"The New Trends" (or "Why Web 2.0 is a Worthy Term")

Recently a client asked me the fairly benign question, "so what are the new trends in web design?" My initial thought was that this was so broad a question that even listing a few dozen trends would barely scratch the surface. But upon further reflection, I realized it wasn't such a tough question after all. As a corollary, I imagine fashion editors are posed such questions daily, and any one of them could probably spit out a reasonably accurate soundbite. "Bright colors and loose, flowing garments cinched with thick belts are all the rage." I have no idea if that is actually what is popular in fashion right now, but it's certainly the kind of answer one might expect to plausibly hear, and that kind of answer would probably be sufficient for a casual observer.

There are a few different aspects to web design -- functionality, visuals, and programming among them -- and you can name quick responses to all of them. Social networking and interactive "make it your own" experiences are popular from a functional point of view. Visually, gradients, larger text, and reduced visual clutter are becoming widespread. And from a programming point of view, although I admit this is where I am least familiar, there is a renewed emphasis on semantic markup, open-source programming, and lightweight applications (basically, yes we almost all connect via broadband these days, but we can still make things move even faster). As someone in the field of usability, I'm tempted to say these are all ways of saying the same basic thing, a la the fashion editor soundbite: Web design is shifting from a "look what we can do!" showiness to a "look what you can do!" utility focus.

This is somewhat inevitable. As such a young medium, web design was really flopping around without a clue in its formative years. Since there were very few clear "right ways" to do things, trends came and went, and as anyone who has ever worked in a design agency knows, often the first thing a design team does when starting a new project is just look at everything the competition is doing, sometimes emulating work without really knowing if it's genuinely the best approach (this is not entirely without merit, however -- a key tenet of good usability is standardization).

This era of web design feels like the clean-up period after a major project's initial launch. Everyone is going back and looking at how they used to do things and seeing if there is a better way (there almost always is). Perhaps this is why the unquantifiable notion of Web 2.0 has caught on. It really does feel like the second phase. We get how this works now. We know the ground rules. Now it's time to make everything better.