The Ten Web Design Trends for 2020

When it comes to the new year, most people would anticipate what the future would bring for us. But when it comes to a new decade, it often can be viewed as a different era. Changes can be difficult for most people, but sometimes change can be a good thing. A new year could mean a new web design trend to start something fresh. Product creators follow design trends for a reason — incorporating newer design trends into a product’s design can make the product look fresh and desirable to the target audience, and this creates a substantial competitive advantage. Here’s a look at web design and user interface trends for 2020.

1) Dark mode

Dark mode, otherwise known as night mode, is a well-known feature that’s been used in many popular websites recently. A dark-on-light color scheme, it was originally designed to simulate the appearance of ink on paper. Instead of being black, typography would be bright and instead of being startlingly white, backgrounds would be dark. If you put this metaphorically, you basically turn off the bright white lights from your web page. The night theme not only makes your website look cool, but it’s sort of viewed as a benefit to a viewer’s health. Research says that visiting a website or opening an app in a pitch dark night can cause a user’s eyes to get hurt because of the brightness by the colors of the screen. Dark mode helps make it relaxing for users’ eyes to open and work on any dark screens and solve the persistent health and wellness issues.

2) Micro-interactions

In recent years, micro-interactions have been used in many different websites as a way to let the user feel what they’re doing and bring a site to life. They are tiny design elements that can play a significant role in creating ‘human’ feeling websites that delight the audience. Micro-interactions can also be seen in social media sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. For example: when you like a post on Tumblr, a heart can be seen floating up to signify to you really love the post. Micro-interaction has three important functions to fulfill:

Ï Communicating status and providing feedback

Ï Enhancing the sense of direct manipulation

Ï Helping people to see the results of their actions

The micro-interactions can also help improve website navigation and make it easier for users to interact with your website as your site is showing emotions to your visitors.

3) Gradients

In computer graphics, a color gradient specifies a range of position-dependent colors, usually used to fill a region. Gradients are the gradual transition from one color to another and it can be used in various contexts. This includes; a background for content, color filters over the images or illustrations, or as an accent for functional elements. Before flat design dominated digital interfaces, gradients were used to create (semi-)realistic surfaces. But thanks to its color mixture, gradients are now being used more to balance the atmosphere of a web page. In fact, most known companies use the color gradient for their logo to make them stand out from the others. But the company that starts the trend is Instagram who has rebranded and uses its current gradient logo starting in 2016.

4) Minimal Design

There’s a saying by Dean Koontz to “keep it simple, don’t expect too much, and enjoy what you have”. This could also be implied to a web designer keeping a minimal design for their web page too. But minimalist design doesn’t have to be a boring design for your web page. Instead, you can still use whatever designs you like for your branding and keep them as simple as possible. Generally, minimalist design refers to extensive use of white space, with no single element distracting attention from the visual hierarchy. Minimalism is about cutting away any unnecessary excess to create a clear and easy user experience and instead, keeping the content simple and easy to digest and navigate. Make use of white space, and focus on form and function to avoid overwhelming your visitors. Minimal web design is mainly being best used for your application/web page on your mobile device which is highly recommended to you.

5) 3D Design

For a long time, 3D graphics have been recognized in the gaming and movie industry. But the use of the 3D design in web design is more engaging lately and it’s considered the best trend for visual design. According to creative digital designer Ella Johnson, “Designers are stepping away from vivid, bright colors and moving more towards muted and pastel colors. This looks especially effective in 3D illustrated artwork where compositions are created with smooth shadows and soft natural lighting, creating a visually pleasing scene”. Face it, some of us are sick of using the 2D flat design on our websites. The 3D computer graphic helps gives the design look more realistic and more dimensional for your website background. Sure, 3D modeling may be expensive these days, but you have to admit that the graphic designs can be beautifully animated with the feeling of realism in it.

6) Oversized elements

We all know that sometimes there’s a text that’s too small for us to read on the computer screen. We want that text to be bigger, and bigger can be considered better for most of us. So in order to communicate clearly and instantaneously, websites are favoring large, prominent elements. This includes; big, bold typography to fullscreen images and videos, and even oversized website menu icons. Enlarged elements such as these are eye-catching and help site visitors understand what the website is all about right away. It can also draw attention to your brand name or business objective when you use huge typography. Whenever there’s a visitor coming to your site, they will likely remember what your website is about based on how large your elements are.

7) Liquid Animation

Liquid animation is a type of animation that has a movement that seems like the web screen is water. These animations often have a slow, flowy movement that may ripple or ebb and flow which makes it look and feel very realistic. Liquid animation can work for entire scenes as a way to transition video elements, as a hover state to entice clicks, or as a general animation. The trick to making this trend work is in the speed of movement. It has to be smooth, fluid, and perfectly timed for the most realistic feel. Liquid animations might take effect as a hover state or as part of a video or rolling animation and they can even get activated by scrolling. In fact, the movement is so realistic and fluid that it actually encourages people to keep playing with it to see how motion happens and works.

8) Bright colors

Colors are around us everywhere we go, especially on every single known website. They play a key role in helping the designers create a store that would attract potential customers and become interested in your products. Recently, there’s a large wave of bold, bright colors appearing from the online stores which had overshadowed minimal, modern design with oceans of white space and monochrome color schemes. The reason for this sudden change? It’s because bright colors catch attention, create emotive reactions, and can be great motivators. And as stated by Alex Vasili, “We’re seeing a real mash-up of styles across the board. The minimalist, refined designs that we have become so used to over the past few years have given the opportunity to a more bold and disruptive aesthetic. This means we are seeing bold patterns and colors being used across the industry in both print and digital.”

So if you want your online store to look nice and attract customers, pick any color that fits your branding and make it bright and bold. Because if you like the bright colors for your website, then your customers would like the bright colors too.

9) Asymmetric Layouts

When it comes to building a website based on your ideal design, it could be hard to place whatever items in the desired place you want. To solve that issue, most designers would make their websites be grid-based. The grid is made of imaginary lines that help layout elements on the page stay in order. It’s used to help add content to a website in an aligned and consistent way and the layouts made it look symmetrical and structured.

Though despite all of it, broken-grid compositions are particularly popular with personal websites because of how unique they look combined with resolute assertiveness. Designers layer content modules, colors, and textures to achieve a depth effect and this helps to engage viewers and emphasize the most conversion-oriented sections of the website.

10) Bold Fonts

If you ever visit an official website of a company, you might notice that the headline, not imagery, is the first thing that grabs your attention. Most web designers use specific typography and large bold fonts on their websites to give their message more visual weight and to get their visitors to become interested in their site. It can also help direct your audience where you want them to focus first as heavy fonts put more visual weight to the message and direct the reader to where they should look first. And aside from improving readability, it’s also excellent for creating visual hierarchy and contrast to keep an element stand out on your website. Bold fonts are especially extremely popular among mobile designers since they help give the designs a modern and contemporary feel for the mobile app.

Takeaway

As any web designer or website development agency would emphasize, some trends to stick around and others are short-lived. It's best to be selective as a designer what deploy, and what to brush aside. The main goal is to stick with trends that will help the user interface, engagement and allow visitors to quickly get what they want.