21 Modern Web Design Trends for 2018

2018 is here and with it comes a new wave of web design trends to take notice of. Here, we explore 21 top trends. This article is originally from instantshift.com. InstantShift is leading design and inspiration related community for web designers and developers daily resource, inspiration and premium web design and development. About the author: Prateeksha Mathur is a tech-savvy marketing professional writing for Zestard Technologies, who loves to write about digital marketing, web design, web development and other technology spheres. She is a coffee addict and a bibliophile too. Image courtesy of Rawpixel.com via Bigstockphoto.

A good website should not only have a good design. It has to be responsive enough to be compatible with all the devices.

Web design is a visual representation of the page layout of any website. It is an important part of the web development process. This process gives life to any website. It gives an amazing look and feel to the web pages and websites.

You can easily create static and dynamic web applications. It is easy to learn and implement on the web pages. It does not matter even if you are a beginner or not a creative person. It is a good practice to do web development and design hand-in-hand.

• A good web developer and designer will always focus on the look and feel and the responsiveness of the website.
• They can create the mockups or layouts of pages. This gives you a basic layout of how your website will look.
• All one needs to do is know the basics of HTML and CSS. These two are the backbone of a good website. You do not require any specific logic building for creating websites. Hypertext Markup Language handles the structure of the webpage. While Cascading Style Sheets adds styling to these structured layouts of web pages. Together, these are responsible for creating a plethora of websites.

To start with, as a designer you can simply understand the HTML layouts and style later. You can take references to other websites and templates. You can study more about the web designing principles. Later, you can apply the effective web design principles and layouts into web pages. With the help of colours, multimedia, graphics and images, you can enhance the web pages. Thus, you get a simple structured website. Now, you have to apply the CSS to format these elements. This will enhance the look and feel of the website.

Web design is a simple three-step solution – Plan, design and publish.

Plan: When you start website designing and development, the first thing is proper planning. You should plan a proper layout and structure to start with a single web page. Later, you can apply the same to other web pages on the website.

Design: According to the end user needs, you can use the web designing principles. Then, you can style the web pages and give CSS effects. This way, you can add a rich look to your website.

Publish: You can verify the changes and test the website completely. Once done, you can publish your changes to the website.

Benefits of a Good Web Design

A good quality web design is a part of a valuable investment. It will surely benefit your business and increase your value among your customers. Let us know some benefits of a well-designed website.

1. It provides a consistent brand identity in this competitive world.
2. It helps you retain your customers.
3. It helps you attract more visitors to your website.
4. It defines your unique selling point to the customers.
5. It builds a solid foundation for the next development in the process.
6. It is beneficial in terms of search engine rankings.
7. It helps you generate more revenue.

Expected Web Designing Trends for 2018

As a web designer, you should keep yourself updated with the latest web designing trends. Here is a list of the trends you should keep an eye on in 2018.

1. Mobile responsive design

Today, the mobile responsive design is a must-have in all the websites. It is the most important trend in the web designing. The principle of web designing should focus on “Mobile first approach”. It is a good practice to design your website as per the smaller devices first. Gradually, you can design the web pages on the larger devices. To make your websites mobile responsive, you can use Bootstrap and the material designs.

2. Flat Design

Flat design has become popular since 2017 and will continue to be so. It focuses on the important parts of the website. It is all about the usability and the minimalism. It gives a quick loading experience. It helps in optimizing the website loading speed. It helps the search engines to crawl the web pages of your website faster. Thus, a flat design engages the users to stay longer on your site.

3. Broken Grid Layouts

Bootstrap focuses on the grid layouts for the responsive designs. Likewise, broken grid layouts allow the elements such as images and text to drift into the simpler layouts. The simple boxes overlap each other, merging the pixels and bitmaps of the inner elements. These boxes then overlay onto each other and converge. This creates a beautiful pattern of the converging pixels of the texts and images.

4. Expressive Typography

The use of expressive typography can help in creating powerful and alluring web designs. These help in capturing user’s attention. It also gives a unique design and branding style to the websites. Many big companies pay a large sum to develop special fonts for typography. For instance, Facebook has its own “f” in their logo. It focuses on the special colour, fonts and interface that reflects their brand.

5. Illustrations should be in center stage

This is one of the most interesting challenges web designers can face. In the world of digitalization, selection of image is very crucial. There are two most important factors. They are editorial photography and product UI images and GIFs. They emphasize on the product features, functionality and how they affect the human lives. Thus, it is necessary to keep the illustration in center stage.

6. Animated Logos & Scroll-Triggered Animation

Using animated logos is a powerful trend nowadays. It attracts the visitors and is helpful for the website and business. They are easy to load and download to the device. The Scroll-triggered animation has become popular lately. It uses smooth transitions that are light and easy to accomplish. The combination of these creates eye-pleasing and lightweight websites.

7. Bold Fonts and Eye Catchy colours

A website looks vibrant and eye-catching as it comprises of multiple colours. It matters a lot when it comes to fonts, styles and the colours. The bold fonts and styles tend to attract the users and the visitors. For instance, if you have a website for kids, you can focus on the colours and fonts. And design it accordingly. Thus, it is important to focus rightly on the fonts and the colour combinations.

8. Micro-Interactions

The micro-interactions allow the users to interact with each other without reloading of web pages. This allows them to communicate in real-time. It increases the connectivity and speed in this era of the high-speed internet. Social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter have made these extremely popular. Users love these micro-interactions such as likes, shares, post and private messages. Thus, micro-interactions have ruled the mobile-connected world.

9. Virtual Reality Videos

Video integration in websites is a new trend. The use of content, graphics, videos and images is very common in today’s designing process. But during the designing process, there are a lot of challenges behind. In 2018, we can see more of 360-degree videos, 360-modelling and virtual reality videos coming up. Also, there will be a significant rise in the applications creating videos.

10. Organic and Oblique Shapes

The card-based UI has dominated both web and mobile designs. Until today, the cards were mostly sharp-edged. But with the concept of material design, there has been changes to these. Google is focusing on changing its UI card designs that have rich-look. The Google Now has a completely card-based UI. Also, Twitter, and Facebook have adopted these. Thus, this has changed the design elements to a big extent.

11. More Pervasive Interactions and Animations

There has been a rise in the use of tools that simplify the creation of animations and interactions. So, animations should be rightly used as they can lure the visitors at the right place. This helps to distract the users from the performance issues. Also, it gives a delightful experience to the website users and visitors.

12. Chatbots, AI, and Machine Learning

The impact of technology has been phenomenal on the web designing elements. The use of AI assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana are now available on billions of devices. Web designing involving the usage of chatbots is no big deal now. Every eCommerce website or messenger apps includes chatbots for easy communication with the users. As these technologies continue to advance, we can clearly see their future in web design.

13. Top Sticky Elements vs Bottom Sticky Elements

In this mobile-connected world, users are prone to visit the websites and the web apps more frequently. They navigate to different tabs and apps by clicking at the bottom. As mobile app design is getting so important to modern web design, sticky menu items are becoming popular. Many website developers have started to make sticky menu items. These items scroll from the bottom of a site. Thus, the progressive web apps must-have this modern functionality.

14. Responsive Design

Website responsiveness is less of a trend nowadays. It has already been in this field since ages. Any responsive website should be resizable as per the device screens and sizes. It is essential to design websites that can look appealing to multiple screen sizes. This design element has been continuously evolving. In 2018, it will expand to include the new technologies such as the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

15. Voice User Interface & Search

Nowadays, a design is not just limited to screens. It also includes voice-powered interfaces and searches. New website designs include these voice user interfaces. It becomes easy to implement and use the voice searches in websites. It will save a significant amount of time in daily routine. Today, we see Cortana, Siri, Alexa and more such voice-powered interfaces and devices that power our day-to-day activities.

16. An Emergency of Maximalism

Today, a good design has different approaches and meanings. The use of maximalism in the site designs has increased to a lot of extent. It seems brutal but it lays an effect. There are fonts, designs and graphics that have maximalism. It seems as a mess to a greater extent. But in 2018, this is what we can see as an emerging element.

17. Floating Navigation Menu

For a better experience, web designers have to keep the navigation controls constantly at fingertips. There has been a drastic change in the navigation bars. It gives a better visual experience. They have allocated the navigation bars to the very top of the website. This gives a clean look and design to the website.

18. Scalable Vector Graphics

These are not new to the web designing elements. But it is sure that in 2018, these graphics formats can overtake the traditional file formats. They have a lot more advantages than the pixels. They are highly scalable in terms of quality. Also, they do not impact the loading speeds of the websites. These include 360-degree views and 3D images.

19. Simple, Functional, Futuristic Design in 2018

In 2018, the web designers need to focus more on the simple designs. Nowadays, the creation of powerful and optimized websites is highly recommendable. There have to be new styles, fonts, formats and new technologies. So, it is better to focus on how to design simple and functional designs in a subtle manner.

20. Sustainable Design

It is equally important for web designers to focus on the sustainable design. Today, internet uses almost 10% of the world energy. The global use of web pages is increasing the amount of carbon emission. So, the tech giant companies have to focus on the use of renewable resources. So, designers need to also focus on the environment-friendly websites.

21. The Brand Experience

Websites reflect the brand. A web designer has to design the website keeping its brand value in mind. Also, for a stronger brand, you have to work on performance and content marketing. Proper marketing requires proper strategies to be planned and executed. Thus, they should focus on the brand value and experience equally.

We have picked the top trends of 2018 and treasured the best for you. Hope these help in designing powerful and sustainable websites.

There are number of web design trends that web designers need to focus on. A web designer has to focus on the bigger picture every time. They need to choose and follow the trends and apply the techniques. 2018 is going to be the year of new technologies. Web designing will trend with these technologies such as Machine learning, AI and VR. With these into effect, it will help to design the websites effectively. These surely will affect the digital world positively.