A few years ago, a lot of sites were using tabbed navigation. The big players, including Yahoo! and YouTube were also using tabs. But nowadays I have seen tabs being phased out and replaced with simpler navigation menus. Even Amazon.com, which was notable for using tabbed navigation, recently stopped using tabs.
Also, I have seen that back in the day, content boxes were popular. Yahoo! and MSN, and other sites basically wrap all content in the form of content boxes (which look a lot like "widgets"). Even the main article content was wrapped in a big content box. Like tabs, I also see them being phased out. Instead of content being differentiated by boxes, they were separated by dividers or even white space.
There is yet another trend for sites to have a background color that is white rather than grey or blue. Macy's for example, was one of the last e-commerce sites (after Kohl's and JCPenney) which phased out their grey background color.
I see those trends as being part of a larger, minimalist trend.
I'd agree, a couple of design magazines have pointed out the minimalistic trends in the past couple of years, *leans to the side and whispers, "plus simpler designs lend themselves to working better as responsive designs in this world of an expanding multitude of resolutions"
A few years ago, a lot of sites were using tabbed navigation. The big players, including Yahoo! and YouTube were also using tabs. But nowadays I have seen tabs being phased out and replaced with simpler navigation menus. Even Amazon.com, which was notable for using tabbed navigation, recently stopped using tabs.
Also, I have seen that back in the day, content boxes were popular. Yahoo! and MSN, and other sites basically wrap all content in the form of content boxes (which look a lot like "widgets"). Even the main article content was wrapped in a big content box. Like tabs, I also see them being phased out. Instead of content being differentiated by boxes, they were separated by dividers or even white space.
There is yet another trend for sites to have a background color that is white rather than grey or blue. Macy's for example, was one of the last e-commerce sites (after Kohl's and JCPenney) which phased out their grey background color.
I see those trends as being part of a larger, minimalist trend.
I'd agree, a couple of design magazines have pointed out the minimalistic trends in the past couple of years, *leans to the side and whispers, "plus simpler designs lend themselves to working better as responsive designs in this world of an expanding multitude of resolutions"