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With new web design technologies appearing every year, it is more important than ever for web designers to keep up with the latest trends, or risk being left behind with the dinosaurs of the industry. Thanks to ever-faster internet speeds and better technologies, web designers also have more opportunities to unleash their creativity. There’s no longer any need to settle for standard designs that offer little that’s unique or memorable.
There are more ways of connecting to the internet than ever before. Browsing is no longer restricted to computers: most people now get online with smartphones and tablets, and many laptops have touch screens. To reach the largest audience possible, web designers need to design for all of them. Here are some of the most significant trends that have changed web design and are here to stay.
Touch-Screen Browsing
Touch-screen browsing is now everywhere. It is no longer restricted to phones and tablets; many laptops and desktop monitors have touch screens too.
That means buttons and links need to be large enough to tap easily, menus need to work without hovering, and pages need to respond well to swiping and pinching. Most desktop users still use a keyboard and mouse, so a good design works well with both.
Websites that aren’t designed for touch feel clumsy and outdated, so web designers who don’t want to get left behind need to design for it.
Typography
It wasn’t so long ago that web designers were mostly restricted to a handful of standard fonts, and standard, repetitive designs were the norm. For many years, this made most websites look rather similar. Web fonts, from services such as Google Fonts, changed that. Today designers can choose from thousands of fonts to give a website its own personality, and good typography is one of the easiest ways to make a site stand out.
High-Definition Media
More and more people are connecting to the internet with ultra-fast broadband and mobile connections. This has created demand for higher-quality content such as HD video and large, sharp images and graphics. With compression better than ever, including modern image formats such as WebP and AVIF, there’s no excuse for using low-quality, blurry images on a website.
High-definition media is now standard, and web designers need to keep up to leave a good impression on their visitors. That said, it’s still important to consider people on slower mobile connections. Compress your images, serve the right image size for each screen and avoid autoplaying large videos, so the site stays fast for everyone.