It's always fun to do a stocktake of current design trends every now and then. Here are some trends I've observed lately.
1. Simple, natural, strong colour schemes
If the 2000s were marked by lots of texture and earth tones, we seem to be moving more towards the sparse and fresh. Lots of white, sparse use of strong colours, and while wood is still a popular texture it seems to be more of your lighter and cleaner timbers rather than dirty old burnt wood.
2. Restrained, grid-based, typographic websites
This is really just the application of old design principles to the medium of the internet. Still, it's great to see we've arrived at the point where people CAN create websites with a proper grid and nice typography.
3. Big bold colour blocked websites
4. Geometric shapes
5. Jon Contino
This is a minor note, really, but has anyone noticed Jon Contino's aesthetic cropping up all over the show? Possibly the most cribbed style of 2012. Sketchy white lines on slightly-textured black backgrounds, I've been seeing a lot of that lately.
6. There is no web design
The main thing I've observed, really, is that web design doesn't feel like a separate thing anymore. The term itself feels out of date. There is no practice of "web design", there's just design for the internet. The internet is a medium, with its own peculiarities and technical constraints like any medium, but the same basic principles (and trends) of graphic design as a general discpline still apply. The trends on the internet these days are more about technical innovations like responsive design than anything superficial like styles of dropshadow or gradient. The superficial trends follow design generally; the same trendy fonts, the same trendy colours and textures.