What's your favourite web design trend?

I went through a recent phase with the previous layout for CoSC that used a lot of rounded corner. But that was mainly because there were a series of tabs on the top and it made sense to continue that through the site.

Though we're switching over to a modern looking, super sleek layout that's mobile friendly. And I do think the Mobile trend is important to get on board with. More and more users are spending more and more time on mobile devices. I'm even one of them with my own site. And I work from home and spend most of my time there. I just like being able to pop on to my phone and check what's going on and still have the site be usable should I decide to stop and make a quick response.

 

As I am getting older and my eyesight getting worse (and my monitor and resolution getting larger), I've found myself a huge fan of darker designs (like this one!). A soft, dark grey with a light grey font is perfect for me for being able to read--with a few, or even just one or two colors to highlight important stuff (like bright colors for buttons, links, forum headers.)

Soft rounded corners, css wise or used with gradients are still a thing I enjoy. I remember when--was it called web 2.0? came out and everything was glossy, glassy and gradient! I think a touch of that is okay--but not an entire site. xD

I am also a fan of larger, readable fonts and using larger/responsive widths. I feel like having a very slim forum with monitor sizes these days to be like wasting space--if that makes sense? And tiny fonts are so very hard to read! You don't need to worry about wasting ink or what-have you on the internet, so having a medium-large font size won't hurt. Making it readable is definitely a boon for design for me.

 

Enjoying the growing trend in minimal design, remembering the days of flashing bright buttons are thankfully going away. A big thing in that is coming forward is responsive sites, to not have to relay on a separate or 3rd party app to give access of your forum to your members is welcoming.

 

Blurbs.

Having a 1-2 sentence place to figure out what the site is all about. We only have a 3 second attention span, so blurbs capitalize on that, telling us if this site is what we want or not. It lets us figure out if we belong that much faster.

Newsflash: You don't really choose your members. They choose you. (Unless you ban them, etc).

 

I really love the rounded corners trend.

 

I tend to lean a bit towards simplistic and plain, though I view that bias as 'clean and efficient'

 

I love keeping things very clean and one to three colours where possible! Just because it makes pulling a scheme together easily!

 

I am really liking the new twitter bootstrap theme as of v3.3 I have found it a great front-end framework for CSS and JS. It has really given me a lot of flexability whilst I have been developing my site and its made it really easy to make really cool looking features too. Here's a link to it: Bootstrap · The world's most popular mobile-first and responsive front-end framework.

 

^This.

It's something about simplicity that I really like, and I try to practice myself. A flashy and bold website is fine and all, but I tend to see real success in those sites who keep it simple. Xenforo seems to be the trend now-a-days, and I think its due to its sleek and simple theme.

 

Specifically regarding forum RPGs, I always seemed to gravitate toward the side bar, with the intro, links, census, cbox and all that in there. Recently made my first site without a side bar and it feels strange!

 

I'm not enough of an expert to make specific comments but I will say that the trend towards clean design that I've seen out there is something that I enjoy quite a bit. Minimalism go!

 

I like a clean design its what we've gone for, something that is easy for people to use.

 

Simple and clean is a trend I am liking. Another that I like seeing is fixed menus so certain links are always available no matter how far you scroll down the page.

 

Rounded corners and simple color scheme, like having a black background with white text (this is a throwback from when I used to look at websites with all the lights turned off on a CRT, so websites with a white background would throw off a lot of extra light and hurt my eyes). Though, I am fine with a subtle off-white background with black text.