10 Web design trends you need to know

1. Inclusive design

Unfortunately, the word “Inclusivity” is seen as a buzzword in politics that is frequently used, yet at its foundation, it is a concept that speaks to every designer—making every attempt to be inclusive where inclusion was not previously present. It is a concept that is truly far from unfamiliar in today’s individualised global market.

Every stage of the website design process is impacted by inclusive design, from selecting the website’s target audience strategically to personalising it and determining the graphic language of your brand to suit all genders, perspectives, experiences, and circumstances.

To give playful diversity, pictures and graphics of practical uses have started to emerge more regularly on non-gender fronts.

Additionally, as a result of the gaming industry, the internet will undoubtedly be overrun with an increasing number of avatars, illustrations, and characters with non-human identities in the coming year. This is because the internet offers alternate realities that bring into question the very nature of what is real.

The model Ranboo Fashion uses in their video is somewhat gender fluid and has her face covered, making it unclear to the audience who she is.

2. Storytelling

More and more people are using Scrollytelling to communicate complex stories using the medium of a digital interface.

These visual effects dish out engrossing content on a silver platter in order to entice visitors. Scrollytelling, sometimes known as “narrative visualisation,” is a method of telling a story by using a succession of sequentially ordered graphic components.

As with reading a book at your own leisure, websites now allow you to explore and regulate their flow in an individual way by recognising that each user is unique and delivering messaging in an appealing manner.

It’s a Texas-based company, Infrared Mind and Body, that uses a variety of animations to highlight its value offer. It’s easy to get a sauna atmosphere with the use of huge, close-up shots, dimly lit imagery, large-scale writing, and seamless transitions.

3. Horizontal Scrolling

Scrolling horizontally rather than vertically may result in unexpected interactions between text and visual elements.

For portfolio websites, catalogues, and maps, this is crucial. Discovering projects, touring places, and perusing online galleries are all much more enjoyable while navigating sideways. Our selection of the top horizontal scrolling websites will demonstrate its potency.

SIRUP was designed as a website in order to play a playlist. For this, the designer decided to incorporate the graphics and the playlist into a horizontal scrolling experience. It’s impossible for a user to not keep scrolling if the various design components are moving smoothly.

4. Brutalist Typography

If you’re looking for something a little more outlandish, this style is for you because of its roughness and dominance, which make a website stand out even with a limited number of parts.

The brightness, cheerfulness, and minimalism of today’s web design may be seen as a reaction to brutalist typography. In contrast to the more refined contemporary standard, this design is unabashedly rugged.

An urban feel may be achieved by the use of Brutalist Typography, which employs the use of typography to create a dynamic grid. Letters can be used as building blocks for segments, sections, headings, and paragraphs.

A one-pager for a technological innovation hub called Zona de Propulsão. The huge font is unquestionably the origin of this identity, creating a festival-like urban environment. The designer aimed to provide information that was open to all users and convey technical information in a more approachable manner.

5. Typography Animation / Kinetic Typography

Kinetic Typography is a great complement to the preceding style, which is continually expanding with new approaches at hand. Web designers use this strategy in a variety of ways in today’s environment. Animated characters used to be the go-to method for presenting stories, but typography has taken on a life of its own.

Text that moves may draw attention, set a tone, emphasise crucial sections, and direct the user’s gaze through a page. Since the 1960s, feature films have begun employing animated opening titles instead of static text, and this has been a trend ever since.

Dillinger, a Paris-based film production business, uses dynamic fonts to make the whole website a menu. When an option on the menu is picked, the typeface changes accordingly. With each change in typeface, a new grid is generated for the page.

This type of kinetic typographic exploration will become more common in the next few years.

6. Nostalgia

Nostalgia-based fashions have emerged in recent years, appealing to people’s urge to reflect on the past. Almost two years after the COVID-19 epidemic initially occurred, and in the midst of rising uncertainty, individuals (even web designers) are seeking more comfortable experiences and forms of escape.

In this technique, typography and pictures are slowed down, providing a more analogue feel using vintage image filters, retro typefaces, blurriness, grain, textures and soft lighting. These are just a few instances of the techniques designers are employing to produce relevant experiences.

Bravenewlitis is a playground for the literary. Fonts with romantic curves and soft grainy pictures give a sense of intimacy and familiarity in the flat, earthy pastel tones and soft grainy images. A post-it note and scanned photos of texts with footnotes create the impression that the user is a part of the writing process, which is exactly what the designer was going for when creating this interactive magazine.

7. Contrast Colors

One for the millennials, people born from 1980 to 1990, will enjoy this one. It’s impossible to ignore a website with neon colours. Colour is a fundamental technique that aids in directing the user’s attention and eliciting an emotional response.

It’s a brilliant, bursting web design approach, replete with neon on black, neon acid forms, sharp contrast and gradients. This style is usually geared to a certain audience.

Super Glow is a studio for music and lifestyle design. There are large black letters on a bright yellow background in the second section of their webpage. On hover, the colour of this menu list turns to fuchsia. The overall design incorporates saturated photographs as well as a fade-out mouse motion that seems to hover and provide a peek of the project within the internal link.

8. Off the Grid

One of the most essential tools for a designer to have is a grid. It offers our work form and organisation. In a sea of time-consuming competitors, moving off-centre to accentuate a section can help your website stand out and be remembered.

Going off the grid isn’t a new concept, but it hasn’t been widely explored. Web designers no longer require intermediaries or developers to bring their concepts to life. Even the wildest idea you dreamt of in the middle of the night is becoming more simple to translate and implement utilising a web builder. Best of all, it’s already programmed, making the entire process easier.

Maxim Aginsky’s portfolio, Arrow Space, employs a quotation from his design motto as the page hero, illustrating his philosophy of welcoming accidents with overlapping text-on-path and linear structure backdrop.

The US company Infrared Mind Body presents huge graphics and messages that appear through different animations to emphasise their value offer. A clean, classy sauna feel is created by using huge close-ups, dimly lit photos, large-scale lettering, as well as gentle and seamless transitions.

These simple shapes frequently evoke sticker designs from the 1980s or 1990s and may also have text printed on them. These shapes may also be utilised to create static or dynamic buttons or stickers that alert us about a temporary sale. No matter how these stickers seem or what they include, all of them aim to catch the attention of website visitors.

9. Imagery Multilayers

Clean, pixel-perfect, and minimalist designs have been increasingly popular in recent years during the design process. Many designers have given up on the challenge of creating more complex graphics.

The utilisation of several layers of material, such as photo galleries and typographic elements, challenges the traditional components that our eyes have been accustomed to. As a result, visitors are more likely to stay on a website and look around.

All of these elements work together to provide an overall unified visual experience when used in conjunction with General Condition’s pictures, beautiful animation, and black backdrop.

This approach also has the advantage of making it simpler to cram a large amount of material into a small area, such as the screens of mobile devices.

10. Delight

Today’s consumers have learned to anticipate pleasures in one of two forms, surface delights or deep delights, and they have made them a key component of excellent user experience.

Animations, tactile transitions or movements, microcopy, pictures, and audio are examples of surface delights. Deep delights, on the other hand, aim to guarantee that all user needs—including those for functionality, dependability, usability, and pleasure—are addressed. If customers are deeply delighted, they are more likely to suggest the goods/services to other happy customers.

Web design has reached a stage where it is no longer sufficient on its own, even while surface delights are wonderful and effective. A website that is healthy over the entire page is a truly deep delight, according to our current understanding of user needs and behaviours. It improves the usability, dependability, and functionality of the website rather than just providing fleeting pleasure.

A website that provides enjoyable user experiences across the whole user journey is Airbnb, which is an excellent example. The user may navigate the sometimes large number of possibilities arriving on their screen all at once more quickly by using features like highlighting the map tags they have previously looked through.

But it is only one example. Airbnb’s tight property requirements (such as the photographs they post, cleanliness standards, and payments and fees) offer a high standard for the user and a lovely, relaxing sense of security and confidence along the route.

We Hold the Key to the Future

The websites we came across covered a wide range of topics, from brutalist typography to soft muted colour schemes, evoking nostalgia, and using high contrast colour schemes.

Web design is on the verge of a new age due to the inevitable Metaverse, which will dominate headlines in 2022.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence implementation will soon be crucial factors for web designers to take into account.

These technologies are now making steady progress on mobile applications, but it is just a matter of “when” and not “if” they will also enter the world of websites.

The business appears to be in the midst of a chaotic process analogous to the internet’s equivalent of the big bang — a creative universe of pixelated energy. At times, controversial design styles and philosophies collide.

In our rapidly changing environment, it’s critical to remember to keep current, but it’s also crucial to pay attention. After all, following trends may be a tricky decision. You can also take a look and get inspiration from here.

Ultimately, if we want our web designs to serve their intended purpose, we must critically assess our work and base our decisions on what appeals to our user personas and the kinds of websites we create.

If you are looking to develop or re-develop your website, get in touch with the team at ec and we would love to help inspire your website using the latest trends.

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