

2014 Predictions for Web Design - collistaeed
http://inside.envato.com/2014-predictions-for-web-design/

======
gbog
Motions: we already have too much of them.

For me Wikipedia had the best content and very high ranking, and its "un-
designed" interface is telling strongly that making things "designed" was
often unnecessary. Sometime ago an "[edit]" link appeared where hovering a
section's title. It was annoying and has been apparently removed.

The first thing I do on a new smartphone install is to remove launcher
animations, which are laggy and useless. The same with any PC install, either
Linux or Windows: go to the settings and uncheck all animations.

Most animations other than simple sliding on mobile apps are also useless. Any
the only moving thing that is useful, the "loading..." spinning weel, is often
even absent.

So I think it will be like with rounded-shades-UI vs flat-UI: once doing
animations is easy and mainstream, it will not be a marker of craftmanship,
and will be dropped except when really useful.

~~~
alexgrcs
I think Wikipedia is not "undesigned", it's just a very well designed site.
And the net is plenty of bad designers.

Sometimes things have to be simplified and redefined. In some ways
"undesigning" is a very important part of the design process, in order to
maintain the functionality of the product. This is the real purpose of design,
not making things look cute and over animated.

------
pulmo
I just hope that designers stop ruining user controlled standard behavior like
scrolling on web pages. Example: [http://www.apple.com/mac-
pro/](http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)

~~~
RyanZAG
Got to agree. It's possibly the worst website I've ever seen. Besides maybe
the iPhone 5C bright green scrolling background madness. Apple these days
seems to be leading the charge on terrible design when it used to be pretty
good at it. Pity.

Luckily their hardware design is still good (laptops and phones anyway), but I
guess that's only because they haven't 'redesigned' them yet. Pretty sure it
will be a train wreck if they try to do that too.

------
petepete
> Things culminated with iOS7’s release which took the concept of flat design
> mainstream.

Yeah, Windows 8 and Android are pretty niche.

~~~
jitl
iOS7's transition to flat design was behind both Android and Windows 8, and
clearly followed them. I think the point the author is trying to make is that
Apple, the biggest proponent of stylized, squeomorphic design moving to flat
UI behind Google and Microsoft was really the final defeat of brushed metal
and rich leather in UIs.

~~~
kibibu
> squeomorphic

This is a beautiful typo of skeuomorphic. It makes it feel more squicky.

------
actionscripted
If you want to see the future, look to the past...right? With all of the
advances in JS/CSS features and performance I would expect that a lot of the
garish 90's Flash "enhancements" will make a return beyond some of the simple
scrolling and animation touches we see now.

Full 3D spinning cube navigation, automatic audio playback, loading screens,
constant page/background animations, etc. It's all going to come back in some
way, and that's not some sort of wishful thinking on my part.

Having watched and been a part of the evolution of the web during the rise of
Macromedia, what we're seeing now with CSS and JS is very similar to the
simple SWFs people were putting together back then. Once everyone gets
comfortable with the way things work, it's going to evolve.

------
callum85
Sorry to be negative, but I didn't find any real predictions here, just
statements about what is happening now, each followed by "...and I think that
will continue in 2014."

~~~
aadvark
be careful they will vote you down.

------
hnha
I hope for a return of text instead of icons. Text is less ambiguous, does not
require guessing, is accessible and clean.

~~~
untog
But doesn't translate. Quite literally.

------
Kequc
Website colours will begin to standardise a little bit my imagination tells me
white backgrounds with black text are in.

------
ABS
it's true that "Living and breathing the space gives you the background to
draw on using intuition" but, at the same time, that's one of the reasons
people tend to miss disrupting changes: they are simply so far out what they
are used to they don't even consider them possible.

------
aadvark
am I the only one who doesn't like envato?

from a web design point of view I believe their popularity is keeping
designers from innovating. the whole portfolio is polished but extremely
repetitive.

