Vessno’s web design team is obsessed with the latest trends and web technologies. That passion drives our design process and assures the development of high-quality websites that thoughtfully incorporate technologies that make sense for your business. We want our clients to have the latest and greatest when it comes to your website and we are already thinking about next year’s web design and development trends.
FLAT DESIGN
In 2017, designers and developers began creating clean and simple websites for better mobile performance. Image-heavy websites are slow to load and frustrate mobile users. The number of mobile searches is going ever-upward, and mobile-first design for websites is considered a necessity, not just an option. Clean, minimalist designs that load quickly are trendy and desirable for several reasons: both for mobile users and desktop browsers who want quick-loading but engaging websites, and for their SEO value. This is why flat design has started to become popular and will continue to be trendy into 2018.
Flat design doesn’t mean that everything is reduced down to two dimensions – it’s all about minimalism and usability. It’s about getting rid of clutter and focusing on the important parts of your website. Utilizing bright colors, clean and crisp edges, and lots of open space, flat design is a refreshing change from distracting and slow-loading hi-res image-based designs.
In spite of being minimalist and valuing function over form, this doesn’t make flat design boring. Contrasting bright colors, illustration, simple imagery, and sans-serif fonts come together to provide excellent user experiences that are still eye-catching and engaging.
Since flat design doesn’t rely on pictures to be captivating, it doesn’t have large amounts of extra data to load when a user navigates to the page. This means two really great things for website owners: the first is that customers and clients, no matter if they’re browsing on mobile or otherwise, will have an enjoyable, quick-loading experience on the website. Secondly, these data-light, fast-loading designs make page speed and optimization much, much faster – which looks really desirable to Google, Bing, and pretty much every other search engine. Faster load times mean that your site is more likely to rank well, and with an engaging flat design users are apt to stay longer on your site – making them more likely to convert.
EXPRESSIVE TYPOGRAPHY
While website layouts will be clean and simple, you can expect to see web designers unleash their creativity on typography. As we’ve said before, quick-loading is great both for search rankings and for user experience. In a designing landscape filled with picture heavy designs, how is a designer supposed to creative innovative websites without relying on large, high-resolution images? When it comes to typography and 2018 web design trends, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Relying on typography to do the heavy lifting for design helps websites load more quickly.
To some, typography might not sound like a very interesting design element at all. Gothic or modern, serifed or sans, script or slab, what’s the difference, really? Each style of typography, despite what the words are actually saying, have the ability to transport your mind to specific associations, even subconsciously. Gothic fonts evoke images of Europe, history, churches, and antiquated language. Modern typography is present in most logos for the technology giants of today, and the mind associates it with fashionable, edgy brands. Script reminds people of fancy parties and femininity whereas slab fonts are associated with being bold and strong.
This is why companies will pay large sums of money to develop their own special fonts just for use in their branding. Large brands like Intel and AirBnB went through the trouble to develop their own fonts just to help define themselves and their brand. The Facebook “F” in their logo, while not a proprietary font, is highly iconic to their brand and their image, just as much as the interface, their color of blue, the liking function, or the blank profile photo image.
This is how powerful typography can be.
Taking the expressiveness of typography and then placing it on the backdrop of flat design can create powerful, alluring web designs that capture the viewer’s attention, keep it for longer, and provide better results than more image-heavy designs.
