Your website is your virtual identity which is why it is vital to present valuable content that is both aesthetic and useful. Cameron Moll says, “What separates design from art is that design is meant to be… functional.” Web design is constantly evolving. New age designers are now shifting to ‘experience designing’, something which is more profound, complex and a purposeful catalog combining technology and aesthetics to reach out to users. In the words of Paula Scher, “It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.”
Here are the trends that will shape web-designing in 2018
Colors
Color schemes would include more vibrant, bold shades as designers are ready to experiment and move beyond the web-safe subtle colors. Experts say that alongside color schemes, there would be increased customization and personalization with new tools like Khroma to create exceptional user experience
Accelerated Mobile Pages
2017 saw mobile browsing overtake desktop usage, something which would continue the coming years. Here’s how AMP features will play an important role even for mobile apps in 2018
Shapes And Animations
In 2018, we will see more of fluid shapes instead of edgy structures in web design. And even more cinemagraphs, GIFs and UI animations. Subtle animations that are realistic, engaging and dynamic is already the in-thing. Here are some inspirations on how animations could be used in websites
Virtual Reality
Using virtual reality with accurate and POV cameras to create 360° space in e-commerce websites is already a modern-day web designing trend. Real estate, architecture, interiors, studios, showrooms can benefit a lot out of VR. Earlier, users had to download apps to see the virtual reality content. This resulted in significant user dropout. Content creators have now shifted to incorporate and customize 360° experiences depicting the entire virtual reality in the website itself. Here’s a Google I/O ’17 video on WebVR
White Space Without Minimalism
The web is an innovative ecosystem which offers a lot of scope for creative use of space. It is a common tendency of designers to prefer a lot of white space to create a minimalistic look. However, 2018 would see more filled-up white space with fewer words and object that are larger in size and font.
Intelligent Chatbots
Gartner estimates that by 2020, “consumers will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without ever interacting with a human.” Hence the use of intelligent chatbots would scale up in web designing as well. There would be increased use of voice and native language search in websites.
Nav Bar And Layout
For navigation, horizontal and sidebars have been the trend so far. In 2017, the hamburger menu or the sliding sidebar menu with navigation drawer icon usage picked up fast. These unconventional ways are likely to gain more popularity.
Inventive Typography
Both emphasis and aesthetics can be worked out for the better with inventive typography, something that is going fast pick-up in 2018. Bold trends are expected to develop by limiting the number of letters. Words won’t be limited to text but would be used as images as well. There would be more of broken-up spacing in words, mixing of Serif and Sans Serif fonts for a greater aesthetic appeal. Sites like Font Pair can help to figure out which fonts pair well.
Innovative Grids And Particle Backgrounds
In 2017, split screen designs were a trend. 2018 would see extensive use of CSS grids. Particle backgrounds that are dynamic, catchy and surprisingly easier to implement would see an increased use.
SVG Extension
PNG, JPG and GIF images would be replaced by SVG files which are easy to scale and have no loss of quality. In software, Sketch is going to displace photoshop for making a quick and easy layout.
Check out some more interesting web design trends here
