Web designing has always been experiencing rapid changes, improvements and new trends and within the last decade a great number of trends have been emerged on the sphere of designing.

If you are a professional designer, you know that the field has seen incredible changes in every aspect from workflow to layout and techniques to tools. Therefore, as a professional designer, you must know that the secret of your success lies in being aware of the hottest trends in this industry.

Though, it is not really easy to forecast the most attention grabbing trends in coming months, you can still try to learn from the history that how some particular trends became so popular because of their unique way of practices. Here in this post, you are going to discover 12 trends which gained huge attention not just in 2015 but also in early months of 2016 and most probably will continue winning the trust of professional designers and developers.

1. Build Native Mobile Apps

In web designing and development industry, you are successful only when you use right kind of tools to perform certain activities. If you want to develop an app for android phones, the best option is Java while on the other hand if you are targeting iOS, the best option is objective-C/Swift. However, if you are the one who has no time to learn and excel in a new language, you should be thankful to the developers of alternate libraries which are developed to create native apps and made the process much simpler than ever before. One of the popular resources to build mobile apps using JavaScript is NativeScript.

Some of its features are:

• 100% native performance
• No bridging codes required
• Beautiful and easily accessible platform
• Cross platform
• Angular and TypeScript

2. Advanced User Interface (UI) Animations

The animation has become a never ending trend on web. Though, its beginning was CSS3 transitions, it never stopped then and with the passage of time, a great number of JavaScript and CSS libraries have also been created which are fully dedicated to the world of animation. Things that you could never imagine before can now easily be built and most importantly these will cost you nothing, however, you just need to know where you should be looking for them.

Many designers believe that to create a good design, they don’t have to put the animation and they are absolutely right but you should also know that the touch of animation will actually turn your simple design into a great one. Therefore, you must watch both latest and traditional trends for user friendly interfaces as this will help you grab the interfaces that can be taken from great-looking websites.

You should also keep in mind that the website animation should not be treated as some kind of funny movie. In fact, you should be very careful in using variety of animations because if you don’t take care of it, your interface will show up as some kind of nuisance that you would never like to mix up with your site design. Some popular resources to put animation to your websites:

• Google Web Designer
• Adobe Edge Animate CC
• HTML5Maker

3. Touch Event Handling

Touch features of websites are usually supported by the browsers of Smartphone as it helps in maintaining websites backward compatibility. However, you might have also noticed that the some websites are adorned with custom features which are given certain types of touch-event handling tasks. After responsive website building, the touch featuring websites have also been built. If you search Google, you can easily see and find a lot of features which have specifically been built for handling touch screen events.

Basically, there are three touch events which are as follow:

• Touchstart: When a finger is put on a DOM Element
• Touchmove: When a finger is moved alongside a DOM element
• Touchend: When a finger is detached from a DOM element.

Some other useful resources to be able to create touch supported elements on your website:

• Mozilla Developer Network
• W3School.Com
• GitHub

4. More Focus on UX Based Design

UX design industry has started growing so fast because most of the senior developers and designers have realized the importance of user experience designing process. Though, User interface is a definite part of user experience but of course, the ultimate goal is to deliver the best experiences to the users. If you just look few years back, you will be surprised to see that most of the designers were not even familiar with user experience designing. However, things are completely changed and now there are a number of great resources which can be used by the designers to be able to give their best in this particular field. Some of the useful resources for UX designers:

• Proto.io: Create high-fidelity and fully-interactive prototypes.
• UserTesting: Get videos of real users speaking out their views as they use.
• PowerMockUp: 800+ User Interface Elements.
• Naviewapp: Create navigations through prototyping and testing.

5. Product Previews

The designs of landing pages are usually created keeping in view different browsers capabilities as well as internet speed. However, this is the most important page of any websites and therefore, you will always see constant evolution with it. You might have also noticed that some custom pages or homepages display live product previews where home page is featuring a video tour along with factor graphics which play a vital role in giving support to interface.

The basic aim of showing product previews is to allow potential customers have a look at the product features and how it works. Most of the visitors prefer to navigate to other websites if they can’t figure out the advantages of the product they are viewing. This is the reason why product preview features have been very successful in making their permanent place especially on ecommerce websites.

6. Package Managers

Modern website development demands for innovation in everything and thus the demand for digital package managers has also increased. Though, it requires a lot of time to learn and excel latest technology but definitely, frontend or backend developers must know about package managers. The developers have to gain terminal commands knowledge but they just have to spend some time on it and once they become used to it, they will not have to face any problems at all. Some of the popular package managers are:

• Bower
• Duojs
• NPM
• Component

7. Frontend Frameworks

Frontend frameworks were introduced few years back and some of them such as bootstrap have proven their effectiveness in professional as well as personal projects and its popularity is constantly growing. However, it is also noticeable that the responsive designs have found out their place into frameworks and the developers started feeling that they need much more than backend codes and then frontend code also came in demand. We have moved into the year of huge innovations 2016 and a lot of buzz has been heard regarding frameworks with responsive frontend in web designing and development projects.

Some useful tools are:

• Foundation
• Bootstrap
• Materialize
• Skeleton
• HTML5 Boilerplate

8. Server-Side JavaScript

A number of good options were introduced for server-side JS, unfortunately, none of them were welcome by JavaScript developers as warmly as Node.js. This exclusive library has been very effective in winning the heart of developers who later saw how it challenged other popular backend languages of time like PHP or Python.

The best thing about Node is that it enabled developers to do their frontend and backend coding only with a single language. The more value was put to the Node.js by easily accessible resources such as Node Package Manager.

9. Automated Task Runners

Frontend development industry has seen so much improvements and changes with some of the best practices recently introduced for creation of websites. Just a few years ago, most of the tasks were completed with manual efforts which, of course, took too much of time but all those hassles have been tackled with the help of task runners programs such as:

• Grunt
• Scotch
• Gulp
• Mimosa

When you are looking for quick turnaround, you must trust on machines because in this way, the chances of mistakes are greatly reduced and the more automation you do, the more success you see.

10. UI Design Sketch App

Sketching technology has been very successful in taking the place of Photoshop for User Interface designs jobs. UI Designs need variety of tasks from high to low conformity such as wire-frames, icon design and mockups etc. Web and mobile designers and developers can take advantage of Sketch App which has been introduced specifically for professional designers who are busy and want to save their time. It allows them to experience perfect working environment where they can easily create vector element to work with any interface.

11. Card Layouts

Card layouts for websites were brought to the popularity level by Pinterest just a few years ago and they have now become a popular trend for heavy content based websites. There are a number of plugins available for use to stimulate layout styling along with animated cards. If you are building a website that is going to have a lot of data and you need to make it scan-able, the card layout can be the best option.

Some of the best examples of card based websites are:

• Pinterest
• Dribble

12. Explainer Videos

All small to big companies would like to take the advantage of custom explainer videos. Sometimes the animations are used to create such videos but most of the owners would like to show real life footage in their videos. These videos are basically used to let the customers know how their products or services work. Sometimes, visitors come to the site, go through the detailed features but did not find how the product will actually be working and the confusion often lead them to navigate to other websites, therefore, the explainer videos are considered to be the best choices because these can demonstrate everything just in a matter of few minutes.

Some useful resources:

• Videobrewery
• Demoduck
• Wizmotions
• Webris

Final Words

Going through the above discussed trends will make it much easier for you to put your efforts in the right direction to deliver the best user interface and user experience to the visitors as per the requirement of latest web designing trends. Every designers and developers want to save time and efforts and utilizing the resources mentioned above will definitely help in not just saving time but also improve day to day workflow. Hopefully all these trends will keep dominating throughout 2016 and the years to come.