3 Essential Design Trends to Follow in 2018

Each year brings about a new set of trends and forecast, about how certain things will go throughout the course of the year. Particularly discussing the web design scene in 2018, we’ll bid adieu to many trends that have been in vogue for years and embrace the ideas that popped up during the last year. Here’s an insight into 3 essential design trends you need to follow in 2018. Read on.

Kinetic Content

Static content is fast becoming a thing of past and its moving, sliding and popping counterparts is paving its way in. While static content had started going redundant by 2016, and 2017 was all about embracing video contents, sliders, and cinema-graphs, the transition will only accelerate this year and become a mainstream practice in 2018. However, with such rich multimedia elements embedded into the site design, optimizing load time as well as cross-platform compatibility will surely come as a challenge.

What’s fueling this transition from static to video content is the fact that people tend to refrain from reading long textual paragraphs, and are more likely to retain information if it is presented in the form of dynamic, spontaneous and more appealing formats like video and slides.

Sound Integration

No, this is not about that robotic sound that says ‘Hi, how may I help you?’ in an artificially sweet voice when you log on to a website. This will be more about adding layers of soft, subtle and aesthetic sounds into each action a user performs on your website.

Sound integration in websites isn’t a new trend. However, having learned good lessons from the failed experience of adding automatic background music and robotic greetings, this year, web designers will use sound as a subtle means of breaking the monotony of a browsing session and to keep the user engaged.

Creative, Playful Visual Elements

Visual elements have always garnered the most attention in web design and will continue to be a core design feature, aside from technical aspects such as responsive design and cross-platform compatibility. In 2018, visual elements will continue to veer off from conventional, symmetrical and cookie-cutter designs, and will be majorly inclined towards creative, lively and playful illustrations.

Text-boxes, icons and action buttons that have been rectangular shaped for the most part in the history of web design will more likely be modified into oval or circular shape. Similarly, split screens — symmetrical as well as asymmetrical — will be another ‘in’ thing in web design.

Aside from that, darker color palettes will be more preferred, especially for backgrounds, whereas text will be placed in white or lighter hues, to make it pop on dark backgrounds. There will be a significant emphasis on inventive typography, as in pairing serifs and sans-serifs to create eye-catching font styles.