Web Design Styles

There are many web design styles.

Visitors are increasingly fickle, good navigation wins hands down when compared with appealing graphics. But if you want to launch into design then do so, but be prepared for a long haul, good designers are artists that have spent years perfecting their skills.

If you are ready to jump in the don’t copy the drab sites of old, get creative with the powerful tools that are available today. Plan your site with pen and paper, then surf around until you find a collection of sites you would like to emulate. In the design game, you need to be on top of what others are up to and the new styles emerging all the time.

Corporate Style

The web will continue to be dominated by hard core corporate styles. With this style you must concentrate on the visitor experience with gorgeous photography, simple navigation and total accessibility.

Organic Styles

Organic styles are impressive when done well. It involves some notion of nature or a sense of growth, usually the very opposite of a futuristic style of sharp lines. The organic style has curved lines and artwork, with a depth and complexity to the graphics.

Photographic Style

Not exclusively for photographers of course, the photographic style has minimal text and sharp high resolution images. Navigation needs to be obvious, simple and intuitive. Images usually dominate the screen creating the majority of the site impact.

Minimalist Style

Very popular. Essential to have lots of white space, fantastic content displayed clearly and cleanly with minimal options for navigation. If you don’t have great content then avoid this style. A website can easily look empty rather than minimalist and a subtle use of shading can be very difficult to achieve great results with.

Futuristic

Futuristic really means ‘space age’. Essential to have a metallic feel with sharp lines and high contrast. Popular amongst designers this style always has the danger of becoming quickly dated.

Typographic

My favourite style, with large text distorted into endlessly different forms, graceful and elegant fonts and shadow affects beautifully applied. This style is very difficult to achieve and can easily go wrong. When done well, it can produce some of the most beautiful sites on the web.

Animated

The power of animated sites shouldn’t be underestimated. Flash is the market leader by a long way but should be used with caution. Great flash sites can be awesome festivals of animation skill. Although not popular with search engine obsessive webmasters, flash animation can not only bring a site to life, it can produce sites that are almost impossible to leave.