I’m always keeping an eye out for trends especially when it comes to web design. Lately I’ve been noticing something very interesting. There is something that almost all of the really “new age” sites have in common nowadays stylistically. Go to sites like Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Vimeo, or Facebook and and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Evidently web designers are starting to move on past their love affair with shadows and gradients.

I noticed this way back when Digg redesigned their site. The site that took great part in that “Web 2.0” look with it’s shiny buttons, soft gradiants and shadowy badges was now stripped of all that stuff, replaced now with something that I thought at the time to look sort of retro. Now that I see it everywhere, it’s starting to grow on me.

I can totally understand why this is happening. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact it’s “in” right now, but that’s not all. One of the main aspects of web design has always been optimising how quickly your page loads. The simpler your graphics are, the quicker they’ll load. It is kind of ironic, though because while this is happening, bandwidths are increasing to the point where we can watch streaming hi definition movies without any hiccups or loss in quality.

Evidently web designers are starting to move on past their love affair with shadows and gradients.

What’s the point then? Well it seems while on the surface, websites don’t look all that different than the way they looked back in the day, you have to remember that there is much more going on under the hood. Along with very large, complex databases and other systems such as scriptaculous or sproutcore, there are many more people surfing the net which means much more demand on your server.

Really, we’re in the same boat we were in back in the late 90’s, just on a much larger scale. As a web designer the challenge will always be to create a site that is light on size, but rich on style. I don’t see this trend going away any time soon. Have you seen the new Facebook? Their website was lightweight to begin with. Now it’s just anorexic.