Website Design Trends for 2018

 

Art Meets Interactive and Personal

This past year, VR, 360 images, card layout, AI-powered bots, pre-built websites, and forms dominated as the website design trends to watch. The theme for 2017 seemed to be multi-tasking and finding the quickest way to get the work done.

In 2018, designers are forecasting a continued trend of simplicity, but with a twist. Bold minimalism and asymmetry are going to impact the website design industry. Simple, yet visually appealing and user-friendly, will be the overall theme of 2018’s top website design trends.

 

Bold Minimalism

Minimalism has had great influence over the past few years in web design and fashion. Thin, crisp lines and sold colors are the home pages of beautifully website designs like Huge, Bedow, Manuel Rueda, MmD, and Electric Bodies. Simple will never go out of style, which is why minimalism has so many variations. 2018’s version of minimalism will be bold and vibrant. This year will still have the same minimal elements but with a pop. An example of this is thick, sans-serif white text over a vibrant, patterned background.

 

Engaging Photography

Last year, stock photography infiltrated websites. This year, designers are focused on more authentic photography featuring real people and places related to the company.

Branding will take a spot in the front row and generic photography will be a thing of the past. This will increase visitor engagement and flow more smoothly with branded web design.

 

Interactive Content

Another emerging theme in web design is user-focused. Designers want to provide visitors with a unique user experience, and interactive content is the way to do it. Polls, quizzes, and games are just a few of the ways that web designers will reach visitors and create a much more personal user experience.

Interactive content helps the user by answering questions and delighting them.

 

Animated Videos

This year will see a rising popularity of animated videos for marketing content. Websites like Go Animate are making it easy for marketers to make quick little videos that are informative, branded, and playful. Users tend to watch animated videos longer than regular, non-animated, which is the reason for the trend. Animation is easier to match design-wise to a website, which also adds to the appeal in developing animated content.

 

Persona Focused Design

With the rising interest in creating targeted content, persona focused design will augment this trend in 2018. There will be a more in-depth process involved in making design choices based on insights from persona development.

The trend comes from a desire to increase the quality of website visitors and to pull away from website traffic just for traffic’s sake. Companies aren’t interested in irrelevant website visitors. They want visitors who have an interest in what the website has to offer. (Bye bye vanity metrics…)

 

Fluid Shapes and Gradients

Lastly, experts are expecting to see less sharp colors and shapes and more fluidity and gradient. In 2017 minimalism, sleek style, and sharpness made for an overall theme of clarity to be conveyed. It is expected that the overall theme for 2018 will be organized chaos.

Minimalist ideals will still reign true, but with a splash of disarray. Designers will have a lot of fun with this year’s newfound design freedom!

 

2017 was full of great design choices for websites, video, and various multimedia. It was also a year of quiet, impersonal designs. This year, we are going to have fun, get to really know our audience, and have more freedom in design choices. We are looking forward to it!

Want to talk about ways to evolve your website? Send me a message!

nancy at heartbrain dot marketing