At a time when push alerts and never-ending browser windows continue to fight for our interest, it may come as a shock that web design would be all about perception and user-friendliness. Today’s websites need to communicate their messages even more specifically, to stand out.
Web design is responsible for nearly 95 percent of visitors’ first impression of your business, and great design can help you improve revenues and sales.
It is why we need to use modern web design for our digital marketing strategy. Trends in web design evolve continuously.
This 2020, artists are using extremes in their designs, revolutionizing traditional design patterns, and continually exploring with design techniques connecting with audiences this year. Some trends are classic, surviving changing preferences in design, like minimalism and vibrant flat lays. What other web design trends are making a scene this 2020?
7 Web Design Trends of 2020
⦁ Dark Mode
Image Source: YouTube Search
Dark mode web interfaces not only look visually impressive but also render colors and design features.
Even the most exciting web design innovations have realistic roots. For OLED displays, dark designs are better because they save power and prolong device lifespans. Make it functional but look great at the same time is an element of the dark mode design trend.
Dark backgrounds make colors prominent, and the design looks very dynamic. Fittingly, the artistic dark mode idea also matches several existing 2020 design trends with dark and brooding color combinations mixed with blinking neons, as well as sleek and futuristic dark dystopian styles.
⦁ Oversized Type and Elements
Image Source: Google Search
Enlarged features like this are eye-catching, helping site visitors appreciate what the site’s all about straight off the bat. Nonetheless, they look amazing on every screen size. To shine, the set of design features on each board. Bear in mind that far too many fantastic features can be daunting and ineffective.
As part of this trend, even more, websites opt for a first fold fullscreen picture or video, combined with broad typography. This layout helps to convey a message clearly and effectively, ensuring that the vital information not only gets across but also communicates and resonates with site visitors.
⦁ White Space
Image Source: Team Meñez Creatives
Like natural tides, white space helps to pass visitors via your site pages, moving from one feature to the next, creating a visual hierarchy in which no information diverts attention from the whole. The white space breathing room allows viewers’ eyes to rest. Also, it improves understanding by identifying page element relationships.
When two elements are near with such little white space between each one, human eyes can see them as one entity. However, if two pieces are farther apart, the eyes can see them separately. White space helps visitors define the site’s structure. And they use white space to find essential details on websites, so learning how and when to use white space on your website to help enhance user experience (UX) on your site.
⦁ Full-Page Headers
Image Source: UX Planet
Web designers may incorporate header variations, but adding key text or call-to-action (CTA) buttons to just the left of the header with eye-catching photos to the right is a typical setup.
It’s because readers prefer to concentrate more attention on your page’s top-left.
Discord shows a fun and funky picture right of the header and highlights the advantages of their paid service left. Their CTA buttons are labeled, telling viewers exactly what to do to get the added activities. Scrolling down, you can find that Discord teams site elements into cards, making their details elegant, easy to find, and read while retaining the fun aspect. You can see how such websites create a feeling of playful sophistication.
⦁ Imperfect, Hand-Drawn Designs Add Personality
Imperfect, hand-drawn interior designs inject emotion and empathy into websites that consumers have longed for after seeing polished and impersonal visuals dominate web designs. In 2020, incorporating some hand-drawn reality makes web designs appealing to heart and soul travelers.
Indeed, who couldn’t use some extra positive these days? Unique, stylized, hand-drawn icons and other elements show your brand and stand out from your rivals. This defiant movement is almost a countermove to pixel-perfect flat design direction — so flaunt your scratchy edges and curved shapes to show how real and lifelike your brand is.
⦁ Immersive 3D Elements
Image Source: Behance/Megogo Brand Identity
3D graphics still fascinated people; what held back this trend was technology and (previously) costly price tag. But as Pinch Studio states, the technology is now in a position where, without NASA-tier equipment, you can design 3D, opening gates to more and more designers.
Before VR becomes more popular and cost-effective, hyper-realistic 3D is the best way to create an interactive site experience. Not only for graphics but also UX — interactive 3D architecture allows users to remain longer. As 2020 unfolds, expect more immersive web designs to attract users and visually break the barriers between digital space and truth.
⦁ Solid Color Blocks
Some websites split their content into even more bits, resulting in a collection of color-separated squares and rectangles of various sizes. This look can convey many messages at once, organized, and cohesively. With a picture or a few short lines of text in each segment, site visitors can easily navigate these bite-sized bits of text. And to make the website color scheme even more interesting, be sure to paint the squares in different colors.
Although this pattern includes showing a selection of objects in a visually appealing website layout, the outcome should keep away from scattershot collage work. Color blocks can shape a clear structure, making the design simple and easy to understand.
Conclusion: 2020 Design Trends—Less Frills, More Value
Web design trends in 2020 celebrate utopianism like never before, not just because of trends, but probably out of all the things happening in the world today. Amid a global crisis, design trends are showing forth boldness, color, life, and hope, as if saying, “we are still here, and we matter.”
Visual effects and colors, 3D effects, and reinvented old patterns strongly identify design themes for this year. Trends for next year may change, but while these trends are still capturing hearts, align your design styles, stand out, and make it your own.
These trends also show that consumers look beyond aesthetics but into practicality and functionality—less frills and more value, targeting the core of the matter, laying down bare essentials to find what is really of value. It takes a lot of constructing and deconstructing. Still, as we see the results of what is trending this year, the results are unique web and app designs showcasing more user-friendly interfaces, streamlined and consumer-centric.
AUTHOR BIO: Mayleen Menez
Mayleen Meñez worked for seven years in TV and Radio production, and also as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Finding her true passion, she devoted 15 years in NGO and community development work, where she experienced being a coordinator and teacher, travelling both in the Philippines and countries in Asia. She homeschools her three kids and reinvents Filipino dishes in her spare time. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.