Website design trends change every year. Some new trends, such as broken grid layouts, typographic animations and fluid effects have emerged. They provide context and go hand in hand with our creative choices. Here are some of my findings of what website designers have come up with recently
Assymetric/Broken grid
Designers are starting to push the boundaries by creating deliberately broken grids and asymmetrical designs. Sliding images, overlapping elements, and a deliberately twisted look that catches your eye and forces you to pay attention. The appeal of the asymmetrical layout is that it is unique, distinctive and sometimes experimental.
Dynamic Gradients
Gradients are big, loud and full of color. The most popular recent incarnation is a gradient filter over photos, a great way to make a less interesting image look intriguing. A simple gradient background can also be the perfect on-trend solution if you don’t have any other images to work with.
Web animations
Web animations are often saved as GIF, CSS, SVG, WebGL or video. They can be anything from a simple underline that appears when you hover over a word to a full-screen video or background image. I came across a lot of websites which have animated backgrounds. Very intriguing and interesting.
Typography
Typography is the core foundation of web design and also a timeless trend that won’t become unpopular anytime soon. Great designers focus a large part of their time on typography alone to optimize the design for legibility and to improve usability.
Minimalism
An increasing number of designers have accepted this influential design style and widely used it in their designs, making it an overwhelming trend in website design.
Social proof
Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation. Almost all websites comprise of social proof these days. They can be in the form of user reviews, endorsements, logos, ratings, email subscriber count etc.
Floating navigation
Most of the websites you visit have their navigation in the same place: across the top of the website. Some websites are experimenting with different options though. We already talked about the hamburger menu option, but another possibility is floating navigation. Floating navigation stays visible even as you scroll down the page. It provides a unique experience, but also offers the practical benefit of keeping all the navigation options present and visible no matter where your visitor is on the page.
Hovering effects
The idea behind mouseover effect is to reduce the effort that the user has to make to view more details, access key information, or see different views on the website. Almost every website has some kind of an animation or movement that catches the eye. Great bits of animation or hover effects can help users better navigate content and move around the design. Out of the above listed trends, I plan to incorporate Asymmetric grids, Dynamic gradients and other trends that would be most appropriate and feasible for my final chosen project.
References:
- https://www.creativebloq.com/features/web-design-trends
- https://webflow.com/blog/19-web-design-trends-for-2018
- https://designrevision.com/14-modern-web-design-trends-2018/
- https://www.mockplus.com/blog/post/best-website-design-2018
- https://agilie.com/en/blog/top-10-web-design-trends-2018-keep-up-with-users-needs
