Web design has come a long way in the past few years, and we've all moved into the era where everyone wants XHTML/CSS tableless designs in "Web 2.0" style (and functionality). Back several years ago, designers could almost create anything they wanted, and it was not a problem to slap it together into 100 table cells - essentially, there was no limitations. When tableless designs became popular, it was a pretty big jump for many designers, and we saw a lot of boxy designs with borders, plain text and straight lines. Designers tried to keep everything simple so it was easy to code, and because of this had to look toward other ways to brighten up sites.

Bright pinks, yellows and typical 'in your face' colours were used to draw away from the boring structure of pages, and items such as logos had to be very powerful as they were one of the main defining objects on the page

I am going to predict that in the next year or so we'll see much more complex designs coming back, as designers are pushing the evelope again. Colours will become a little more muted and 'plain' while other design effects are used to draw attention, with bright highlight colours. The common 'safety' designs we're seeing will start to die off and more advanced CSS teqniques will become basic.

Here are a few predictions of colour combinations which could be popular in the next year: