsive. No
“one size or format fits all”.
• The best example of this is the recent Netflix
brand redesign.

5. 3. App inspired
web design
• Websites should learn from app design
(speed, zero distractions, tailored user
experience).
• Remove all unessential information and let
the user interact with your content as fast
as he can.

6. 4. Clever menus
• Some people hated the now omnipresent
Hamburger Menu or navicon. Now, say hello
to clever menus.
• Hidden navigations that appear out of
nowhere depending on the user’s actions will
soon be the norm.
• Even if we can’t see it at the moment,
experience tells us that there is a menu on
every website. So no need to worry, it will just
appear when we need it.
• Experts are predicting that clever / hidden
menus will be fully responsive to
multidirectional scrolling.

7. 5. Modules and
modular text
• No one likes to read a dreadfully long blurb of
text.
• The first trick to breakdown long texts in the
web was to try to write in short paragraphs.
• But you can take a modular approach to web
page layout.
• Modular design is a technique where
everything is built using a block grid pattern.
• This doesn’t mean a boring pattern, like a
chessboard.
• In fact, it can mean exactly the opposite: hard
to anticipate patterns, that make it easy for us
to read and be interested in the different parts
of a website.
Image: Well Made Studio

8. 6. Modular and
infinite scrolling
• Modular scrolling means every module on a website
may scroll on its own, independently from the other
modules.
• You may have already seen it (though sometimes it’s
hard to notice) in sites with a sidebar that doesn’t
scroll at the same speed than the main content.
• But it’s about to get better. Picture a website divided
in two columns with independent scroll, as you can
see here.
• It all began with infinite scroll. A trend that you may
have noticed in 2015. Some of the most popular
sites on the world today, like Pinterest, Twitter or
Facebook already use it.

9. • Infinite and modular scroll work on the
same premise: scrolling down is easier and
faster than clicking and it doesn’t interrupt
user experience by loading a new page.
• Time.com’s bounce rate dropped 15
percentage points after they adopted
infinite scrolling (source).

10. 7. Material Design
• Material design wasn’t widely adopted
until 2015.
• But Material as a trend that you’ll find in
websites, apps, artwork, etc. will be
adopted massively during 2016.
• It will be the year of material design’s
dominance.
• Expect to see those long, solid shadows
virtually everywhere.

11. 8. Flat Design
• Material design came along to fix some of
flat design’s usability problems, but that
doesn’t mean flat is dead.
• In fact, flat design will also grow to be even
more popular during 2016.
• With a lot of big brands adopting flat
design in the last few years, mass
audiences are more aware that less is
better when it comes to visual style.
Images credit: Brafton

12. • Flat web design has another UX
advantage: image files weigh less and
do not add to page load time.
• The general guidelines of flat design will
be widely spread around small brands
and blogs artwork all over the web
(eg, ghost buttons).
• At the same time, those on the know on
graphic design will be moving on to Flat
2.0.

13. 9. Visual Storytelling
Some data:
• 100 million people worldwide watch at least
one video per day.
• Website visitors are 64% more likely to make a
purchase after watching a video.
• 80% of viewers recall watching a video ad up
to 30 days after seeing it.
• 92% of those watching video on mobile
devices share the content with others.

14. • Human beings process visual elements
60,000 times faster than reading words.
(Source).
• Now, design needs to play a content
function; it won’t be a mere companion to
the text that tells the story anymore.

15. 10. Infographics
• Everyone loves a good infographic, and above
all, they love the results: infographics are
shared 3 more times than any other piece of
visual content.
• What kind of infographics are we going to see
generating buzz in 2016?
• The time of boring old infographics based on
the same old templates are about to fade
away. Putting three or four bullet points and
adding a few cute icons just won’t cut it
anymore.
• It’s time to mix infographic storytelling
capabilities with the deep insight of data
visualizations. Infographic and big data
together.

16. 11. Cool Typography
• With typography becoming a key element
in any serious branding efforts, broad
audiences are g designers etting used to
seeing more artistic typefaces.
• Typography is a language in itself.
• Years ago, only graphic were able to talk
that language.
• Today, more people are gaining access to it,
thanks to the wider range of available web
fonts.
• 2016 will see a comeback of big fonts, italic
and all caps for logos and headings.
• Another big trend here are typefaces that
appear to come from someone holding a
pen.

17. 12. Modern retro
• Modern retro is cool. It started as a trend in logo
design and it’s already permeating to web and
graphic design.
• There’s a subtle difference in what retro means
now. Old retro refers to early 20th century, up
until the 60s.
• Modern retro is all about the early days of
computer age: think vintage video games, pixel
art, big cell phones, Tron…
• Anything that was big in visual style between the
late 70s and early 90s is back!

18. 13. Rich colors
• When it comes to colors, the 80s will rule.
Prepare for a world of bright pastels and rich,
bold accent colors.
• “A happier, sunnier place where we feel free to
express a wittier version of our real selves”, in
the words of the Pantone Fashion Color Report
For Spring 2016.
• The Top10 2016 spring colors according to
Pantone look like this:
• Whatever you do, just don’t pick a boring,
washed-out color. You’ve been warned.

19. 14. Grids and geometrical
shapes
• Grid design is a clear system, easy to work with for
designers, plus the users can easily understand it
and use it very easily too.
• But every trend has its flip side, and experts also
predict that, as a response there will be a rise in
free-form shapes.
• These are just like geometrical shapes, but with
dents.
• Rough edged and hand-drawn shapes are a
signature of neo-grunge, another trend that will gain
prominence in 2016.

20. 15. Kill The Stock Photo!
• Stock photos are one of the most boring and
unoriginal things you can include in a website.
• 2015 was the year that a host of free alternative stock
photos sites tried to make it more accesible for
anyone to get quality stock images in their sites.
• Everyone ended up picking the same photos and you
found them everywhere online, over and over again.
• Why use stock photos? You have millions of
alternatives.
• Please use images custom made for your site, either
by yourself or by a professional.
• What about a hand-drawn illustration? (You’ll see a lot
of these in 2016).
• Or a custom graphic? Or even better, what about
video?

21. 16. Video & GIFs
• You’ve probably noticed all those cool websites
with video backgrounds.
• Most of them take a long time to load, but that
will change once people understand they have
to compress the video as much as possible.
• Video will replace images in lots of places, other
than website backgrounds.
• Vine, Snapchat et al have gotten us into the
habit of staring at short video loops.
• Watch out for profile pictures that are not
pictures anymore, but a short video
• Above all, watch out for the invasion of
animated GIFs.
• Facebook is to blame for opening the Pandora
Box and they will soon be EVERYWHERE.

22. So what do you think:
Will my predictions be spot on,
or will they utterly fail?
Please let me know
in the comments.

23. Thanks!
@VisualErnesto