As a web designer, or even a developer, you’re visiting probably well over a thousand websites a month. What kind of an impact does that leave on your perception of good design, or your criteria for what’s possible?

The W3C standards page is constantly expanding, growing and flourishing; due to the fact that the community is so involved with the development of the web, which means that we’re constantly seeing new design trends being introduced to the masses.

We would like to introduce you to ten showstopping web design trends that we’re going to experience in the year 2014, some of which are already making their appearance felt.

1. Flat UI

Flat is a mix of fun and smooth colors, combined with complete and total simplicity, which brings websites and web applications to life. Apple introduced flat UI design on their latest iOS 7 software update, Microsoft has been developing Metro UI for a fairly long time now.

We do believe that flat is going to just keep growing, and will manage to be among the top web design trends this year.

2. Responsiveness

You would think that something, that has been around for a couple of years now, would by now have expanded and become the norm for the majority of the web. Strictly speaking, it should be the standard – as there is no any other alternative to making websites mobile device friendly.

There is still lot of room for growth when it comes to responsive web design, and designers are surely to fill their pockets with that dough for years to come. Watch our for platforms that will offer to build a mobile website in five clicks, they’ve already arrived.

3. Minimalism

We looked at flat already, which enables us to think of minimalism as simple design, only without all the fancy colors. Simple web design has been emerging already, and one of the main reasons for that is the huge emphasis that is being put on content, and nothing else but content.

Straight to the point web design is going to be the future, people will not spend more than a minute to find something that has been hidden behind the garbage cans.

4. Video Content

You can only write so much, before people realize that they’re spending way too much time reading something they could have consumed from an interactive media type like video.

Because video content is becoming easier (&cheaper) to produce, we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially when it comes to introducing a business (or yourself) to the world.

This also goes for stuff like video backgrounds, take a look at this Spotify page and tell us you don’t want to go work on something similar right now.

5. “Branded” Typography

Fonts have evolved in the past couple of years, and with services like Google Fonts offering hundreds of fonts to choose from at no cost, there is definitely a trend setting for designers to use more personal and brandable fonts to get their message across.

“Brandable” fonts mean only one thing, the website using them is trying to get a message across that they’re independent, and do not depend on other’s opinion to run their business, it’s a strong message at that.

6. One-Page Scrolling

Why make the users look for stuff all over the place, when all of your content can be served from within a single page? The name it goes by is long scrolling, and what it means is that all of your websites pages can be viewed by vertically scrolling up or down.

This is already showing signs in the web design community, and we’re constantly running into a business that takes the full advantage of this.

7. Fixed Navigation

It’s hard to display this as an example in a snapshot, so please bare with me and take a look at this page to see the full example. Fixed navigation has been emerging quickly, there are a lot of creative uses to it.

We’ve seen websites that integrate social media, search and even purchase options within their fixed navbars, making the user experience more accessible and seamless. We will be seeing a lot of advancement in this field, not just in the year 2014.

In some cases, this enables the designer to drop sidebar design, as it can be integrated within the fixed navigation itself. Which leads us to…

8. Compact Sidebars

Gone are the days for the need to display a sidebar on every single page. Now, we are able to focus more on the full-width content of pages and have widgets like sidebars scroll-out from the side of the page when needed.

It wouldn’t be possible without some JavaScript, or jQuery – but even then, it’s quite simple to implement and it gives you more website space to work with.

9. Parallax

Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.

Some might think this falls under the one-page scrolling headline, but we do believe that there are plenty of websites that prefer single parallax images to capture the attention only one time. Parallax has been evolving, and will continue to do so in 2014.

The one area that Parallax has been really excelling in, is Premium WordPress Themes.

10. SVG Animation

Scalable Vector Graphics have been around for a while, but only now are making significant progress as more professional web designers are starting to pay attention to it. SVG’s are easy to scale, they’re small in size and as of late – a lot of JavaScript libraries are making appearance to make development easier and more efficient.

At Tesla Themes, we believe in transparency and so we’re closely following the latest web design trends that happen within the industry. We wouldn’t give you advice that we ourselves, would not follow or implement.

Image credits: flatuitutorials, gregoirevella, codrops, spotify, myfonts, naikom