Top Quality Web Design Trends

Each year, web design trends evolve. The hot designs of years past now look old and outdated (think WordArt, stock photos, and websites overcrowded with widgets).

Understanding the year’s top trends can be one of the most important web development solutions you come across. Especially knowing that 38% of people will leave a website if they don’t like the layout or design.

Keep reading to learn about the top web design trends so your site can stay looking fresh and relevant.

The Importance of Mobile Design

Mobile web design has become increasingly important each year with the rise of laptops, smartphones, and all things Internet. But this past year, more than half of all web traffic to top websites has been comprised of mobile web traffic.

Creating simple, easy-to-load web designs is one of the key web development solutions of the year. With many of your site’s visitors coming from a mobile site or app, its design is crucial.

This doesn’t mean keeping everything about your website the same and attempting to make it work on a mobile device. You should take the time to redesign and adapt your site for a mobile user.

Minimalist Designs

This trend has been relevant for a few years now. It has continued throughout 2017, especially since the rise of mobile sites.

Simplifying web development solutions and designs has led to flat design and minimalism taking over the look of most sites. Keeping the design simple and clean has allowed for developers to create easy to use mobile and desktop websites.

Minimalism and web design usually means choosing only a couple of colors with a simple, clean looking font. You’ll also notice a recent trend of making logos and brands even more minimal by losing the extra design frills.

You can see this in a lot of mobile brand logos (see the importance of mobile design?), with some examples of simplified brands being the new Instagram icon and Airbnb’s new logo.

Bold Everything

While minimalist design is still in, there’s no reason why everything has to feature solely a black and white color scheme. Don’t be afraid to have bold features.

Whether it is bold colors, bold fonts, bold typography, or bold patterns, they’re all in right now. Expect to see many website home pages and designs featuring bold neon colors like yellow and pink or interesting, geometric patterns.

Bold typography is another design you could try. Don’t worry about ruining a minimalistic vibe with some of these bold suggestions. Implement one or two bold elements alongside a minimalistic design to keep things simple.

Retro Is In

With the resurgence of Polaroid cameras, 90s fashion, and vinyl records, it’s no surprise that retro design is trending. This doesn’t mean you should break out your WordArt and extremely slow loading pages.

Think 80s with this trend: neon colors, grid patterns, palm trees, metallic color schemes, and a lot of pink/purple/blue gradients.

Don’t go overboard with this stuff, but it’s definitely a trend that will make your site stand out amongst the crowd of flat design and black-and-white, minimal pages.

Animation

Animation as a part of web design certainly isn’t a new idea. As the use of the Internet and mobile sites rise, it’s not hard to see why animation might become even more relevant.

Use animations as a visual aid to tell your site’s story. Will you use animations that are triggered as the user scrolls to help your storytelling? What about using animations to demonstrate a product or service?

Don’t use animations just for the sake of adding them. Make sure they are serving a purpose for your brand and your website. If they seem superfluous, over the top, or distracting, many users will just click away.

Use of SVGs

SVGs are Scalable Vector Graphics. These have been around since the late 90s, but they’ve recently been able to be applied to web development solutions quite nicely.

These are image files in a vector format, as opposed to the more widely used pixel format. This gives them the advantage of being scalable, hence the name Scalable Vector Graphics.

The vector format of SVGs means that the resolution and quality of the image will be excellent on any and all screen sizes and types. Thinking back to the rise of mobile web design, this is a huge development.

It can be hard to get pixel formatted images to look great on a desktop and a mobile website. With SVGs, you won’t have to worry about this.

The HTTP requests you’re used to with other formatted images will be a thing of the past; SVGs don’t require them. This means that SVGs are able to load quite easily without slowing down your site’s load time.

You can also animate SVGs, which is a huge plus seeing as “animation” also made our list of web design trends.

Microinteractions

Microinteractions are small visual animations or cues that happen when a user interacts with something. This could be when they hover over an image or emoji, when they scroll, when they click a button, etc.

You can implement microinteractions in a number of ways. Whether it triggers an animation, a button changing color, or a small sound, these microinteractions will add a nice touch to your design.

As these have become more and more popular, users expect them. Including them is important, but don’t go overboard. Too many will be overwhelming and won’t look as professional.

Web Development Solutions Can Start With Design

These are just a few of the most popular web design trends we have seen. Each year brings new trends, so it’s important to stay on top of them.

It’s also important to keep in mind that you don’t have to include every trend in your web design. Think about which trends will go along with your brand and how you can balance out some of the louder trends (like bold colors) with the simpler ones (like small microinteractions).