1. Layouts that let content shine

The arrangement of design elements within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of his reading.

2. Better collaboration between designers, and between designers and developers

The emphasis on designer collaboration has arisen in part from the massiveness of the web and mobile apps we’re building these days.

Gigantic platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn require not only huge design teams working on disparate aspects of the platform, but also better ways for designers to stay on the same page — and that means more collaboration, and better communication.

3. Improved design-to-development workflows

As design and prototyping tools for the web gain maturity and sophistication, the traditional handoff deliverable has transformed from the aforementioned static files to more dynamic visualizations that range from animated Keynote files to fully functional websites.

4. More SVGs

SVGs (scalable vector graphics) present web designers and developers with a lot of advantages over more traditional image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF.

The key advantages of SVGs come through loud and clear in the format name itself: scalable and vector. Instead of being raster or pixel-based, SVGs are composed of vectors: mathematical descriptions of the object’s shape. This means SVGs are resolution-independent, so they’ll look great on any screen, on any device type. No need to worry about making everything retina-ready.

5. More focus on animation

Animation has long played a key role in our digital interfaces, and there’s no reason to think that’ll abate in 2017. In fact, as designers get more and more visual tools to help them build engaging and smile-sparking animations, we’re sure to see them become both more prominent and more refined.

6. Flexbox

If you haven’t dived into flexbox yet, you’re in for a treat. This relatively “new” CSS layout module offers both incredible responsive-friendliness in its functionality, but also makes a lot of sense to visual designers used to manipulating objects on the canvas with the align and distribute tools offered in the likes of Sketch and Illustrator.

7. Complex CSS grid layouts

Grid is the very first CSS module created specifically to solve the layout problems we’ve all been hacking our way around for as long as we’ve been making websites.

While flexbox helps us solve some seriously aggravating and long-standing web design problems like vertical centering, it really wasn’t intended for use in full-page layouts.

8. Virtual reality on the web

Given our already firmly founded tendency to think of the web as a kind of alternate reality, this is a bit inception-y. But there’s no denying that VR is going to affect the web in a big way in 2017