Stunning Web Design Trends for 2020

Stunning Web Design Trends for 2020

With pioneers such as Apple and Google backing flat design, 2020 might see an insertion of color and depth into the simple concept. For the last few months, it has been evident that flat design can accommodate splashes of deeper energetic colors if given the experimental dash and attention it deserves. In 2020 and beyond, the vast majority of web designers and developers are going to focus more and give attention to two distinctive areas of web design trends:

Top e-commerce design trends – currently, e-commerce has already taken over and has become a new norm for tens of millions of online shoppers. It’s just a matter of giving the online consumers what they exactly want in terms of visual appeal and user interface/experience. At the minimum, the most significant e-commerce design trends for the near future must focus on usability, simplicity, and speed. The faster and easier it is to find whatever they want, the better.

Responsive design trends – we’ve already in an era where Smartphone web traffic has at ease overtaken by far the traditional desktop traffic in many vital areas. Recent data shows that, globally, mobile traffic is accountable for about 52 percent of total web traffic. Towards the end of 2019, 63% of all mobile phone users could easily access the Internet primarily through their device. Therefore, this is the best and crucial time to focus on the most critical responsive design trends. The decision on which responsive design trends are applicable should be approached entirely from the end-user perspective.

By looking at things at a more general level, it is evident that over the next couple of years, several key web design trends are proving to be trendy among developers worldwide. Several are continuations of existing trendies, while others bring varying new features and functionalities into the mixture.

Simplicity + Bold Colors

If you think about supersaturation among a sea of online competitors, more web developers will continue to adopt bold and bright colors to demonstrate a brand’s forward-thinking, daring, and even eccentric personality. Deep and brilliant colors are immersive and also attention grabbers, something online brands can use. Most web designs have defaulted towards safe shades and shadows, and depending on the specific brand’s target market, going against the grain can be a great thing that induces loyalty and association. More device screens are adopting IPS (In-Plane Switching technology, which makes bold colors stand out magnificently and in simplicity for the world to enjoy. Simplicity in design and the use of striking colors reflects the growing complexity of consumer technology in general. These days, most consumers carry powerful supplementary smartphones that have the capability of displaying incredible eye-catching imagery. Bold and fine-looking imagery has become the norm of today’s consumer’s expectations.

Patterns In Web Design

The use of patterns in web designs is super diverse and refreshing. They are making a massive comeback in 2020 and will create hot and modern web design looks. Besides covering the background entirely in 2020 web design trends, patterns that spread only on separate parts of the backdrop will be trendy.

Retro Style In Modern Web Design

The design style of the 50s and 60s has been a significant source of inspiration to many web designers. And soon we are about to experience a real blast from the past. Effects that remind us of retroes such as duller colors, noise, dust, and black-and-white photos, will be present in web design trends 2020.

Dynamic Illustrations

In 2020, we will see many 3D elements and motion effects that impress. The level of depth and realism, which allows web designers to create, is yet unreachable by any other digital technology. The 3D has become an inevitable part of the web and graphic design in modern days.

The 3D has become an inevitable part of graphic and web design in modern days. It can be animated, interactive, or static. In 2020, web designers will surprise us with interactive 3D effects. A motion will be more engaging than ever and will make users stay longer on the website. Static 3D graphics will also impress with mesmerizing colors, realistic looks, and smooth shapes. Web designers will keep all other elements at minimal so that the overall design can feel modern, clean, and well balanced. Illustrations to combine art and design in different styles on web design will be among the hottest trends in 2020. There will be fantastic artwork from pastel and watercolor to weird and modern art such as characters with no facial features, characters with disproportionate bodies, and much more. A huge trend in web design right now is combining super simple hand-drawn 2D illustrations with photos. Following this trend, illustrations will either interact with photos to create a fun mixture of two realities or will replace parts of them.

Animations and Integrated Gifs

When well-executed, not only does motion graphics add spunk and persona to your overall brand, but also the integrated GIFs, custom illustrations, and animations can help tell your story and what you stand for. You can do this in a clear, calm, and confident manner too. Illustration, on the other hand, can help the reader to preview a site’s pages or make it easy for product brands to demonstrate to potential users how to use the product. E-commerce sites can also use custom illustrations to help internet shoppers on how to configure filters and shopping carts, navigate through product pages, and see how a product works beforehand and guide them to the checkout page. Custom illustration and animation can inject fun into a sales funnel or a buyer’s journey. It can also keep the reader’s attention while the page is loading. With the advancement in web-based designs, 3D effects and animations can swoop in to offer less stringent and bland data visualization and maybe make more people look at the numbers twice. The only exact thing to consider with animations is mobile audiences. Depending on the size and nature of the mobile device used, it can be impossible to provide the same experience in some gadgets. Nonetheless, there are various ways animation can apply to connect and cement strong relationships with customers.

Asymmetric Layouts

In 2020, most asymmetrical structures are receiving adoptions in a bold bid towards flourishing enthusiasm, crazy fun, brutalism, and individuality. It is not that well-arranged homepages are bad, but most websites are grid-based and obsessively orderly. Personal sites are the ones that are taking this idea to titan levels. The broken-grid structures are most appealing due to their perceived dogged assertiveness and uniqueness. The only disadvantage is that brands with large amounts of live content might be challenging to deploy asymmetric design making it a chaotic experience for their readers. So, if designers are to keep users happy, they need to reconsider the ideas and switch to an attractive design yet more fitting design. There might be a thing of taking a prevalent web design too far, but the key to a stunning website design with asymmetry lye ironically in balance. For a designer to create a sense of balance, it is essential to ensure that no part of the page is more substantial than the rest. Larger images apply provided they balance to perfection with space, text, and other elements. Irrespective of how sophisticated the design may be, the viewer’s eye always hits the more prominent on-page elements first, before traveling to the smaller accompanying components.

Loud And Proud Typography

The crucial low web design trend became popular several years ago and still looks classy and modern up to today. Unlike a couple of years ago, designers are removing unnecessary decorations and details and maximize the use of typography to make a more powerful statement. The topography isn’t a new visual in web design 2020. The previous typeface design was created by the use of traditional san serif fonts to say it loud, while the emerging typefaces are entirely hard, bolder, and dogged to miss. Of course, words speak louder, but a photo might yell it out. Deploying striking, large, and custom fonts to usher a more elaborative typeface can make a ton of sense. With the availability of more devices and tools to support custom fonts, 2020 and beyond, is a year to make bold statements that will set you apart from the crowd. The use of variable fonts is coming on very strongly as well. Variable fonts are fundamentally dynamic, single fonts that change to appear like multiple fonts. In reality, type designers can smoothly interpolate individual glyphs along with 64,000 axes of variation, from weight to width, and so on. That means adventurous typeface designers will have a wide variety of options to engage recreation with and flourish. For any online business, typography counts for something that taps and influences the power of targeted, yet well-designed keywords of search engine optimization.

Nonetheless, simplicity and fundamental readability are needed. Taking things to the extreme with illegible fonts can be off-putting and counterproductive and a vain attempt to be creative. When it comes to mobile responsiveness, it is essential to balance loud and proud typography. The topography that does the business well on a large desktop screen might not be wholly applicable for a tiny smartphone. So, don’t shortchange your mobile visitors for the gain of your desktop traffic.

CSS Grids, Black And White Evergreen Web Design

Black and white web designs are evergreen, classy, and always trendy. They are present in every year’s web design trends, and we will see them in 2020 as well. They will appear in a more elegant, simple way but containing line elements and maximum typography. Recently, online brands have had to decide between creating a mobile-only or desk only site. Web designers must configure those sites to detect what devices online visitors are using, and redirection of the latter version to a version that will suit their device size is so easy. Official data indicates that more people now browse the web through mobile device s than desktops, so a smart CSS grip will offer a brilliant option to flex a single site into multiple versions to fit every user’s screen size. From the end-user perspective, this is the most crucial responsive design trend of recent years. Mobile web traffic volumes have already overtaken traditional desktop traffic in major vital markets all over the world. Google itself continues to demonstrate a firm commitment to the development of mobile-friendly websites. The current advancement in CSS grids in responsive web design will ensure every visitor enjoys the same high-quality experience irrespective of the nature, type, or size of the device used to access the website. The layout systems will allow the web owner to organize content into columns and rows that respond well to the user’s screen size.

Scalable Vector Graphics To Boost Mobile Prioritization

Site browsers love multimedia and sites that host engaging multimedia content tends to score higher than test-only pages when it comes to engaging and retaining online visitors. In the past, content-rich sites had to suffer slower loading times but thanks to traditional file formats such as GIF, PNG, and other video formats. However, these formats have been notoriously anti-mobile. Recently, Google made everyone aware that they will soon be using mobile-first indexing results for website ranking. Such types of news aren’t big news considering the number of mobile users as compared to desktop traffic two years ago. What this should mean to website owners is that it is time to make an early-bird switch to responsive mobile-first designs that will put mobile prioritization at the center of the web design process. The process must apply without sacrificing rich visual content that enchants visitors, and that is where SVGs comes in handy. SVGs are vector images that scale with the size of the screen while maintaining the quality of the original graphics. SVGs are not pixels, and this makes them a significant contributor to their scalability aspect, and this is a crucial responsive design trend for today and years to come. The use of SVGs ensures the consistent quality of the user experience for all mobile visitors. Rather than some users getting the full website experience and others felling shortchanged, SVGs bring about consistent mobile performance, which is essential in a mobile-first web society.

Hand Drawings, Line Art For Clean And Creative Websites

Line art and hand drawings are a total hit right now in all fields of graphic design, and it has made its way in web design as well. Sites with line art illustrations look clean, professional, and still super creative, and we will see a lot of this trend in 2020. Webmasters have realized that a website represents more than an online address, and hand-drawn elements add a unique sense of character to website pages. The trend took off on the back of recent time’s bold typography and custom illustrations in web design trends. The reason why designers are not sticking only to photography and high-resolution imagery is that the use of hand drawings are appealing, charming, and human. Thus, given the sophistication and technological advancement in web design trends for 2020, hand drawing will be associated with stunning website design. Designers can use hand drawings to enchant, engage, and enlighten while oozing personality and standing out from the crowd, which can be a massive differentiator of the many quality websites choking for attention around the web. With the usual trend of inspiring photography and 4k imagery, it is important to consider that everything is far too flawless to have been produced by a machine. So, to contrast, throw a human element to your pages by adding hand drawing into the mix, especially if the drawing is a little on the rough side. Everybody can shoot a bunch of stunning photographs and arrange them on a website, but it portrays something about your business if you draw something by hand and display it with pride. If you wish, you can hire help to produce your pictures, but nothing talks more about an online business than a line art or a hand-drawn picture behind the scenes.

Innovations, Voice-Capable Interfaces

It is evident that advanced technology is impacting web designs in modern days inevitably, but some will be the trendiest in 2020.

Chatbots – these are on the user’s disposal 24/7 to answer FAQs and guide users through the site. Websites in 2020 will be more conversational than ever, thanks to the increasing use of chatbots. The use of advanced AI technology will keep making chatbots more adequate than ever.

Automated Assistants and User Interface – this is the ability to lead an actual spoken conversation with devices thanks to voice user interface and AI technology. In the coming years, there will be a rise in the use of automated assistants that use voice user interface technology. When online users can be able to have a conversation with the site, they are visiting sounds so exciting, but most importantly, this can help the disabled to interact with the website better. Attention spans are often very short, and any smart webmaster needs to team up with progressive designers to capture and lead an increasingly distracted readership. With many devices hosting intelligent virtual assistants such as Cortana, Siri and Goole Now, more people are embracing voice-over text. Speaking to a machine or smart device, directly, is more convenient than taking the time to enter your requests or queries manually. Web designers can take advantage of these and treat busy audiences with less effort browsing by engaging more and levering voice-powered models. As technology advances, device screens are becoming smaller and more crowded, and voice-powered models take very little space. Content delivery personalization is in a way that text content might not be possible. The use of voice control/input may have gotten off to a slow start, but the popularity is finally hitting its stride. The introduction of voice capable interfaces by mainstream businesses remains relatively not very fast, and evidence suggests that it is only a matter of time before voice takes over as the exclusive or primary input/control option for the masses.

Artificial Intelligence And Advanced Machine Learning Infusion

In 2018, the social media giant, Facebook released its predictions for social media trends to take off in the years ahead. Three of them were Machine Learning, Social Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence. For those UX designers looking beyond 2020, it is good to know that the UI of tomorrow is heading towards doing away with the traditional homepage. A bubbling trend to swap to more targeted and personalized landing pages is geared along with the use of cases and context. UX/UI designers, web developers, and webmasters will use advanced machine learning to capture leader’s details based, for example, on their location and browser history. As a result, the information will help site owners, designers, and developers to come up with relevant web pages that land individuals based on the product, type of information, or service they would be looking for in a site.

An example is an e-commerce website. AI is not a newcomer to the web development landscape and design, and any automated system that provides a personalized experience based on the user’s perceived behaviors and preferences qualify as AI. Others, such as The Grid and Adobe Sensei, are offering a stack of tools to help web designer’s move with speed and conquer this growing trend. It is just a matter of time, and an average web user will begin to expect or demand far more multi-dimensional personalization of their online experiences. Users will have online familiarity where the websites they visit and interact with will know what they want before they even realize it themselves.

Brutalism In Web Design

Towards the end of 2017, a new tide blew that sought to redefine the traditional web design layout. Before material and flat design popped into the scene, stringent grid layouts with sharp edges ruled over the web design. In the past years, big brands have embraced organic designs with their soft, shapes, patterns, and curved lines, which represent real works of art meant to add a dash of authentic fun and help uncover the brand behind the design by humanizing them to the target audience. A good example is Google’s rounded-edge designs. Brutalism in web designs highlights a deviation from the grand old static-print-design-like websites to well organized and conformist layouts. The aim is to inspire blatant individuality and originality to foster a sense of belonging among the target audiences. From color clashing to a mix of horizontal and vertical text, you will recognize it when you see it because a site sporting this new look will have distinct asymmetrical visuals that are in open defiance to conservative website layouts. Brutalism has been associated with a certain sense of purpose and functionality over and above unnecessary aesthetic extras. Other than simplicity and accessibility, brutalism has the potential to be eye-catching and engaging and can also be used to create seamlessly functional business websites.

To Sum Up

Website designs have developed a lot throughout the years, and 2020 will be not only extremely impressive in terms of visual presentation but also technology-driven. Surely an eventful year awaits overflowing with creativity and unusual designs. As technology and web consumption advances, more web designers are coming up with creative and unique works that will continue to dominate the top web design trends in 2020 and beyond. Over the next couple of months, some of our top picks, such as CSS grids will become the hottest web design developments while others such as web animation are already growing concepts. However, what the future holds for long-term popular web design trends will continue to be determined by the preferences of the end-user alone. Theoretically, the expectations, tastes, and preferences of a typical web user could shift radically at any time, thereby laying to waste several web design trends previously considered superb. For example, if consumers suddenly begin responding negatively to asymmetric layouts, then they are out of the picture. There is also an inevitability of technology mapping out the future web design as we may know it. Currently, it is all about mobiles and how the rapid advances in the sophistication of mobile technology have transformed the way the world accesses and interacts with websites.

Additionally, voice-capable interfaces are also making their mark. In a few years to come, virtual reality could also usher in an entirely new era of web design and development. Even still, it is unlikely that we will be seeing sweeping VR-influenced changes in web design trends over the coming couple of years. But for the time being, it is a case of the web design trends detailed above, forming the cornerstones of genuinely stunning web designs for today’s web user.