Design Trend Your Website Should Adopt

1. The end of stock photos

The end is nigh for the humble stock photo.

With companies placing greater emphasis on unified and consistent branding, bland stock photos of ‘office table with papers’ really have no place on your company website anymore. High quality imagery is readily available at our fingertips, and with many companies putting far more thought into crafting a digital presence than they once did, brands have increasingly been seeking out their own, personalised imagery instead.

2. Animation with a purpose

Though we’re certainly not welcoming an era without animation altogether, 2018 will mean a shift away from the classical ‘animation for animation’s sake’ powerpoint-esque movements that have been a dominant feature of web design for years.

The utilitarian design wave will usher in new, handy and consistent animations to guide the user across the page.

Take CI Financial’s latest site as inspiration.

They’ve consciously chosen to use only light animation on the home page, bringing attention to the content rather than the theatrics.

Sticky navigation and a carousel header banner helps guide users to the appropriate part of the page, whilst keeping the menu on screen – making it impossible for the user to get lost.

3. Less wordy menus

2017 welcomed a new wave of websites redesigned with fewer navigation options. With wordier menus doing

nothing but clogging up users’ screens, this is a welcome change.
2018 will usher in even more streamlined choices, which will make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

4. Say hello to Duo Tones

Duo tones use two simple colours to filter over images, to simplify busy or distracting imagery on sites.

This is a design technique that most of us will recognise from modern sites like Spotify, and acts as a great way to maintain the user’s focus on navigation without their eye being drawn across the page.

This only works with primary colours that are in line with your branding, so try to keep things simple.

5. Material Design

Taking lead from Google’s ‘Material Design’ guidelines, web designers have placed far greater emphasis on unification of CSS design across devices.

This means drawing together bolder headings, meaningful motion and unified layouts across browsers and devices to create a steamlined UX. For more info on Google’s ‘living document’

6. Parallax be gone

With the parallax trend taking off in the last few years, we’ve seen the tool turn from stylish and helpful, to overused and often unnecessary.

Many sites have used the tool to their advantage, adding depth to the page and drawing attention to images. For a great example of parallax used well take a look at Liberty Shares.

When overused, however, this feature can often slow down pages and therefore harm SEO – a painful price to pay. 2018 should see a decrease in the use of parallax images for this reason, though the trend certainly won’t disappear.

7. Google Fonts

In 2010, Google launched a freely available library of webfonts for designers to take advantage of.

As of 2017, these have been revamped to include even more colours and background colours for you to preview and configure easily. Google also flags Featured fonts that are most suited with Material Design.

Google’s free font ‘Noto’ caters to up to 800 different languages, keeping continuity in design despite editing settings or scripts.

Expect to see even more designers trying Google Fonts this year.

8. No more Hamburger menus

Often, users are in danger of missing this teeny tiny symbol, which can drastically affect the user experience on your mobile site. Though this can look fantastic and neatly tucks away cluttered menu items, it often disguises the amount of information available on the site.

2017 will see a number of designers trying out creative ways to showcase the depth and breadth of their sites, without hiding away any important information.