Different skills and disciplines are used in the production and maintenance of websites; named as web design. Web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website also including writing mark up.
Web Design Trends
Web designing has now become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is impossible to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, background, different styles of typography and sounds.
From last two years, it has become prominent that many designers are trying to move away from simple symmetric and closed type composition. Open-styled, asymmetric compositions are being used widely these days.
Evolution of Canvas and Web GL have played magnificent role in setting this trend.
Trends of Composition
Open compositions of loosely bonded elements that are fleeing somewhere off-screen are gaining popularity. example of this open composition can be seen in website like booneselections.com and durimel.io
Rule of symmetry was broken in 2016. Many designers have created layouts which are asymmetric mean not balanced perfectly on the both sides. (Left and right). Previous example of durimel.io can be coded as here as well along with another good example that is culture.pl
More dynamic compositions are created by designers these days in which larger amounts of intersecting diagonal lines are present. These compositions are usually based on more complex organic shapes as in case of helloheco.com .
The apparent chaos
Classic contrasts of forms, colors, textures, sizes, are bases of layout. Currently, items such as headers, icons, or paragraphs are deployed more often, as if in spite of trite logic. Despite being a part of a single theme block, they are split apart and situated a fair distance from each other. Enormous headlines contrast sharply with delicate and thin decorations and separators.
Richer background and patterns
Increasingly, there are more backgrounds and patterns used in web design, for instance small dashes, stripes, or dots etc.
Grid pattern is especially common which is treated as a "frame" for the other elements of the layout. Those elements are moved over the grid on the parallax principle and often are arranged in a chaotic manner.
One of the first sites that used the grid pattern was werkstatt.fr, which didn’t use the characteristic movements.
What has also recently changed is the approach to details. There is a gradual departure from the minimalistic, raw Form Follow Function. There are many more elements that only have decorative functions. "Flying" geometric figures or fragments thereof are common. Linear, rickety icons are slightly detached from the content they illustrate. Underscores and separators are getting shifted. There are digital noises and glitches, as on bigyouth.fr or kikk.be.
Buttons are less frequently created as harsh rectangles with texts inserted in the middle.
Smooth animations between sections.
New opportunities are always tempting as they allow us to do something different, fresh, and original. The richness of animation leads to elimination of the rigid division into sections of the page. A website smoothly changes itself during scrolling. Interesting animations enrich simple layouts. They add a new value and constitute the uniqueness of the page. One of its cool example is
The change in trends can also be seen in the typefaces used. Until now, the entire Internet was dominated by simple neo-grotesque styles, such as Helvetica, Roboto, Lato, or Open Sans. A bit more "decorative" Neo-grotesque was most commonly used in headlines, while its simpler style was frequently chosen for paragraphs. Serif typefaces were not used very often.
Animations are used in text, individual letters are broken down into a variety of effects to enhance attractiveness of a website and make it eye catching.
Sans serif geometric typefaces gained more popularity, for instance such classics as Futura, ITC Avant Garde, Proxima Nova, or the ones that are available in the Google Library - Poppins and Montserrat. These typefaces are much more distinctive than the “invisible", neo-grotesque ones
Use of serif typefaces is common - not only in paragraphs or signatures but also in large headlines. Some of the other popular typefaces are those that refer to Bodoni or Didot.
Monospaced typefaces ("typewriter")
Use of proportional typefaces which are typically associated with typewriters is also unique - they can be seen on such websites as admirhadzic.com
Contrasting pairing of typefaces
Expressive combinations were reinforced by a high contrast between the sizes of texts. Typefaces which are large and decorative combined with simple geometric ones, such as headers with geometric fonts were paired up with a serif one in paragraphs.
As part of the key visual large typography
A very cool, frequently chosen thing to do was to use very large sizes for texts in KV. It created a very strong contrast between headers and the rest of the content. An example of that can be seen on monsieurcaillou.com.
Additional effects imposed on typography
Strong integration can be seen between typography and images, films or animations. Individual sections are coherent internally - typography interacts with both background and other elements. It became a thing of the past to haphazardly place typography on a dim picture. Currently interesting relations are created by designers between all of the elements - weaving typography into the background, animating it, etc.
Larger letter sizes in paragraphs
Most readable size is 14px in world web. Now, we can notice the use of much larger typefaces, which are especially popular when it comes to using the serif ones.
Embrace the dark side
It is less prevalent to create websites that are completely white, in favor of using gradations of gray, textures, or patterns. Now it has become rather common to create darker websites, where black or its dark gradation in the background and creates minor gloomy and sometimes bizarre impact.
But despite of all of above it's hard to predict that this trend will grow significantly during this year. Colors, however, are part of the visual identity of brands, so it's hard to expect that they will radically change their communication based purely on the popularity of certain trends