The interactive marketing services firm Forty Media has had the courage to go public with its predictions for the coming year in Web design. 

Here is some of what Forty Media says will characterize 2005…

“Themes of the Year

• Freshness: New ideas, new colors, new layouts, and new approaches.
• Effort: Minimalism is out; detail is in.
• Professionalism: Site users have little patience for amateur design.

“The Looks

• Out: Retro; Swiss/Euro; Minimal; ‘that standards-compliant look’
• In: Wicked Worn (close to being overdone, but we’ll still see quite a bit of it); Turn of the Century; any look that’s not yet done to death

“Layout and interfaces

• The pure 5-piece Web site (header, menu, sidebar, content, footer) has worn out its welcome; designers are more willing to vary from the standard.
• Faceted classification becomes commonplace in sites with a large quantity of dynamic content (including personal sites).
• Formal content hierarchies still dominate, despite conjecture and enthusiasm about non-hierarchical systems such as wikis.

“Colors

• Color of the year: Brown
• Tech grays and blues take a sabbatical; may not be back soon.
• Pure red (the ‘new blue’ of the past few years) falls into disfavor.
• Designers are feeling confident—lots of bold colors this year.
• Lots of ‘in-between’ colors (yellow-greens, red-oranges, etc.) used to achieve fresh looks
• Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete; Web-smart palette takes over.

“Typography

• Designers realize that Verdana is ugly; most stop using it.
• The novelty of Georgia as a body text type wears off; still used for headings.
• Arial dominates as the body text typeface for the year; despite much disdain for this overused font, it provides some needed relief from the overuse of Verdana.
• Heading text increasingly done in serif typefaces, especially with sIFR.”

For their complete list of predictions, with hyperlinks, visit the Forty Media Web site.

All the best in 2005!