Making a visual statement with big, bold headers and fonts catches the viewer’s eye and can sustain interest long enough for him to scroll or click further. Earlier, such mega headers provided a welcome change from the narrow headers we had become accustomed to, but like all trends they too are becoming commonplace to the jaded web visitor.
The huge variety of fonts available in web design allows designers to experiment with big, bold typography, use several font sizes and combine fonts with different font families to judiciously grab attention and get the point across quickly, whether it is to the interested primary audience or to the web-skimmer in a hurry. Mega fonts can be used effectively in conjunction with photographs and images too and can be made interesting with textures, highlights and hand-written text.
Visualbox makes a dramatic appearance with a huge edge-to-edge logo against stark black that provides relief from the vivid colors of the rest of the site. The header uses up most of the space above the fold.
With a personalized illustration and large font headline, the artist introduces himself and what he does (graphics and web design), big and bold.
The footer invites the web visitor to stay a little longer on the website by providing him or her with an opportunity to interact and engage with the website while just leaving the page. Thoughtful footer design will do much to enhance a website’s functionality, ease of navigation, and creative appeal.
Multiple-use footers: Far from being a design afterthought, the footer has evolved from being to being a useful space for
Lines like “Where am I?” or “Looking for something?” call attention to the sitemap on the footer. Footers are highly informative, illustrative, sometimes casual and chatty, with networking links, tags, hosting and copyright information and other relevant links.
Tapbots uses illustrations to personalize the menu and invite readers to subscribe to its mailing list.
The Beatles Rock Band footer presents a lot of information simply and clearly, contrasting with the colorful, poster-like appeal of the site header.
Mecannical has a well-designed footer where the eye is immediately led to the cartoon with blurb which prompts reader interest in the site-map. Copyright info is provided semi-tongue-in-cheek, and this acts as a disarming door-opener to the engineer-designer offering his own services to a prospective client. A neatly laid out contact form and a Send button with a rocket taking off provides a creative call to action.
Making the most of social networking icons, this site’s footer also calls attention to its other services.
Ectomachine promotes its other blogs on the footer, shares Flickr photos, says it meets CSS and HTML standards while making the social networking icons stand out prominently for easy sharing.
Popular Web Design Trends 2011:
