Wishing you a very Happy New Year and it’s a wonderful time to look forward to 2017 and the big question on every designer’s mind has to be: what will be the design trends in 2017? so lets just start with mine.
Say goodbye to the end of flat design
It was fun at it lasted, but flat web design where everything is starting to look the same, as we have lost our creativity in design. When you strip the fancy away, you certainly left with what everyone else has… the basics that look just like each other.
Imaginative heading styles
We’ve starting to move away from the basic heading style that we seen on nearly every websites (whether it’s san serif, all caps, centered heading) and we are moving more toward being imaginative or create creative headings. Changing up the heading style is a welcomed way to be uniqued in your design.
You can achieve this by changing up the layout of the heading, adding unique elements to the heading, or even just showing the main content without a heading (at least it above the fold) are all the newest ways in which designers can start experiment with changing up the typical heading style types that you see on sites.
Increased use of animations and GIFs
Animations are starting to be used more heavily on sites as they are often a great way to show how something works, or how to do something, or even reveal meaningful content. GIFs have been used for this purpose for a long time, but now we are seeing GIFs being more sophisticated & animations using SVG and CSS to achieve some pretty unique designs.
Less navigation items
I believe that because most of us access many sites through our phones more than our desktop, the overall trend to make things easier to navigate has on our websites.
Instead of showing a long complicated navigations items, more and more sites are starting to simplify their navigation down to about four to five items. Keeping navigation to a minimum which helps visitors to focus on the content at hand, instead of trying to find a way to take them off the page.
Microinteractions
Microinteractions are subtle, but powerful ways to interact with a website. As they are often found in hovers, click animations, scrolling effects, etc. While we had these types of design elements already, designers have been spending more time on them, making them more informative and refined.
These been used to integrate in the the hover/rollover action, as a visitor can simply move their cursor over parts of the site to see these microinteractions and interact with the site in a way.
More Emphasis on content
After years of adding things to our sites such as sidebars, headers, banner, sidebar ads, calls to action, comments, popups, all social media buttons etc. All of these things had ended up cluttering our websites while taking up more and more real estate, that certainly take the attention away from the entire point of a web page: the content.
We more will likely to see in 2017, that websites are likely to start moving back to basics and placing more emphasis on content. Whether its means we remove all of the other distractions we’ve spent the years adding, or just making them take up less space, this is yet to be determined.
Geometric shapes, lines and patterns
The use of geometric shapes, lines and patterns have really taken off in the last 6 months of 2016 and this continuing through 2017. As there are various ways in which geometric shapes have made their way into sites. Whether it the use of circles around images, photos that are geometric heavy, or the overall design of the site relies heavily on the use of lines and patterns.
There are a amount of ways in which you an integrate geometric shapes, lines and patterns into your site, and this could be one way in which designers take flat design to a new level or even add some personality to them. Overall, you should expect to see these types of design styles more throughout 2017.
More hand-drawn elements
We have already seen a increased use hand drawn elements. These elements include fonts, icons, graphics, buttons and other elements that bring a nice unique touch to websites. These have never been a medium that most would associate with drawing out, but the introduction and the subsequent take off of these hand drawn elements have been a nice change from using standard design elements.
