Nowadays online media are overloaded with various designs and visuals. With more brands, publishers, and people trying to go after the same audience on the same market, it can be a real challenge to be better than your competition and sell your products.
As design and graphic trends are constantly changing, designers have to push themselves so they can be more innovative and creative. That means that everything they do has to leave a „wow effect“ on visitors of their website – not only does the website have to work brilliant, it has to look astonishing.
Here’s what you can change in 2018 in the design of your website to get the most of it:
Typography
Typography is the unavoidable element in building your brand identity. Choosing the right style, font size, color scheme and other can make a huge difference in the looks of your design.
In 2018 typography will be used both as a text and as an image. What we can expect from it is more serif fonts mixed up with sans-serif fonts, large and bold fonts featuring huge headlines, but also lots of creativity. According to that, we will see more creative, cropped and chaotic typography, as well as typography with real-life elements or negative space.
Even if unique and stylish fonts look nice, designers should keep in mind that their font style should be simple enough so visitors can read it easily. For example, creative or chaotic typography can be used for headlines, but if it’s overused in the paragraphs where readability is necessary, visitors won’t be able to get the information they wanted and they will leave your website.
Use of colors and gradients
Along with typography, color has an important role in building your brand’s visual identity. Colors can attract or refuse your visitors, as they are essential for understanding the context and have an impact on how we feel, think and behave.
It can be challenging to choose the right colors, but what could make any designers job easier, is a knowledge that 2018 will be full of vivid and bright colors. Black and white will still be fashionable, but we will see more colors from the wide range of pastel, vibrant or even gradient/transition colors which were neglected in recent years.
When creating your perfect color mix for your website, don’t forget that oversaturating bright and bold colors might not always be a good idea as you will get an opposite effect and slightly „burn“ your eyes. With a decent mix of colors, you will stand out your content among the others and attract more visitors.
Custom artwork and illustrations
With more stock vectors and illustrations available, more business can have special designs, but in 2018 they won’t search for them online, they will want custom artwork and illustrations that suits their needings and desires.
Unique and custom illustrations will add to personalization of the brand and will make it harder to forget. According to that, standardized solutions will be replaced by authentic hand-drawn illustrations, papercut illustrations, and photographs combined with digital drawings.
Animations
It’s time to leave static websites in the past and give a warm welcome to interactive sites. As animations drag more attention and encourage visitors to search and read more content on your website, in 2018 we can expect more of it. We will see more animated logos, backgrounds, and menus, which means there will be more parallax scrolling, mouseover effects and animations of various elements or sections.
Also, we can expect more GIF animations and cinemagraphs which will look more appealing than regular images without video loops on one section of the image.
With more details and playful animations on your website, you can take your design to the next level and make it more interesting. But don’t get too playful with it, as overuse of animations can lead to a site that will take a millions of years to load.
Photography and video
Speaking of animations and return of the cinemagraph, authentic photography and videos will be seen on many websites. Polished stock photos can be helpful in many situations, but as many people used them, they can be a bit of a turn-off for people as they learned they are fake. Instead of furnished photos, try looking for photography that will tell a story, represent an emotion and look natural as in real-life and not on a made up scene.
In 2018 we won’t see videos only on the main pages. As they drag more attention, wake up more interest and give more information in lesser time, we will see videos in multiple areas of the websites which will make sites look more personalized and interactive.
Now that you’ve read what trends can you expect in 2018, can you tell us which of this trends you don’t like and which will you follow? 🙂
