Web design trends shift ceaselessly throughout the year, so here is a look at a few more important movements that are likely to gain popularity in 2018.
Impactful Text
Typography combines lots of different design decisions and is immensely important to web design today. Minimalism in terms of page layout, necessitated by the rise of mobile browsing, means that well-chosen fonts, colours and configurations of text can make all the difference.
Extreme Functionalism
The aforementioned fashion for minimalistic site design has been overtaken by a new trend – one which sees not just the look and feel of sites cut back but even the number of pages used to convey information put on the chopping block.
Referred to as the online equivalent of brutalism in architecture, this approach is another mobile-friendly twist that a growing number of businesses are embracing. And since ad blocking is also getting baked into browsers, a surgical look is easier to justify.
Softening Corners
Sharp-cornered squares and rectangles are dead and buried. Soft, curvaceous boxes for text entry, images and more will become more common in 2018, especially as major platforms like Twitter and Google have taken the plunge.
Mobile Motion
The limited power and bandwidth of smartphones has made some sites opt for such simplicity of design that certain audiences will feel uninterested and unengaged by pages.
The antidote to this is a rise in animation found on mobile-friendly pages. Echoing the popularity of GIFs but eliminating all the data-hungry issues that this file format entails, fun and functional animations will be ten a penny on sites that want to stay competitive.
Working with a Drupal design agency like https://www.website-express.co.uk/ will let you hop on this bandwagon and get ahead of the pack.
Virtual Reality
Virtual and indeed augmented reality experiences are becoming more widely available thanks again to smartphone hardware. And just like QR codes helped combine real-world retail with online information, so too AR-interactive tags can bring various digital elements to life in the real world.
The web integration of these technologies is complex and costly so may be out of reach of smaller sites. But big businesses will be looking to outdo each other in this area over the course of the next 12 months as the competition really intensifies.
