Design trends on the internet have short lifetimes. During the internet boom in the end of the nineties, we have seen a tremendous amount of different visual trends. Designs were competing each other in complexity. A typical “cool site” around a year 2000 would feature a variety of forms and patterns, renderings, outlines, photo composings, 3D effects and flash animations.

The public has got oversaturated very quickly. Minimalism has begun to dominate the design landscape. The majority of the relaunches around 2002–2004 were changes to more minimalist and clean designs. (Of course, there were always designers, like Ingo J. Ramin who were true to themselves and swam against the common trend). At that time, function seemed to be declared over the emotion, requirements became more pragmatic. No Flash, unless absolutely needed, no redundant graphics, nothing superfluous, which can be avoided.

Two years ago, minimalism seemed to be a consequent end to almost any design path. Summer 2004 we had an interesting discussion about that in our design forum. Main arguments were that clean designs look more mature and that complex designs just do not meet the taste of big clients. It really seemed that we have come to some dead end.

But, luckily it was not so... Designers (well, the real ones) always urge for something new. So as in the other creative fields (like fashion design, music, or architecture), the “new” is usually the interpretation of something already known, existing and forgotten. And it is also interesting to observe, how the trends in the mentioned fields are closely connected to market cycles. So, if we say that the minimalism style was closely connected to the thriftiness of the hard economical years after the new economy crash, what do we see as the next spin of the spiral, when the times on the online market become to get better? Generally speaking, design receives attention again.

Few years ago, one could read between the lines of a new, clean redesign something like “we don’t waste money and time on nonsense, like graphical gadgets and concentrate ourselves on our main task, delivering certain information”.  Nowadays we can discover more and more big client’s sites, where you can read (or sense): “design is important for us, at least not less than usability or whatever else”.

Minimalist designs get more sophisticated. After a learning phase of crazy graphical experiments and getting mature, finding out that “less is sometimes more”, designers show their skills in smaller details.

One example is a comeback of gradients. No, not the psychedelic vivid ones, made by the amateurs in CorelDraw, but very subtle, soft, hardly noticeable, providing the impression of the “final finish”. As the broadband problem becomes less important, we now have even complete screen backgrounds, which are based on slight gradients and changes of color – the effect, long known from the TV screen designs. The new gradient trend can be illustrated best by the new Microsoft sites (Microsoft.com and Microsoft Vista). Yes, after some 30 years of history even they have considered the power of design: http://www.microsoft.com/design/ (although, you'll see nothing visually interesting there).

Of course, the inventors (although, let’s be fair – they haven’t invented it too, just cleverly marketed) of the plastic-effect surfaces and buttons was previously Apple, but this time, considering the websites, Microsoft has managed not just to copy, but to overrun the competitor. (No, I am not paid by Microsoft :-) I just try to be fair and am wondering, why Apple is not changing their site for years. In design, nothing is good for long).

After bandwidth problems, barrier freedom, plug-in compatibility and other obstacles are no more on the way, we experience the next triumph of Flash. After being abused so badly in the end-nineties and banned for years by the marketing managers at big companies, it is now finding its deserved place on the internet. Pure HTML-Sites will still remain a niche for mainly informative portals, but it’s easy to predict, that the majority of the professional consumer sites will be flash-based in the future. Now we can already expirience something like a transformation stage: complete Flash portal site, directing to subsites, which are (yet) in HTML, like, for example, www.sony.com. Now I can even imagine seeing a Flash front end on Amazon and Ebay in some mid-term future. If even Microsoft can discover a power of design – so can these conservative monopolists too.

Thanks to the latest versions of flash, video footage becomes a more and more spread design element. As broadband obstacles fall, we discover not just post stamp big movie snips, but full screen TV quality motion designs. Agencies, like Fantasy Interfaces, who believed in Flash from the very beginning and have acquired the necessary motion design skills over years will be the winners. On the other hand, one-man companies and even bigger agencies with no interactive video professionals will not be able to produce rich media sites of tomorrow anymore.