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This post presents design trends for 2009 in terms of layouts, visual approaches and design elements. Please notice that this post showcases trends and developments that were extensively covered in our previous articles (e.g. handwriting, retro and vintage etc.) and therefore weren’t covered in this post (they are all linked in the overview, so feel free to explore these single posts as well). Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As a result, new design approaches come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them, new trends emerge.

Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009: recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches. We also discuss situations in which these trends can be used and present some beautiful examples. Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

Every now and again we showcase beautiful favicons — tiny pieces of art you’ll usually find in your browser’s address bar or when searching through your bookmarks. Favicons are important as they provide visual indicators to visitors and help them to easily associate the content with a bookmark in their browser. Besides, favicons are just nice to look at and there are way too many sites which don’t make use of them. We like to change things. Which is why here is the 7th episode of the favicons series.

We love creative favicons. Their beauty lies in the approach a designer has chosen to put something really unique inside of the 16×16px box. Designing favicons, it’s necessary to work with miniature images, and every extra pixel can be the wrong one. A good favicon is original, beautiful and - in best case - fits to the logotype and color schemes used in the web-site. Creating them is a challenge not every designer is able to cope with. It’s hard, but not impossible. In fact, many creative solutions are possible, but it’s damn hard to come up with some of them once you need them.

Every now and again we showcase beautiful favicons — tiny pieces of art you’ll usually find only if you are looking for them or search we stumble through your bookmarks. We’ve written enough about favicons in our recent posts.

The New Year’s Eve is a tricky time for designers. Some of us eagerly analyze deadlines, define milestones and refine the time schedule for the upcoming year. The other ones discover the need to update footers and copyright statements on their web-sites (by the way, have you actually replaced “2007″ with “2008″ in your footer?). Still, even on the January 1^st passionate designers continue to strive for inspiration in order to come up with fresh ideas for the ongoing projects.

If the latter is your case, is there really a better way to find the inspiration rather than in a fine gallery of excellent favicons - our not that secret and very lively passion? We’ve written a lot about favicons in the previous articles.

Please notice that the favicons weren’t chosen simply because of their beauty; it’s been important to us that the favicon perfectly fits to the overall site design. All favicons are linked to the sites where they are used — you can click on them to get more insights into how favicon design can be related to the layout design.

Favicons, mini graphics for a particular web-site, can be displayed in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface. To be recognized immediately, favicons have to be visually appealing and fit to the design or logo of a given page.

Below you’ll find over 45 more beautiful favicons, which can serve as a nice source for inspiration. You can click on favicons - they lead to the page, which uses the image as a page icon.