The recent year had a toll on us all. We came to learn how to adapt to new norms at home, and in the working places, as well as the way we commute. The world has changed dramatically over the years and so does the web world come to witness some innovations along the way.
As we entered new year with a looming threat of pandemic upon us, the online consumerism and online shopping behaviors sour up more than ever before, requiring webmasters and web designers to revamp their designing capabilities and bake something anew all in the effort to provide a good user experience and improve visitors retention rate.
Read: 10 Great Web Designing Tips For Large Websites
A lot has changed over the years when it comes to the web designing avenue. Websites today are more interactive, user-friendly, easy to navigate, and laced with all aesthetics, shades, and elements that make users tick. Speaking of web designing, we at FME Extensions— a leading web design and development company keep a vigilant eye on the latest web designing trends and reflect them in our clientele’s projects to ensure they stay put in the market competition.
Here is the list of 15 web design trends the web designers have brought us for the year and will likely continue ahead with more innovations coming through.
Trend No 1: Retro Fonts
In web designing, often we come to see many things that have gone obsolete and have begun to resurface again with renewed interfaces. The Retro Fonts have to come to experience the same decay and resurgence in their popularity.
Though, the old version of Retro Fonts has gone through a bit of reprocessing and re-modification. We have come to witness rather more artistry and a bit of stylization that has completely reimagined the Retro Fonts that we will see in the web designing. One such insurgence of Retro Fonts with renewed effects we came to see in the promotion of Spotify Carnival. Instead of giving a feeling of old and stale, Spotify web designers managed to cook something anew out of the existing ingredients with a bit of new taste and elegance. This is the perfect example of how to mutilate topography and inject a new life into it and still retain the legibility of the Fonts.
Trend No 2: Parallax Scroll Animations
Parallax scroll features have been in trend for years in the web designing premises, and every year comes with it a bit of rejuvenation. We expect to realize some more creative and subtle variations in parallax scroll animations.
Be mindful of the fact that too many movements in parallax scroll animation can shy away from visitors with vestibular and visual disorders as the depth, illusion, and movements can cause dizziness, disorientation, and sight straining.
Following are some sets of guidelines designers often take into practice to make sure the parallax effect is accurately incorporated with the least amount of causing any harm to the end users-end.
- Avoid parallax effects to distract from key information.
- Avoid making it harder for the end-users to accomplish an important activity.
- Incorporate the lowest number of parallax animation effects.
- Lower down the parallax movements.
- Allow users with the feature to turn on and off parallax effects.
Trend No 3: Horizontal Scrolling
Formerly known as the web design Faux-Pas, horizontal scroll is also having a rebirth in the web designing arena, with renewed imaginations and ways of application.
More web designers and web development companies today tend to experiment with websites with horizontal scroll elements. Incorporating horizontal scrolling feature allows web designers to reveal secondary information effectively, for instance, disclosing a media file, social media icons, or perhaps an image when visitors get to scroll a website horizontally.
Trend No 4: 3D Visuals Integration
With the continued arrival of more sophisticated and high-resolution displays/screens, 3D designing has emerged to be one of the most popular trends in web designing.
It allows web designers to incorporate high-quality 3D visuals and elements that add to a greater user experience. Instead of giving a dazzling distraction, embedding 3D visuals enable interactivity and catches the end-users attention.
We have seen in many different ways the 3D visual is being added up to websites. One such example is the creative firm Sennep that is laced with 3D elements throughout their site. Sennep’s website is the perfect demonstration of a minimalist web design, and how 3D visuals can create a lasting impression in the end-users minds.
Trend No 5: Rich Multimedia Experience
With increased penetration of fast internet connectivity and smart gadgets, more and more people today consume multimedia. The incorporation of visuals, such as video, audio, images has been trending for years in the web designing world, which provides a richer user experience and adds up to greater user retention.
Savvy web designers exercise maximum constraint with regards to multimedia experience so that it won’t backfire instead of adding value to the website’s content.
- A lot can go wrong when combining audio with the motion that may yield in the user’s distraction. It is important to prioritize simplicity and creativity in the media you want to embed into your website.
- Use proper media formats to increase content’s accessibility and optimize the site’s loading speed.
- Also, provide alt text for pictures and product descriptions and proper captions for all media files.
- Make sure all text is compiled in HTML.
- Avoid auto-playing of videos, but rather provide “play” and “pause” buttons to provide users with the liberty to play and stop the videos as they like.
Trend No 6: Gaussian Blur Feature
This feature has been very popular for a while. Gaussian Blur provides a soft and swirl effect to gradients and images on the website, and improves user’s experience and interactivity.
Web designer uses the bluer feature quite a lot. One such example we come to see is in the Goodbooks background. The background is designed that provides a furry blend of purple, red and blue colors with vivid typography and important anchor texts being shaded.
Trend No 7: Incorporating Cartoon Illustration
Not long ago, website designers would only resort to text and a few random graphics and images when building a website. Today the web design has evolved as per user’s tastes and palates.
Today, web designers aim to connect with end-users on a more personal level by incorporating cartoony elements on websites. This trend has gained traction, and we have come to see its usage a lot.
These illustrations and cartoon characters provide a lot in terms of making a brand more personified and it is expected that the use of such cartoon characters will become more common in the coming years. There are so many artists drawing creative elements and sources such as Humaans and various others, where you can download cartoon illustrations that fit your business website.
Trend No 8: Scrollytelling
This is an emerging trend that is becoming very common in web designing in a couple of years. We see a growing number of web designers portraying stories through their web development experiences. This is how the concept of scrollytelling comes into play which allows designers to hook people with visual storytelling.
For the best usage of scrollytelling, you must take the following things into account.
- Ensure interaction on the user’s terms. Provide clear playback, start and pause buttons for motion media.
- Maintain motion in a small area of the website and make sure it aligns perfectly with other elements such as text and various other tabs and buttons.
- Ensure that scrollytelling helps to emphasize the narrative, be specific and avoid any distraction for the users.
You can have a look at the Web Design Art History landing page that perfectly demonstrates how scrollytelling is revolutionizing web designing.
Trend No 9: Darkish Mode
Darkish mode is another trend that is getting very popular each day. We see websites and applications that employ darkish mode for a better user experience. This allows designers to incorporate perfect darkish background and elements and texts popping up from the screen as users keep hovering.
In years ahead, we are going to see more and more websites provide users with the option to go dark.
Trend No 10: Custom Cursors
Cursors and arrows are often the most ignored aspects of web designing. However, with custom cursors, web designers have now sorted it out and completely reimagined the cursors and their experience with the users.
As a user moves on a website, the cursor keeps changing itself that yields more user interactivity, and treats visitors with something new.
Trend No 11: Scrolling Cards
Scrolling cards are becoming a vital part of web designs. With this trend, designers provide a snappy outlook to websites and are considered a great chance to depict the information to the visitors while scrolling upward or horizontally.
Trend No 12: Colorless Web Design
Colorless design is also prominent in web designing for a neat and clean design. Have a look at the User Experience Database website that is built with a colorless design that is minimal and makes it easy for users to read the content.
Trend No 13: Incorporating Audio Feature
To eliminate accessibility barriers with visually impaired people, designers have introduced the audio feature. It reads content on a website to people who don’t usually like reading on their own.
Many popular press sites such New York Times have included the audio feature in many of their feature stories, editorials, and articles. Onward, we are going to see the application of audio in prevalence that will allow people how they want to consume content.
Thus, instead of reading long textual content, users can just click on the audio button and listen to it.
Trend No 14: No Code
Well, no code doesn’t necessarily refer to the full elimination of code. Developers and programmers will always be around. With open-source platforms and source codes available on the web, now anyone can easily materialize their ideas and vision without having too much coding knowledge.
With the built-in templates and open sources codes, anyone can get to become a front-end developer. We have seen writers and content marketers become web developers with no code trend. Many small business owners have dived into the online and eCommerce business world as online consumerism keeps on growing.
Trend No 15: Design Systems for Updates and Consistency
There are powerful design systems. Using a content management system (CMS) to build repeatable websites designs and layouts makes it easy to make updates and make duplication fast enough.
Whether the CMS is used for small-scale businesses or giant ones, they are useful for any size of organization to create and manage their website designs.
Summing Up
Innovation in web designing is an ongoing phenomenon. Web designers and developers introduce new features in design all to make websites more interactive, catchy, and user friendly.
User experience has been quite the buzzword around web designers and they spare no effort in producing new ways to ramp up user engagement and retention. Websites of eCommerce nature and in general websites of any genre require having the least possible bounce rate, which can only be achieved through the ongoing innovation in designing.
