web design trends
As we look forward to 2017 â a year that hopefully wonât be plagued by the passing of so many of the worldâs greatest artists and performers â the big question on every designerâs mind has to be: what will define web design trends in 2017?
1. Layouts that let content shine:
The last few years have seen a sea change in how people view designâs role in business.
web design trends have shifted from a late-in-the-process âoptimizationâ stage where designers swooped in to sprinkle on some âprettyâ like mystical fairy dust to a real competitive advantage.
And a fascinating element of that evolution has been the shift back toward a focus on content: the meat on the bones of the web.
Designers worldwide have realized that people visit websites for their content â whether itâs raging tweetstorms, thoughtful long-reads, or the latest âuser-generatedâ meme â and that designâs ultimate role is to present content in an intuitive, efficient, and âdelightfulâ way.
2. Better collaboration between designers, and between designers and developers:
As design has taken a greater and more influential role in shaping businesses, more and more attention has been paid to designersâ collaboration with both their fellow designers and their developer colleagues.
The emphasis on designer collaboration has arisen in part from the massiveness of the web and mobile apps weâre building these days.
Gigantic platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn require not only huge design teams working on disparate aspects of the platform but also better ways for designers to stay on the same page â and that means more collaboration and better communication.
3. Improved design-to-development workflows:
As design and prototyping tools for the web gain maturity and sophistication, the traditional handoff deliverable has transformed from the aforementioned static files to more dynamic visualizations that range from animated Keynote files to fully functional websites.
These more dynamic deliverables shorten the feedback loop, simultaneously improving design and dev team agility and lowering frustration.
They also facilitate better communication with clients. In fact, for many users of Webflow, client meetings have become actual live working sessions, where designers are able to quickly bring ideas to life so everyone can experience them almost immediately.
4. Big, bold type:
As the design world comes to the consensus that our focus should be on content, more and more websites feature lines of resonant, inspiring copy set in type thatâs just as big and bold as the statement itself.
As youâll have noticed from the sample screenshots, âbigâ and âboldâ donât necessarily refer to the weight of the font! Rather, itâs about dedicating significant screen real estate to a single, simple yet all-encompassing statement about the product or service.
And, refreshingly, a lot of these statements seem clear and to the point, free of the bloviated claims of disruption and greatness weâve seen a lot of lately.
5. Complex layouts rooted in graphic web design trends principles:
If we want to predict the evolution of web design (at least in visual terms), we should refer to the evolution of graphic design.
For the past few years, web design layout has been constrained by CSSâs limitations, but new tools like Flexbox and CSS grid will allow for much more expressive layouts on the web.
6. More SVGs:
SVGs (scalable vector graphics) present web designers and developers with a lot of advantages over more traditional image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF.
SVGs also rock because they donât require any HTTP requests.
And if youâve ever run a page-speed test on one of your websites, youâve probably noticed that those HTTP requests can really slow down your site. Not so with SVGs!
7. Constraint-based design tools:
Responsive design has completely transformed how we browse and build for the web.
Hence a new wave of design tools (such as Figma) that use the idea of constraints to lessen the amount of repeated work designers have to do when building cross-device layouts.
8. More and brighter color:
As movements like minimalism and brutalism came to the fore in 2016, designers sought ways to infuse more personality into their design work that still worked within those stripped-down aesthetics.
As you can see, itâs not just about bright, enthusiastic colors either. Gradients also came back in a big way, blending and blurring those exuberant hues into spectra reminiscent of a noonday sky or a splashy sunset.
Thereâs a sort of synthesized naturalism to this reemergence of bright hues and bold gradients, and I personally look forward to seeing more of it in 2017.
9. More focus on animation:
Animation has long played a key role in our digital interfaces, and thereâs no reason to think thatâll abate in 2017.
The latter characteristic will become particularly important as it becomes easier to create animations.
At 2016âs Design & Content Conference, animation guru Val Head stressed that designers should look to their brand voice and tone documentation when building animations to ensure that they reinforce the tone content creators are aiming for.
This helps ensure that animations perform meaningful, on-brand functions for users, instead of just inspiring migraines.
10. Unique layouts:
The year 2016 â much like the last several years preceding it â featured an ongoing debate about web design either dying or losing its soul.
Overdramatic as the web-design-is-dead argument may be, you canât blame any creative for seeking innovative ways to present content to readers.
One of the most enticing methods for breaking out of the box-centric layouts many blame responsive design for is the broken grid.
This approach seeks a way out of the meticulously aligned and âboxyâ layouts weâve been seeing a lot of lately with a variety of what might seem like visually jarring techniques.