» Design trends for the new year, can they yield bigger results?

Smashing Magazine recently cited some design trends for 2009. As a designer that’s seen the evolution of the web from it’s early incarnations in the mid 90’s to where it is today, I’m noticing some design styles and practices that are starting to come full circle. Because of the accessibility of CSS-based layouts, web and screen design is starting to break away from the standard web paradigm that dominated in the early part of this decade; left logo, horizontal nav bar, flash brand area, neatly clustered sub-content boxes — to large expansive displays of content, vertically and horizontally. Bandwidth and screen resolution no longer seems limiting. Designers have evolved from designing within a 780 pixel wide area to designing wide layout-breaking backgrounds for widescreen displays of up to 1980 pixels wide. For designers like myself, there’s a opportunity to expand the boundaries of what is generally thought of as baseline web design architecture. But doing so effectively, and maintaining the end goal of optimizing the experience for clients, users, and ultimately consumers is the core challenge. Pretty layouts, and ego-centric design can be nice on the eyes, be the main question usually is… will it drive the sale?