Web design is never happy with staying still for too long. Trends change, new elements pop up, old practices, go to a deserved retirement. Step by step, websites start looking differently. They even start feeling differently, when there’s a significant change in the way people interact with websites.
And because the change is gradual, it’s often difficult to follow it. Businesses, especially the small ones, don’t have the budget for a quarterly web design update. It might even be impractical for them to implement so many updates, even if they could afford it.
But a year is usually a good time frame for discussing web design. A yearly web design update isn’t unheard of, and plenty of things can happen within a year. Here are some of the tips that should help your website look, feel, and perform well in 2019.
Make It Unusual!
The web in 2019 will look anything but stale. To be honest, though, websites looked pretty interesting in 2018, too. But the year ahead gives plenty of chances to step up the effort and bring some unique visuals to your website.
If you want to go for dramatic effect, you can reduce a whole website to a simple black-and-white palette. This won’t work with all websites, though, but those that have the right type of visuals can be made to look like old photographs.
Asymmetrical layouts are another design option for making a website unusual. You can strategically break the grid to draw the eye to different elements and deliver something unexpected. Rigidity is on its way out — the shapes are becoming more organic, retro and nostalgia are in again, and design elements that overlap will be very much popular. Add to it glitch art, and you get some unusual and edgy artistic expression mixed in with your web design.
Make Things Happen!
Actually, you shouldn’t make things happen. But you should create all the conditions for things to happen when people viewing your website start interacting with it. Interactions will be everything come 2019.
What are some things you can do? Maybe start with micro-interactions. Small things can happen when visitors interact with certain elements of your website. And by small, we mean something as small as a wink — it’s the little touches that will draw the people into a user experience that looks organic, if not truly alive.
Another thing you can animate unusually is the website scrolling. Making it horizontal instead of vertical would be a good choice, but you can push beyond it. You can create animation users can trigger by scrolling — that way you remove completely the horizontal or vertical direction of scrolling and instead represent the change through different animations. Might be expensive, but no one will say it doesn’t look awesome.
Make Things!
Content will continue to play an important role in everything digital, from marketing to design. And because you won’t be able to escape them, you’ll have to do your best to stay on top of the trends that are coming.
How do you do that? For one, you continue doing what you did before — make great video content. Content in video format was all the rage last year, and this year, and will stay the same next year. But you can still do a couple of things with it differently. You can put the video as the background of a whole frame of your website like its wallpaper.
Google will love it, too. Right now, Google is allowing search results to mix, showing video content together with links to standard pages. It also places the video content on the top, which can boost your visibility in search results greatly.
The one thing you shouldn’t be too afraid to do next year is to experiment. It’s a year when you don’t want things to be the same as they were before. So go ahead and shake things up!
