Web Design Trends





The first site I am reviewing includes Moose Stock Photos. Not only does the website utilize good design principles, but the functionality of the site is great. The website provides FREE stock photos, sounds, and icons as long as you include a link to their website when you use their stuff. The first trend this website leverages is a responsive web design enabling the user to have an excellent experience regardless of the screen size with with they are viewing the site.  The gallery automatically fits to any screen size which is a great advantage as it enables designers to avoid having to build device specific apps. This facilitates the web design principle an easy to use layout. Since the the site is responsive the layout is always maximized for ease of use regardless of screen size.  The second trend this website includes is the way it leverages design for wide screens. Even though responsive design makes content adjust to the size of the screen, there are more and more wide screens that people are using consume content so designing a site to leverage the widescreen spaces is a good idea. This free stock photo website wastes very little space and enables many images to be viewed on the screen at once making choosing the right image even more efficient. The web design principle this facilitates is that it has easy to understand navigation. There is a ton of content on the site but super easy to find it because of the designers strategic use of categories and photos. The design for wide screen maximizes the amount of photos one can get on a page while the navigation remains so simple as the categories are front and center all the time.


The second website I am reviewing is called Limitless Building, which is a website about a home  design company. The first trend the website utilizes is "microinteractions" which are animated responses to user behaviors. For example, on the homepage as the user scrolls down the screen and hover over various content areas on the screen, text and images subtly animate and new information appears to prompt the user to interact with on the page.  This facilitates the proper use of animation web principle. The animation using in microinteraction are intentionally designed for user engagement not just fluff. For example as the user rolls over the content area box the text animates and an arrow appears to view the project. This gets the users attention in a subtle yet effective way.   The second trend this web site is leveraging are "super simple home pages." The website greets the user with a very simple page that has very little clutter on it with a nice background image and bold text that says "Passion, quality, collaboration - Limitless is a boutique builder to take you on the dream home journey" - It is very simple and clean and as the user scrolls down the page they interact with unique objects. This simple nature of the home page facilitates the easy to use layout web design principle. There is plenty of content on the site but because the homepage is scrollable with microinteractions the navigation menu only needs 3 buttons and the contact is strategically placed on the side of the screen. The site is very easy to use. 

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