Time moves like a bullet. You notice how fast it goes when you try to sum up trends and styles in web design. Not long ago we we’re all doing small Flash pages in pop-up windows. Now it is different. Or is it?
2008 is the year of vintage web. Old has become new. You want the worn-feel, by making spot-like effects and torn edges. Big headlines is the way to go and you are allowed to toy around freely with fonts. Mask away! You also work a lot with collages, and maybe this blog can fit in there? Last year’s trends are clinging to life through a respirator. Time to kill them off and head somewhere new?
2007 was all about gigantic RSS-icons. All elements in line with Web 2.0 got a major breakthrough. 
Over-use of big and colorful icons. Glass-effects on headlines. CoverFlow navigation (I-tunes). The foreground were in bright pastel colours and the background in dark-grey and had wave-shaped patterns.
2006 was the year that the gradients came and conquered. This thanks to strong help from the rise of Web 2.0 presentations. Another popular theme was diagonal lines and patterns. 
You also played around a lot with words. You threw in dots and underscores in weird places. Big letters got small and small letters got bigger. You got away with anti-aliasing text and other graphical elements.
We all remember the minimalistic “pixel fonts”. Weird was good, usability was put to rest. You did everything to be creative and many times failed. Arial came back after two years of leave. 
Techniques like sIFR (Flash and JS) came and were used to get even funkier types.
Save your pixels! Never let your site be wider than 600! Make it open in a pop-up without a scrollbar. Validate your code!
Flash came to to kill HTML. Text came sliding down like disgusting Powerpoint presentations. The table was put on death row. CSS and divs were rulers of the web. The first examples of blog layout came and ruined our lives for years to come. Arial and Verdana was replace with “cool” fonts like Tahoma, Lucida Grande and Trebuchet MS. The web page design was clean with massive top pictures.
What will 2009 be like?
This is a nice, tight sum-up! More people should know about it. Make me smile, and there’s a lot of truth in this terse post.
08-10-10 17:24