5 Top Web Design Trends That Will Storm the Web This Year
Last year turned out to be a turbulent period, from the everlasting pandemic to a new surge of movements demanding social justice to a highly disputed presidential election. While most of us fail to realize how wider social events and technological developments influence design, web designers must be informed about broader trends, mainly when designing sites for the rapidly changing web.
As we have stepped into a new year and are about to start designing for the web, we must take several rising trends into account springing from last year. From a more significant emphasis on inclusive design to offering more immersive web experiences, these emerging trends will plan the future for web design in 2021 and beyond.
What follows is a list of five top web design trends that we think will dominate the internet in 2021. However, if you wish to utilize these web designs in your work, ensure that you have the appropriate web design tools available at your disposal to implement them effectively.
- Web Design Inspired by Print
Visual designs that draw inspiration from print fulfill the users’ wish to connect with anything from the natural world, even more so now, given that most of these connections are currently cut off due to the ongoing crisis. What might appear outdated is, in reality, taking inspiration and enhancing on time-tested tactics of engaging and hooking an audience.
Your web design can be inspired from print without feeling antiquated or cumbersome. In case you plan on using this design, keep these critical steps in mind to boost your chances of getting success:
- Select the right typography: This one is easy to accomplish, particularly when we consider that headings and titles should be bigger in size and bolder and should be written in a way that makes it easier for people to read it.
- Design for readability: A block layout with strong borders can distinctly line up a website’s section and is evocative of a style often seen in comics. While doing this, be sure to focus on the flow and readability.
Besides this, web designers can quickly draw inspiration from the layouts applied in newspapers and magazines on designing for scale. Earlier, newspapers used to fill up the whole page, and this is a useful lesson for designers to learn as they continue to analyze the scale and canvas sizes for the web.
- Immersive Experiences Using Augmented Reality
AR or Augmented Reality is a fairly underutilized tactic for connecting with your target audience and introducing your products or services to them in a more persuasive and extensive manner. You can use this design for both B2B (business-to-business) as well as B2C (business-to-consumer) companies because it completely occupies the audience. And that immersive experience can be shaped to fit any business or product, or service.
With the crisis still ongoing, most customers are unable to experience products in the flesh and therefore are looking for substitutes that let them experience a particular brand appropriately, even if not in-person. In addition to this, the sales department is badly suffering because they cannot travel anywhere for events, business meetings or even for product demos. In the light of these prevailing limitations, B2B companies are progressively using AR to build immersive experiences since it helps with data visualization and prototypes. It makes the digital content feel like it is part of the real world around the viewer.
However, if this sounds like too much work for you at the moment, you can opt for numerous other ways available to step into the world of augmented reality slowly. For instance, Apple’s ARKit is an excellent place to start. However, if you are just seeking a simpler project to only dip your toes in right now, you can get started by creating a branded Instagram AR filter.
- Custom Cursors
Cursors are not typically given much heed or regarded as an aspect for remarkable design, which leaves plenty of wiggle room for web designers to convert them into something catchy and unforgettable. Tiny, personalized details such as custom cursors can make the viewers feel a bit more connected to your website and thus to the brand, message, and product or service it presents. Moreover, it quickly draws the visitors’ attention towards itself.
While updating your cursor, you need to keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, review the core aspects or images that set your brand apart and try to connect this around the new design of your cursor. Try and keep it as simple as possible and something that comes across as eye-pleasing when small. Remember, comprehensive or complex ideas won’t render well.
Apart from all this, bear in mind that your cursor serves the purpose of communicating function at its essence. Therefore, make sure that you pick a custom cursor that adds personality and mirrors your brand while maintaining its function. Once you have finalized your cursor, test it out across multiple web browsers, and also be sure to add an alternative for instances where your custom cursor is not supported.
- Muted Colors
Colors lose their trendiness value from year-to-year. Do you recall the millennial pink trend we observed back in 2016? Businesses should keep their websites up-to-date to send out the message that they are a modern and flexible brand.
We believe muted colors will be dominating the web this year along with the other trends because they naturally draw the visitors’ attention towards the illustration or the prime focus of the specific page. Moreover, muted colors do a fantastic job in diminishing the eye strain, communicating to the audience that they can take as much time as they want with your website. Muted colors stand out to be the ideal complement, particularly with the current growth of grain-accented backgrounds and hand-drawn illustrations.
For example, using a light color scheme for your web design together with pieces of a dark color(s) will give off a very contrasting appearance to your website. You can use this to distinguish particular sections of your site.
To pull off this type of web design effectively, be sure to select colors with sufficient contrast so that all the content on your page is still easy to read by visually impaired site visitors.
- No Code Web Design
Although no-code web design might sound a bit clashing or unsettling, it does not imply the complete end of website coding. Instead, it evens up the website building to people of all backgrounds rather than letting the few with an in-depth understanding or experience in intricate coding and web design handle the entire process.
For readers who are getting confused, wondering what no-code web designs will even look like can be rest assured that their website will still look just as modern and sophisticated as you want it to be. In fact, some brands have already started using this type of web design, and if you look those sites up, you can see that they appear just the same as a coded site – no differences. Now coming to the perks of using such web design, you and your organization will be much less dependent on a single person and their skill set. Doing so will allow you to update your website as frequently as you’d like and with inputs from various people in your organization. This approach will dominate the internet given the current condition where more and more teams are practicing remote work due to which businesses will need to take an all hands on deck approach to adapt to these shifts in priorities and schedules.
Wrapping It Up
If there is anything that we have learned in these few weeks of January, it is that this year too, is going to be full of unexpected events. However, unless we have a crystal ball, we cannot simply predict the future. But according to the current circumstances, it makes sense for these web design trends to storm the web in 2021. Nevertheless, if you decide to employ any of these designs in your work, make sure that you have proper web design equipment available to do so.
Happy web designing!