Published - 20th January 2014
As 2013 fast becomes a distant memory and 2014 screams at us to give it our sole and undivided attention, we asked some of the Harris Associates team to give us their thoughts on what the key marketing trends for the year will be. In the first installment, Vicki, Caroline and Joe address what they think will rule the web roost this year.
Vicki Weiss, web designer and developer: Seamless transitions between devices
With the introduction of the sophisticated new next generation consoles, smart TVs and a saturated tablet market it will not be unexpected that websites will have to evolve beyond just responsive design to accommodate the new screen sizes and different devices. Users will expect seamless transitions between viewing a website on a desktop, a mobile, and on a smart TV, which means everything on a website becoming more flexible and adaptable from font sizes and images down to the interface. It might even pave the way for websites hosting 3D images and videos for use on 3D Smart TVs.
Caroline Stickland, digital designer: Long, one-page responsive websites
As the number of different devices a user can browse on are so vast, speed and ease of use are essential. To this end, and to accommodate for the different interfaces, designers will probably start designing one-page websites where a user has less clicks and simply scrolls up, down, left or right. This will essentially help to make the transition between different devices and interfaces more seamless, whilst also helping to strip the website of any unnecessary “filler” pages and keep the load times to a minimum. This pushes designers to organize the content efficiently and in a format where it is easier to digest, as well as allowing navigation to jump to different sections.
Joe Lans, designer: Typefaces with personality
As copy becomes richer and more relevant, the design of it will become less boring too. Designers will start experimenting much more with typefaces, looking beyond the standard boring serif and sans-serif fonts to find some a little more interesting. We may start to see the decline in the use of Helvetica and an increase in designers creating new custom typefaces.
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