Web Design Trends of Q2 2017

Trends exist everywhere—in fashion, technology, or art. Web design and development are not exempted from these. A web design company has to keep up with the latest trends in the industry if they wish to gain more customers. 

Some trends have continued to be as they are, while others have been replaced by new ones. Here is an overview of the current fads in website design:

Grabbing attention of human beings in today’s modern society has become a challenge. Movement and visuals are some of the easier ways of catching the interest of online users. This has led to the popularity of video in digital marketing. Moving images holds user attention more than static ones. More websites are now using animations and parallax backgrounds done through CSS3. 

There is a growing number of websites that use blurred imagery. This is most noticeable in landing pages and hero images.  A blurred image helps in emphasizing other elements of the page design apart from the image itself. For example, it can be used to bring more attention to the typography at the foreground.

Typography gives designers the ability to highlight important content. The usual method is to make use of large fonts for headlines to catch the attention of readers. However, there have been recent concerns that oversized typography can be too big to read. It may cause problems for mobile users, especially if the webpage has not been optimized. 

The current trend is to make fonts smaller, allowing other elements in the page to be given attention to. There are, however, concerns with readability--tiny type shouldn’t be too miniscule as to give the reader difficulty.  Balanced must be achieved to create harmony between large and small type; an in-between of sorts.

This kind of design allows more emphasis on the content through the creation of large areas of white space. White space refers to the negative or empty spaces of a webpage. It may not necessarily be colored white, as long as it pertains to the areas that are not occupied by content. When done properly, modular design makes a webpage appear minimalistic. Displayed web content will look more organized and take on an air of sophistication.

Desktop users browsing the Internet have long been outnumbered by online mobile users. Last year the number of phone users worldwide numbered at 4.8 billion. It is expected to reach 5.7 billion by 2020, according to news publication Hindustan Times. 

Web designers now have to take this into consideration. All the above trends must be optimized not just for desktop use, but also for mobiles. This will help website gain more mobile user traffic, a demographic that is still not being touched on by many web designers and developers. 

Change is a constant in life and in website design as well. Design principles may remain the same, but not the way they are applied in website design. To stay at the top of the game, website designers have to keep abreast of the latest happenings and trend. Should they not, they will find it difficult to improve and develop new ideas for their clients.