Phew! Regurgitating 2012. The design trends grown rapidly over the past year. Amazing changes happened so thought of capturing what I had witnessed last year. Following are few of the cultural shifts I have observed:

Responsive interface design
One of the most exciting trend in application and site design today.
The power of responsive interface design allows page elements to respond quickly to behave and response as per users’ device. Everyone may not know this name but they experience the awesome interfaces that had shifted their mind sets, which are delivering optimal user experience by displaying information that is appropriate to different devices (computers, tablets and smart phones, etc), screen resolutions, sizes, and states they are using. Increasingly, we’ll need to integrate users’ real-world situations into user interfaces.

Designing for touchscreen
The touch screen is one of the easiest to use and most intuitive technology that allows users to navigate a system by touch responsive surface. This technology developed back in 1960’s but gaining popularity and defined the 2000s. the major shift in how world users’ interacts with computers and notebooks. Apple gets the hype, but not the market share. Whatever happens, the design of touchscreen interfaces will continue to drive design and development moving forward, shifted from traditionally mouse-driven interfaces.

Content and image slideshows
Eureka moment. Spotted the subsequent popularity of slideshows all over on the web to display content and unique features. Just the ease of using this feature. These galleries are perfect for demonstrating a quick glimpse of inner-page content. Even the newspaper industry acknowledged what users want and started incorporating user centric approach. Recently, USA Today website rolled out with having an impressive user experience; innovative approach of sliding news. They put visual firsts; gave a new life to dead online advertising model by incorporating cool slideshows.

Tons of freebies
Honestly you know this as well. Anything and everything you want for free is right out there on the internet. Designers were never shy to spread and share their knowledge with other designers but now it has become popular trend. Free tutorials, layouts, interfaces, logos, banners, etc etc etc. Initially there were few communities were spreading goodies but now this is on the next level. Enjoy free downloads.

Data moving to the cloud
The day is near when hard drives, CDs, and even flash drive will soon become obsolete. The data will become centralized. The virtualization practice – this is quite a change from previous trend. There are tremendeous amount of planning to manage the change how we do things, how we see things, even the way we think about things.

These are the trends I saw in 2012 but if you have noticed more, please feel free to add more to this list.