Web Design trends for 2009
Came across this post by Smashingmagazine.com on the latest trends in web design for 2009.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/14/web-design-trends-for-2009/
In summary - web design trends are moving away from the glossy look and feel styles of the ‘Web 2.0′ era and more into a look that is more decorative, grungy, stylistic and feature rich.
Of course, certain elements still remain - use of large text, optimal use of white space, bold colours, but other elements that were so typical of the ‘Web 2.0′ look are definitely taking a backstage role - glossy and plastic buttons, reflections, gradients…
What is definitely ‘in’ are textures, as well as ‘handwritten’ text and fonts and also using SIFR for font replacement. I have been using SIFR for a while here and there on some client sites and on some of my free Wordpress templates (see http://demo.wpthemes.co.za) in the past couple of months. It is just interesting to see that its use is getting more and more prevalent.
Of course, using SIFR for font replacement can take you into the dangerous waters of possibly using commercial fonts illegally. Remember that the one of the big reasons why we as web designers are normally restricted to using good ole’ arial-tahoma-verdana-helvetica-sans-serif is that the actual font file that is used to render the text must reside on each individual computer. And there are only a limited number of fonts that are distributed with the computer that you are buying - most other fonts are commercial.
So if you do want to use a commrecial font in your SIFR application you have to buy a license for it (or just use one of the many free fonts around!)
Apparently there is also a new method to do font replacement - Cufon, that doesn’t work with flash but rather with Javascript.
I haven’t tried it out myself yet but might just do so to see how it works.
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