Web Predictions for 2011
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
Of course it’s the start of a new year and up pop all the posts about new resolutions, reflections on the past year and predictions for the year ahead. Seeing so many articles over the past few days predicting what will be coming in 2011 I found myself wondering if these are actually worth reading at all.
A note
I was asked in December if I would write a post like this detailing the upcoming trends of Web Design in 2011. At the time I declined for a few reasons but not because of a dislike for these posts. I would have loved to have written the article at the time. But time has a way of changing your perspective.
Also if you’ve written such a post I apologise if this offends, it’s not my intention.
The Obvious
The first thing that strikes me about these posts is that they list fairly obvious predictions. I think most designers could cite HTML5, CSS3 and @font-face as major players in 2011. Mentioning these in such a post is a bad as predicting the day and the night.
The Safe Bets
The safe bet is anything that is pretty standard in the world of the web but some still claim is a trend. Typography has to be the safest of all bets, being as most websites have text and this has to be designed. Yet some will still manage to spin it as a trend, but as predictions go it’s like saying that a footballer will be caught cheating or that the Daily Mail will print a new Princess Diana scandal.
Last year’s trends
Then of course there are last year’s trends, things that very likely appear on both posts about 2010 and 2011. Mobile development probably fits pretty snugly into this category. It’s not been the next big thing for a few years and the trend for 2011 is simple more; more mobile development. Yawn.
Setting the trend
There are then those few posts that manage to come up with something original, almost as if it were seen in a crystal ball. Most will have forgotten it before it’s proven right or wrong but what if the simple mention of it is what makes it the trend. Could saying that he majority of sites in 2011 will be pink make it so simply by imparting the knowledge on a group of the community more impressionable to the current trends?
So what benefits do such posts have on the community in general other than to show a writers ability to state the obvious or predict something no one will really be so bothered to check in 12 months?