Top 8 Must-Know Web Design Trends 2019
While there are possibly many fields where following trends doesn't matter, web design is not one of them. A well-designed website should look modern and up to date. Technology changes rapidly and what’s popular in web design changes right along with it.
Keeping up with new technology and staying on trend is vital to a web designer’s career. The designers who keep up will undoubtedly make more income than those who don’t. Successful companies want to hire designers with work that appears fresh and modern. Becoming a top web designer requires studying web designs and keeping up with all the trends.
1. Mobile Design
Focusing more on mobile has been a trend for a while now, but it’s ramping up even more again in 2019.
Google is partly to blame for this. In 2018, the search engine announced that having quick-loading mobile design would improve SEO. This matters to clients, so it must matter to designers.
Beyond search engine optimization, more and more website visitors are on mobile devices. The trend now goes beyond simply having a responsive design, or even one that loads quickly. The page needs to be easily readable and look exceptional on mobile.
2. White Space
White space has long been a consideration in excellent web design. However, while this used to be a consideration of margins and breaks for the eye to improve readability, the white space is more a trend toward drawing the eye to specific areas and capitalizing on the trend toward minimalism.
3. Minimalism
While this can include the trend toward white space, they are not always linked. The trend toward minimalism includes white space, it also includes the focus on creating pages that load quickly. On top of both things, the minimalism trend focuses on crisp and beautiful typography, skillfully laid out navigation, and lots of contrast in the design. Minimalism should still be beautiful and well-thought out.
4. Beautiful, Dynamic Full-Screen Video Backgrounds
Very far away from the trend toward minimalism are video backgrounds. These are very on trend for 2019 and make a bold statement that is meant to capture a viewer’s attention. Websites with movement are sure to stand out this year.
These backgrounds should serve multiple purposes. They can be part of developing the company’s branding, give the user more information about products, or pique their interest in something about the company or website itself.
Video is trending in many areas of web design in 2019, and a video background is one way to capitalize on that.
5. Chatbots
The introduction of AI is big this year and one of the main trends for this is chatbots.
Chatbots allow consumers to get help on a company’s website without feeling pressured to speak to an actual human. Having the ability to hold a customer’s hand as they browse a website, without intimidating them into clicking away and giving up, is an excellent opportunity for more effective websites that produce higher conversion rates. Designers who nail this trend will be high in demand.
6. Fast-Loading Pages
Speed, speed, speed. We discussed this above for mobile, but it’s an important trend all on its own. Speed is becoming a much more important trend in 2019. If you’re going to be adding a lot of video content to a website, this will only become more important.
Simple work done on minimizing image sizes and redirects are important steps. So is looking at any added applications on the page and minimizing the amount of script used on them. For example, designing share buttons so they require less scripting.
This may be an easier trend to achieve if you’re combining it with the trend toward minimalism, but even pages with a lot of white space need work done to make them as clean as possible.
7. Illustration
This is an interesting trend in 2019 that can make a website truly unique. Illustration has been shown to be much more attention-grabbing than photography. Some studies have shown it’s actually seven times more effective.
Illustrations can simply be a background, or involve a character mascot for the site. These illustrations can walk a user through how to use the website. They can also be little bars for progress pages. Or they can simply be a static background that helps draw the eye.
The illustrations can be visually pleasing. They add a unique touch to a website that makes it more memorable, which makes this a perfect opportunity for branding a business.
8. One Page Applications
This design trend capitalizes on things being fast loading and working seamlessly with mobile. The idea is to do as much as possible on one page without a user having to click onto a new page and wait for it to load. This means you need to have extremely well-optimized images and other elements on a page. It used to be that the way to get things to load faster was to put less on a single page and spread things out. This trend requires skillful optimization so that everything can be on one page in an application.
One of the truly stand out ways for applying this trend is to have a customer choose a product and be able to purchase it, the entire checkout process, on one page. There are apps with framework to do this. E-commerce sites are famous for having to click through multiple pages, which consumers often find annoying. Same page checkout is a 2019 design trend that is starting to take off.
About The Author
Rodney Warner heads the team at Connective Web Design and is also a musician, outdoor enthusiast, and ice cream connoisseur. You can find him on his Instagram.