No more design clutter, it’s time to clean things up. A simple, clear message will help your company set itself apart and not get lost in the marketing overload that people are exposed to on a daily basis.

While design in general appears leaning towards a more simple direction, the web is also moving to cleaner interfaces for much more responsive and better use of space without saturating the pages with irrelevant information. There are many benefits on having cleaner interfaces like faster load time, easier on the eyes, better readability, more manageable, better cross platform compatibility and less bandwidth usage which could save you money with your hosting company.

Bigger Icons & Buttons Rock

Larger call to action buttons

One of the main forces driving web interfaces to more open spaces, bold typefaces and bigger icons are the vast amount of touch mobile devices like the iPhone and Android capable of accessing your web content.

Designers have learned that they no longer have huge screen size resolutions to work with and that 960 grid is the new commander in chief. In the mobile environment you have a much smaller screen size and the use of touch to navigate around the site. Therefore, links and icons must be easy to see and tap/click.

Type Beyond Web Safe Fonts

Many more type options exist today

Typefaces will play a bigger role in web interface design. It will be more acceptable to use 50pt title on a page to show confidence and assurance about your product or service of your website. It will also improve readability on mobile phones without having to zoom in, providing instant recognition on what the page or article is about. With services like Google web fonts (free), Font Squirrel (free), and Typekit ($), more and more websites will be able to step out and go beyond web safe fonts.

Logo Designs Simplify

Recently, Starbucks decided to simplify their brand and although it received it’s share of criticism, it was a very pleasing, clean and modern design. They took a little bit of a risk, but they were not afraid to do it. This year we will see more and more companies changing their logo to a much simpler design. Here are a few samples of updated company logos:

Mobile Sites Rise Up

Right now, most websites are completely unsuitable for mobile viewing, taking 60 or more seconds to load and looking jumbled and confusing squashed onto smaller screens. Currently the estimate is that 21% of mobile subscribers in the USA are smartphone users. This puts the current number of smartphone users around 60 million. Based on Nielsen’s estimate, by the end of 2011, 50% of mobile subscribers will be smartphone users. (Source: The Nielsen Company)

As Mobile sites and apps continue to evolve, so does the technology that drives them. Here are some new technologies that are making it easier to create powerful mobile content:

iUI Touch Web Framework

From the creator of firebug comes the iUI is a framework for developing advanced mobile webapps for iPhone and comparable/compatible devices.

iWebKit

Great tool to help you create your own iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad compatible website or webapp.

PhoneGab

Uses standards-based web technologies to bridge web applications and mobile devices to deploy to multiple platforms.

JQTouch

A jQuery plugin for mobile web development, optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. Despite the fact that relies on JQuery, built to support multiple browsers, and so it’s doing work that’s not needed.

JQuery Mobile

From the makers of one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks JQuery comes JQuery Mobile. Currently in version 1.0 Alpha 2 of development.