As technology and internet habits shift, web design is subject to change. As we enter 18 years into the millennium, web designers have to cope with the changing technical environment to create sites that are user-friendly, innovative, adaptive to any conceivable device and beautiful.
With either ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ or ‘Wow’ responses to any design, any designer would wish to receive a ‘WOW’ factor to make them stand out from the crowd.
While one of the 2017 advancements is an increase in mobile browsing, 2018 is going to utilize mobile functionally fully. However, desktop browsing must also evolve to stay abreast. Although some of the web design trends originated few month ago, they are now maturing, and soon they will be entering the mainstream.
Here are some of the web design trends that are likely to be popular in 2018:
Adventurous and saturated color schemes
While designers have stuck with web-safe colors in the past, more brands are shifting their approach to colour.
Their approach includes vibrant shades and supersaturation incorporated with horizontal and re-imagined headers with hard angles and slashes.
Notably, this is aided by technological advancements in display screens that are capable of reproducing richer colours. Clashing colours may also be useful in attracting visitor’s attention, especially for designers who wish to distinguish themselves from traditional web-safe colours.
As such,when it comes to web design trends of 2018, it is likely to be the year of excess colours online.
More focus on Mobile
Though web designers were puzzled in the past on how to get decent menus, sub menus and sub-sub menus on small displays as users found it clunky and difficult to adopt; mobile design has now matured.
In the recent past, mobile browsing officially out shined desktop as everyone nowadays shops using their smartphone.
In 2018, web brands might be forced to ditch large, stunning photos for icons because they are more economical in space and users have no trouble understanding them.
Moreover, UX issues will become easy to identify and fix using interactions that gets instant feedback on user actions.
Artificial Intelligence
While conversational UIs were a huge trend in 2017, most of them are not AI driven, and the promise of Artificial Intelligence is in the air.
There will be more articles, talks as well as case studies on the integration of AI and UX design.
Additionally, this trend will be more notable in the robotics field, which is the ultimate headless UI.
Web Animations
Animations play a huge part in making interfaces easy to understand.
As such, it can convey complex ideas in a short time while informing and engaging, especially in a world where everybody is in a hurry and time is limited.
While personality and storytelling were used to capture user attention, animations will play a big role in the web design trends of 2018.
We are more likely to see animated logos impact the 2018 web design trends, one that provides an opportunity to enhance one’s brand further.
Nonetheless, getting it right is key since it is a visual representation of an organization in a small space and it packs in a lot of meaning if it is a good logo.
Vibrant Gradients
Flat design has been trending in the past years, but dynamic gradients are likely to make a tremendous comeback in 2018.
The dynamic gradient is becoming loud, big and full of colour.
Notably, gradient filter has been used to make an uninteresting picture look fascinating.
Simple gradient is likely to come in handy if one has no additional image to use.
The next 12 months look like an extremely positive time for web design, if you’d like to discuss a new project in more detail you can contact our web design team in our Liverpool office via the contact form.
