The trend of large letters, contrasting sans serif and serif headings help create dynamic parallels, improve UX and best of all, keep visitors browsing your website.

What trends do you think will dominate the world of web design in 2018? While not all trends are a good idea to follow, simply because it’s a phase that gets obsolete pretty fast; some are timeless and useful in improving your website’s UX/UI. Hence, boosting your conversion rate. As we look forward to a fresh start, we’ve compiled a list of web design trends that will improve your web performance.

1. Big Bold Typography

Typography has always been a powerful visual tool used by designers to create a brand personality, evoke emotions and set a tone to the website while conveying important information.

Big, bold typefaces have been a big deal for a while now, due to the many designs that use strong hero-style images with text overlays. The trend of large letters, contrasting sans serif and serif headings help create dynamic parallels, improve UX and best of all, keep visitors browsing your website. Moreover, sans serifs have been dominating web design for years due to its readability on smaller screen devices.

However, many web experts believe that 2018 will be the year of vintage text. Serif typefaces will and can be a beautiful alternative to sans serif fonts. Just like The Guardian newspaper, vintage typography is ready to take front and center again this year with a variety of serif fonts. Here’s another example of a vintage website.

Source: Pinterest

2. Broken-grid layout

Since the responsive design movement in 2010, traditional websites tend to adopt a standard symmetrical or grid layout as they are a great way of displaying lots of content.

However, grids can be highly restrictive, limiting designers creative possibilities. Attempting to build digital experiences that break these traditional standards, many UI designers are experimenting with layouts by breaking the grid. Although this technique will not be attractive to all companies, 2018 is set to see more of these “broken” or “free-flow” layouts and new creative ways of displaying content. Here’s an example from Adrienne Ceramics.

3. Dynamic Illustrations

While illustration in web design isn’t new, it is becoming a growing trend. Illustrations are a great way to create a brand identity that is recognisable and unique. It can also inject a well-needed bit of fun and personality into brands who are known for being stoic and serious.

Illustrations can be very powerful in bringing more abstract concepts to vivid life, as you can see in Dropbox‘s website, where they create rough sketches using graphite, then pair them with colourful, abstract shapes to bring the creative process to life. Finally, its worth noting that illustrations can also neatly resolve some of the representational challenges posed by photography.

4. Mobile-centric

The mobile revolution is upon us. Back in the old days, websites are only reachable via desktop computers and laptops. Today, the internet is in your pocket. If your website is not responsive, you may lose more than half of your target audience. This is because 56% of website traffic comes from mobile as of 2017, based on a sample of 77 billion website visits (Source: Stone Temple).

Mobile development and mobile-first web designs are something that you cannot afford to miss out on when designing web pages in 2018. Even though this trend has been utilised in the past, it is important to note that more people are now viewing web pages on their mobile devices than laptops and desktop computers.

Optimising web pages for mobile is now done through an entirely new approach. Before, web designers created mobile versions by reformatting desktop websites for a smaller screen. Today, people are so familiar and comfortable with mobile apps that the new trend is to create mobile web pages which look and function like an app. This results in tremendous increase in user engagement, better perception, and overall improved functionality.

Another positive note to using a mobile-centric approach is that it can result in highly functional desktop versions. By focusing on core functions, web designers will be able to avoid gimmicky design techniques and distractions. Test your website’s mobile friendliness here for free. If your test result is less than favourable, get in touch with us for expert consultation on getting your website back on track.

5. Floating Navigation Menus

Sticky or fixed navigation menus that stays in place as you scroll down a page, is not particularly new. But it is a design feature we are seeing more of, especially on e-commerce websites like Zalora and Lazada. Lately, we’re seeing the idea being taken a step further by visually detaching the navigation from the rest of the site design, and moving it a bit below the browsers chrome. This reinforces the feeling that the navigation is a global object. See the homepage of Le Rseau COOP for a good example.

6. The <video> Element

The beauty of video is its ability to convey complex information a static image can’t. Embedded video content has been a norm in most websites, from media sites that are pivoting to video, to more ephemeral video on social networks, and video in website design.

They can slip seamlessly into a design without needing to embed from external sources such as YouTube or Vimeo, while retaining its high quality – something GIFs struggle to do. Additionally, videos can be looped endlessly as a hero banner background like the one on theskyisthelimit.se.

If you feel like your website does not convert enough leads,get in touch with us. We’ll make sure your digital real estate gets the makeover it deserves.