I spend a lot of time not just working on our own websites and projects, but also looking at what the current trends are in design, development, programming and marketing.  There’s a definite rift between what has buzz, what the early adopters have grokked on to and what has actually made the effective transition to popular usage and while I admit that I get a tickle when I see something new and exciting, it’s usually several months before it hits the mainstream.  The trick is having an idea of what’s going to be popular and getting in early and often.  Poising yourself to pounce when the opportunity arises, so to speak.

Best of the Web in Graphic and Web Design.

Web graphics and visual design cover everything from vector design to CSS tricks and even typography.  There are some projects that stick out as particularly exciting that I’ve listed below, projects which I think are at the forefront of a movement taking us to the next evolution of the interwebs.

Less is More…

Many of the top rated sites on the web have adopted a minimalistic approach to design, favouring light, seek designs with rich media and content over slow or graphically heavy web pages.  I’m a big fan of the minimalist movement, sites such as TED.com and twitter have taken this approach with great success and the design community is awash with buzz over this new trend.

Six Revisions has a post on minimalism in design with their recent post titled 30 Light and Sleek Web Designs For Inspiration

The thing I like most about these minimalist themes is that they’re much easier to create than really complex or graphic intensive web pages.  Plus, once you have a framework for building content pages that you like, it’s easy to change it by swapping in a new gradient or image as desired.  If you haven’t built a framework yet, look to Six Revisions again for the article,  Coding a Clean, Illustrative Web Design from Scratch

Everybody Get Fontloose…

For what feels like an eternity, web designers have been limited to the use of the 10 (or less) standardized web fonts for their projects, those fonts are: Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings.

While Internet Explorer is still behind the times, Firefox 3.5 has really stepped up to the plate with full support for the @font-face CSS rule.  The rule basically allows you to serve fonts to clients directly from your server, rather than relying upon the user to have the font in their system to see it.   Once this rule, or one like it, is accepted by all the major browsers we can expect to see a revolution in typefaces on the web.  Check out a demo of @font-face in action on Craigmod (FF 3.5 required).  If you have a penchant for typography like I do, check out FontShop.  They release free fonts all the time and have some great tools such as  typeNavigator and FontStruct.

Best of the Web in Marketing and SEO

Move over SEO, here comes RDF and other acronyms

The world of Search Engine Optimization should be expecting an imminent overhaul with the continuing rise in popularity of user driven sites like Twitter, and the need to organize and categorize that content for the end user.  All major search engines are looking to tap into Twitter’s stream of continuously updated information.  Rather than look to Google news during a time of crisis or emergency, better look to Twitter if you want up-to-the-minute updates.

To organize the information, I believe we’ll see a resurgence an older system used to better define information and content.  A List Apart recently wrote a 2 part article on RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in – attributes), and the W3C recommends using the attributes on your web page to define your content.  It’s reminiscent of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set which has actually been in use since the mid 90′s.   Not surprising, since RDFa uses the dc elements for certain attributes.

The immediate downside to RDF is also an upshot.  The XML syntax for RDF is too verbose for the average user to implement effectively.  If you really want to give it a try though, start by reading the wikipedia entry on the subject and go from there.

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