With the year 2017 nearly over, website designers are now on the hunt to find out what trends will play the major role in influencing web designs for the year 2018. This mostly has to do with the need to deliver the most unique and eye-catching designs to clients the next year. And if you are someone planning to develop a website and are thinking along the same lines, then the below pointers should help you with understand what trends to look out for over the coming year.
Center Illustrations
Illustration has played a big role in how the first page of a website is presented. The myriad of colors and shapes often provides a colorful way to showcase the core idea of the website. And while the earlier illustrations focused on presenting them full page, one should expect to see short, centered illustrations against a contrasting background become a trend in 2018. This mostly has to do with the fact that you can easily draw the eyes of the viewer to the center of the screen rather than have them looking at the entire screen.
Interactive Animations
Just a decade ago, there were hardly any animations on the web. Almost all the components of a website were static. At best, you could see some basic flash animations. But with the introduction of jQuery, CSS3, and HTML5, there has been a sea change in how a website is presented. Sites started to become interactive, featuring more animated content. And this trend will be more pronounced next year. We expect the smoothness and the sleekness of the animation to be much improved.
Scrolling Animations
Another set of animation patterns that will soon be seeing wide usage are the scrolling animations. While the parallax effect has been trending for the last couple of years, web designers are expected to create a scroll animation that has multiple speeds. This will give the user a unique, extra-smooth feel while scrolling down the pages.
Grid Asymmetry
One of the backbones of website layout was the concept of grid symmetry, where all the grids of a webpage came together in perfect harmony. However, the big trend in layouts to watch out for in 2018 is the concept of grid asymmetry where grids do not perfectly fit together. However, this does require extra effort from the designer since they have to ensure that one side does not become too overpowering that it disturbs the balance of the layout.
SVG Format Images
Though the idea of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has been in existence for long, it was only in the past few years that designers have started using SVG in their website. These are lightweight image formats that deliver pixel perfect renditions of images. And being free from any limitations of resolution, we can see this format being used even more in 2018, especially in stuff like 360-degree photography, cinemagraph, and so on. In fact, we should see a fast acceleration in designers who will stop using formats like JPG, PNG etc. in favor of SVG.
Brighter Colors
With the concept of flat design taking off in the past years, a major focal point was how to utilize colors to convey a message. And while the initial phase of incorporating this concept included the use of pitch dark backgrounds, today it has become even more lighthearted, thanks to the current trend of favoring brighter colors in websites.
Page Transitions
If anything has captured the attention of the internet over the past few years, it is the page transitions of the website. While earlier web pages disappeared for a few seconds in order to launch the fresh page, page transitions enable a website to load fresh content in a smooth manner where the content kept fading-in or flying in from the sides. More and more people have seen the positive impact of these effects, and we expect a greater share of the websites of 2018 to feature smoothly animated page transitions.
Video
The video element is something that has been rarely used by web developers since its introduction years ago. But with many websites choosing to showcase themselves on the front page of the website using a video, we foresee the video element being used more. And one of its biggest plus factors is that one can include very high-quality videos with rich colors and gradients. In addition, the video can also be easily looped through an extra piece of code.
Split Screen Effect
One effect that has intrigued many people is the split screen effect. And in 2018, you should expect more of the same. In fact, we are very sure that every good creative web design agency will be looking forward to customizing this effect in amazing ways for their client website. Some of the adaptations might include an extra layer on top of the split screen in order to bring a rich depth to the effect.
Sticky Elements
Notice that there has been a proliferation of sticky elements at the bottom of a website? These usually feature ads or other dynamic information related to the website like chat boxes, popups, and so on. 2018 should see such sticky elements being introduced in even more websites.
Fonts
Finally, one big change you will start seeing is the way in which the fonts will be used. And the biggest driver of this change seems to be the impending release of the ‘variable fonts’, which is touted to be a joint venture of the big boys from the tech industry – Google, Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. It is speculated that these new fonts will come with almost 64,000 variations, thereby enabling the designer to interpolate the full set of glyphs of the font. It also allows you to use just a single file for all font styling purposes, right from adjusting to the thickness of the stroke, the length of the font stroke, and so on.
In addition to the above, many more creative changes will come up over the course of the next year. Just keep your eyes open, and you should easily be able to see some creative inspirations pop up in the web design space.
