“Expect more things like thegrid.io. It's increasingly impossible for everything to be hand-crafted and work well.”
“What's next? Designing for the human voice”
"There is still a need for 'traditional' design skills, but instead of fixed layouts, web is moving to style guide driven design. In an odd way, typography and various old skills are constantly being automated. Stilll, someone has to do that. Don't be so sad, there will be lots of things to do anyway. Baseline quality is just getting less ugly. ;). WordPress set 'standards' for blog publishing during many years, but web is not static. World moves forward. There will be work for design companies. While most things will be automated, not all things should be. Machines are good for data crunching, but someone has to decide goals. Tools should not decide everything. Problem with data-driven design is that ultimately it can mislead if people don't also use traditional skills. Just because something works (according to analytics) does not mean it would be good or pretty.
Actually…some retail companies have increased their income (in large way) by making their website more ugly. It is counter-intuitive, but people thinks 'products must be cheap when company does not have money for design. Even while it hurts (from graphic designer perspective), sometimes ugly design can have better conversation rate. I know that since have talked with few people doing retial -type of things in the web (and print). Similar features have happened in the past in traditional cheap companies when brand change lost their clients. Finnish example for bad case could be Tilmari, where design change might have decreased their customer base."
“What’s next for the web doesn’t interest me, what interests me is the next web: a distributed network of networks on the Net. The web is what it is; what interests me is the post-web, post-cloud Net: the distributed network of networks where you own your network. I call this the Indienet.”
“What's next for the web design industry is to truly harness the ubiquitous nature of the Web in order to enrich people's lives irrespective of how they get online.”
“Go to where the people are. In the next five years, the number of people with access to the Web will be an order of magnitude greater than in the first 20 years if the Web. They will bring to it a whole new mix of language, culture, and expectations. The great challenge for the web design industry will be to meet and exceed those expectations.”
"Web components comes to the top of my head. But now we are getting somewhere, we are more mature on how we face the problems but still there's a lot to learn."
“So far the visual metaphor for the web has been based around 2d concepts. Pages. Newspapers. I think we'll start to see more web design based on 3d metaphors. Rooms. Buildings. With technology like Oculus Rift, I think we will see more web experiences designed to be interacted with virtually. You'll start to see people create virtual properties meant to be explored and navigated in dimension. It will start as a niche exploration, but eventually, when you see a company like Facebook create virtual navigation, it will reach a mainstream tipping point.”
“Experience design is where @VCU_Brandcenter is heading in order to design across modalities. I think we design that begs participation not just usage.”
“Fluidity. Craft. Typography. The ability for designs to span across multiple devices will be more important than ever, there will be a greater focus on attention to detail, and now that digital type is catching up to the rest of the design world, there will be a greater appreciation (and expectation) for the use of beautiful typography in digital design.”
“With the brand online. The level of change is set to increase and the adaptability and churn of content needs to be accommodated but not limited. Design guidelines therefore are becoming more popular.”