Now that 2017 is slowly and inexorably taking its leave, like autumn leaves falling steadily and without pause, here are some very interesting notes: the web design trends for 2018.
It’s vital for our work to know what the web design trends will be during 2018 so we can stay at the forefront of web design.
We’re not trying to be dogmatic here, since part of what gets made will surely surprise us, but with this selection of points on web design trends you’ll certainly have a good guide to what’s coming and what isn’t.
Web design trends 2018
1. Progressive loading.
This one isn’t new, but it is very important: in order to speed up load times, new technologies have appeared that will help us improve those times and keep our time-obsessed clients and users happier and less inclined to head off to another site.
2. The return of skeuomorphism and the decline of flat design.
Flat design has been killing it these last few years; the less-is-more concept applied to web design has been a web design trend for a long time.
The truth is that in that respect we’ve reached a point where this simplification has flattened the differences between companies, and that’s a very negative thing.
That’s why one of the trends most likely to grab attention during 2018 will be web designs using treatments that simulate real-life textures.
3. More multimedia.
Time passes and resources keep growing; in the early days websites were filled with images.
But the truth is that in the near future we’ll increasingly see web designs with animated gifs and background video.
All to give our web designs a more cinematic feel.
4. Micro-interactions.
With the aim of giving our web design more personality and setting it apart from the rest, one web design trend for 2018 will be building small interactions between site and user into our web development.
These micro-interactions will mean the user gets more feedback from the site and feels more accompanied, less alone in front of the screen.
5. Adaptive design.
For a while it was a web trend for web designs to have their responsive version, so that — as a sort of patch — mobile users could get at the content through their smartphones.
Even so, today most users reach web content through their mobile phones.
It’s for this reason, and because of the logical evolution of design, that a future web trend will be tailoring the design to the device it’s going to be browsed on.
So the trend for 2018 is to build adaptive designs that take the device into account and can offer the most possible to both the user and the web design.
6. White background.
It’s a very basic point but one that sometimes seems to get forgotten: white is the brightest colour and therefore the one that wins us the highest share of user attention.
That’s why a trend for 2018 in web design will be for our web designs to have a white background, or at least to take it into account.
7. The disappearance of the hamburger menu.
Plenty of usability experts are now warning us that the three-horizontal-lines menu gets in the way of usability.
8. Horizontal navigation menu with search.
The best websites of 2018 will have one thing in common: the horizontal menu with a search box. It’ll be a trend users will be hugely grateful for in the web designs of 2018.
9. Death to the homepage, long live the landing page.
As web designers we’ve surely seen how our clients increasingly lean towards doing away with websites that have a homepage and instead put all that content on a landing page that gives the user a much fresher experience aimed squarely at them.
During 2018 we’ll see this web design trend grow in importance.
Now all that’s left is to wait and see whether these predictions about web design trends for 2018 come true, mutate and turn into something far more interesting: the unknown.
