Like most trends, what’s current, is always changing and evolving. It’s for this reason why you want to keep up with the latest trends, as it ensures your site doesn’t end up looking dated. When you maintain your site, keeping up with all the latest trends, you can much more comfortably ensure it not only looks, but conforms to the standards of the time.
So, are you interested in discovering the trends of today? If so, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve done my due diligence and researched all the latest design and development changes that you need or should consider implementing, if you want the best possible website. Are you building a brand new website, then this should help as a baseline for that site.
In the coming year or so, we can expect web design trends to move more towards animation, minimalism and easy navigation, all while being easy to use and get around.
- Smart Video
Having video on your website can only be a plus. People very much love to watch and listen to videos, and it acts as a very effective method for marketing of products and services.
While there are many benefits to utilising video, you still need a well thought out plan before you go ahead with anything. This is where smart video becomes a viable option. In the past, people would simply embed a related YouTube video their post, just to score SEO points. But today, you need to think about quality, the implementation of one well put together video, rather than adding videos to pages, just for the sake of doing it.
Think of creative ways of adding videos to images. Look to making it appealing, and eye-catching. You want a video that quickly and comprehensively represents your website, service or product, depending on what your site is about.
- Organic Naturalistic Shapes
Though the vast majority of websites today, are created using your typical grid format, web designers are now looking at implementing smooth lines and more naturalistic shapes into their sites. Rectangles, squares and triangles, with sharpe corners have a way of creating a sense of firmness, but today, trends are shifting more towards comfort, accessibility and user-friendliness.
Because your more naturalistic shapes, lack the mathematic precision of your sharp angled shapes, it can make pages stand out, a great deal more. This is because it makes the site look more natural, like in nature, that sense of spontaneity has a great sense of artistic value to it. The objective is for the web designer to create something that feels alive, through the implementation of more naturalistic shapes and images.
- Mobile-Ready Animation
In previous years, we’ve seen a lot of animation that has implemented scroll-based systems, and time-situations, designed to lead the customer or visitor, down a specific path, to purchase a particular tool, service, product or program. While, this is perfectly fine, when viewed on your typical desktop unit, when it comes to mobile devices, we’ve seen the new approaches being brought to the front. We can expect web designers to consider how they can implement animations that are optimized and best suited to mobile devices.
- Colour to Evoke Moods
We’ve been using the bold colour, to evoke moods, for years now, but it looks like, for the coming year, more colours will be used for this very same process. The study of colour impact on the human mind, has been around for a considerable length of time, and has been sufficiently utilised by marketers to help them boot sales.
While, our own life experiences has a huge impact on how we feel when we see certain colours, there is a generality around certain colours and the associations they evoke in human beings. For example, when people see the colour green, they typically think of nature, and naturalistic things, while the colour red makes people think and feel more passionate about what they’re looking at.
It can be said, with almost 100% certainty, that for the next year or so, web designers will be looking at colour usage to evoke more feelings and moods in those they intend to visit their website(s).
- Minimalistic Sites
Minimalistic websites, or flat design, isn’t something new, as it’s been around for many years. People tend to think of Apple as a company that leans more towards minimalistic designs, with their usage of a lot of white space. That said, for the coming years, we can expect that web designers will look to experiment more with minimalism. Using various colours to create the same white space impact – not simply restricting it to black and white.
Shopify, for example, is an excellent example of a website that successfully implements minimalism without restricted itself to the typically black on white space format. To get it right, you simply need a background that is bold, in a single colour, with text using a clean font. Shopify proves that minimalism can be just as entertaining, and engaging as other design elements.
About the author: Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website.
