A lot like the fashion industry, web design, and more generally, design, tends to go through comparable trends.

In the constantly changing web design landscape, we find it always pays off to watch what others are doing for multiple reasons

  • Inspiration and motivation
  • Keeping the web active, and
  • Some things people do are just plainly awesome.

Here’s the top 5 web design trends we’ve been seeing early in 2014.

1. Single page sites

As corporate businesses develop their online strategies, a lot tend to be changing their home page to a “brochure” style, single page layout. Even we recently updated our main site to reflect upon recent times.

2. Flat design

When CSS3 first started being support by major browsers, a flood of designers and developers decided to take advantage of the new technology by adding a whole heap of text and box shadows to their site designs. Personally, I think this “hype” will be comparable to the “web 2.0″ bubble. A few years down the track we’ll look back and laugh at these whacky styles.

More recently, the industry tends to have been going back to basics and using “flat” design techniques. (I.e, no drop shadows, fancy borders or effects)

Take a look at this website which utilizes flat design principles.

3. Photography as a design

More and more designs are popping up that solely rely on photography to do the heavy lifting for the pages aesthetics. Take a look at the Clouds Over Cuba website to see a heavily photo influenced design.

4. CSS3 animations & lazy loading

As more and more browsers are both supporting CSS3 and improving its performance, designers and developers alike are taking advantage of its animation features to “spice” things up. Take a look at the Spotify home page for a good example.

5. Half screen, or big menus

Drop down menus have slowly integrated their way into the “norm” for user interfaces on the web. Once upon a time only “cutting-edge” sites were using drop down menus (and they were usually buggy), but in today’s age it’s quite normal for a site to have them.

One trend we have seen slowly developing, especially in the e-commerce interface scene, is big drop down menus. Take a look at the Kogan product menu.