I’ve always been a huge fan of type, it pretty much comes with the design industry, but I haven’t always been a fan of Helvetica. When I was in school it was almost looked down upon to use Helvetica because it seemed like the safe choice – we are suppose to push the envelope – think out of the box. Once I graduated and began working in the ‘real world’ I soon discovered that Helvetica is much more then a safe font, it a readable font and very elegant at large and small scales. The typeface is so versatile with it’s different weights you can use Helvetica on almost anything. Having said that Helvetica is still not one of my first choices for a san-serif font but I respect it and will definitely see a film about it.

Celebrating its 50th year it seem appropriate that this is the year the film is released. Director Gary Hustwit explains his reasons for making the film:

“Why make a film about a typeface, let alone a feature documentary film about Helvetica? Because it’s all around us. You’ve probably already seen Helvetica several times today. It might have told you which subway platform you needed, or tried to sell you investment services or vacation getaways in the ads in your morning paper. Maybe it gave you the latest headlines on television, or let you know whether to ‘push’ or ‘pull’ to open your office door.”  Read more on the film.

Want good alternatives to Helvetica? Check out Stephen Coles article on Helvetica and Alternatives to Helvetica.

Recently I was talking to someone about the newest trends in interior design for show suites and it got me thinking about some of the current trends on the web. As technology rapidly changes, and with the emergence of Web 2.0, we are seeing an evolving style in the web world. Gone are the flash intros, the tiny pixel fonts that dominated the web as flash became more popular, and having image based navigation. I believe some of these trends are coming from the blogging sites out there, like blogger and typepad as well as the increasing acceptance of CSS.

So here are some of the trends I can think of:

Letter spacing. CSS allows us to manage letter spacing so we are seeing lots of uppercase titles with extended letter spacing (much like the menu on this site).

San serif fonts. San serif fonts like ‘Times New Roman’ and ‘Georgia’ seem to be making a come back, especially for titles. Jeffrey Zeldman does a wonderful job of this on the A list Apart website. He has also done it in the redesign of his studio Happy Cog, but has taken it one step further with uppercase italic!

Fluid layouts. This trend I can see sticking around for the long haul. As much as we would like to think that we as web designers know how people view the web we can’t always be sure. Optimizing for the 1024px resolution with a fluid layout will allow our designs to stay consistent on most browsers. Check out Jakob Nielson’s article on screen resolutions.

Color trends. As video cards improve the requirement of web safe colors is fading. Miles Burke has put together something he calls Web 2.0 Secret Weapon where he has put together 70 of the most popular Web 2.0 colors.

Rounded corners. It seems that along with increased use of CSS came the rounded corners. This is a softer look for the web and is also a nice and clean way to display blocks of information.

3 column layouts. Since monitors are getting larger we have more real estate to work with and if you use a number like 960px it makes a nice 3 column grid. I believe one of the driving forces behind the three column layout is the proliferation of blogs.

Blocky logos and icons. FireFox and 37 Signals do a great job using icons to enrich their web interfaces. And logos such as Flickr and Technorati have a blocky clean look because of the fonts used in them. Have a look at Stephen Coles’ article on the fonts used in a few of these favorite brands.

Funky domains. I know this is not really a design trend but I think it is worth noting as a branding trend. Funky domains like del.icio.us look awesome but
as Miles Burke mentions in another article cra.zydomai.ns, this new
trend makes it more difficult to remember domain names…where do you put
the period? And trying all the different combinations will take you to
other sites if you don’t register them all yourself…

A few things to watch for in future; someone has finally come up with a way to use your favorite fonts on the web. sIFR 2.0 uses flash to replace blocks of text or titles with the font of your choice, the code is open source and uses javascript, CSS and flash. Unlike strictly image based text, the developers Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben claim this technique is fully accessible to screenreaders and other assistive technology.

And watch for increased screen resolutions – Jakob Nielsen predicts “Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals”. That is going to drastically change the way we design websites and web applications.

Trends change all the time and these are just a few that I’ve been noticing. I’m excited to see what the future holds as we move into the world of Web 3.0 – the Semantic Web.