I find web design quite fascinating--like a few of you mentioned (Kim, I think you did, and then the post that linked to the "fight" between realism and flat design, among others), trends in web design are quite difficult to keep up with, which is frustrating. Part of that, though, is due to how quickly technology has been improving. I'm old enough to remember not having a computer in our house--I think I was ten or eleven before we got our first one, and it was specifically for my dad's work, and had nothing cool or fun that I could find to do on it except a maze game in the "how to use this computer tutorial" that was meant to teach you how to use the arrow keys. Consider how much has changed just in the last seven years since the first iPhone was released--it seems like it's been around forever, but it hasn't even been a decade yet. So, with technology changing the hardware--desktop/towers to laptops to smart phones to tablets to watches and wearable tech--, it's difficult to anticipate where web design is going, so it's difficult to anticipate which current trends might end up lasting. But those same changes are pretty exciting because there are more and more possibilities in what can be done with the tools.
That being said, I think a good idea based on your brand/product and its audience is always a safe bet. Web design has come a long way--just look at the time capsule sites out there like the oft-cited Space Jam movie site, which has gone from cool to lame and back to cool in a hipster-nostalgia kind of way--to the sites that many of you have posted. I'll always appreciate a site that's clear and gives me a quick, easy, pleasurable user experience.
But I also like pretty things, and love sites that are clear but also feel luxuriant. Hence, I'm a big fan of white space--I'm definitely a believer that the pleasing white space on its search page helped Google outdo the much-bigger competition of the time in AOL, which was always cluttered and confusing to navigate. A site I really like that uses white (or bold background color, as the case may be) space well: Sydney Stockholm, an Australia media/communications company. That site also has an interesting/unexpected user experience (see next paragraph), using these quiet little touches like the loop video of the fingers typing, which almost seems to reference a right-brain/left-brain relationship to me. Another site that works for me in terms of experience and luxuriant white space is for book designer Rodrigo Corral. I love the way that the levels unfold to showcase his work in more ways and across more types of media.
I love sites that do something unusual or unexpected, and are therefore memorable. Miranda July's site for her story collection, No One Belongs Here More than You, is one of those. The book was published way back in 2007 (quite a long time in tech years, no?), but the site still seems fresh and interesting to me now. It's something I hadn't seen before, and don't think I've really seen anywhere else since, and she tells a story with the site that brings you in. She creates a persona for herself as an author, one who is funny, quirky, down-to-earth, humble, maybe even doubts that anyone would really take her book seriously. I don't know how effective it was in selling her collection, but it's certainly a memorable website in terms of the experience of it. I also appreciate a site that includes a bit of humor: Mark Melnick's site for his book/print designs works for me--I like that he admits he can't do everything but what he does, he tries to do as well as he can. Again, I don't know how many jobs it's gotten him, but I'd imagine that it might be quite refreshing for a client to be able to cut right to what he does best.
If I had to say what goals I have when designing anything really, but especially when designing a web site, I'd go with these: remember what you want the user to do (like TJ said over and over in Words and Images) and make it clear and easy for the user to do that. If I can do that, I'm pretty happy with what I put together. If I can do that in a way that is also beautiful and feels to the user like a world he/she would like to be part of...even better.
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