cre8d design

Goodbye Web 2.0?

The big-text-shiny-rounded-gradient “Web 2.0 designs” will start to fade in 2009 and seem a little dated. Here’s my predictions for blog design trends in 2009.

Back to the middle

Blogs have been sidelined a little with social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and communication tools like Twitter. Many bloggers spend more time on other sites than on their own blog but as their online identities are spread out further and further, bloggers will re-center their online identity around their blog where they have complete freedom over the site structure, design, features and content. Blogs will be used to pull in social networking data like never before. Blog themes will powerfully integrate these in a meaningful and useful way – and as a permanent record all bundled together in one place.

Tweet, tweet!

With Twitter starting to really hit the mainstream, Twitter will be much more tightly integrated with blogs. See my post on Mashable with 10 ways this will impact blog design in 2009 – including Tweetbacks, Tweet Comments and more.

It’s black, it’s white

Simple, classy, black and white blogs with lots of white space are the new trend. Who needs color and clutter getting in the way when you have lots of large gorgeous photos on your blog to steal the limelight?

Made by me

The handmade and crafted look took off in 2008 and will continue to be popular this year. Look for more blog designs with handwriting, collages, paint strokes, doodles, sketches, paperclips, stitches and material.

Organic, local, sustainable and green

Even blogs will be going green and not just in color. See textures such as wood, dirt, hessian, earthy browns rise even more in popularity. Notice more fresh fruit and vegetables, insects and flowers. Designs will feature more original, ethnic and local elements rather than trying to appear completely global and vague in origin.

Stretching out

Bloggers will continue to redesign for wider screens to enable displaying larger photos and large widescreen videos. Bloggers will crop their images to be widescreen format, rather than the standard photo sizes – appreciating the wide screen look more. New default templates that come with blogging tools will also finally be wider.

Is that you, really?

Wordpress, Expression Engine, Drupal and other blogging/community tools will be used in ever increasing creative ways – to the extent that a casual visitor will be surprised to learn what the site is being run by and impressed at the ease of updating such seemingly complex sites.

The year is flying by and I keep thinking I must blog about a few of the recent sites that we’ve been working on which have now launched, so without further ado:

• Channel Flip – we worked with the team behind this site who are based in the UK and making some fantastic online videos so completely redesign their site (logo excluded) and implement it in Wordpress with lots of handy little features such as a forum view of the site.
• Lost at E Minor – we worked with the guys behind this site who are based in Australia and implemented Andrew Whitehead’s design in Wordpress. It’s a great example of an intricate magazine site still being powered by Wordpress and has tonnes of fascinating content as well.
• Cheap Stingy Bargains – we’ve been tweaking their site adding new features and custom plugins for them – again this massive site runs on Wordpress!
• Street Speculator – design and implementation and support for a much simpler blog in Wordpress.
• Digital Soapbox – a simple Drupal site where bloggers’ posts can be voted on.