14 web design trends for 2017
As we look forward to 2017 — a year that hopefully won’t be plagued by the passing of so many of the world’s greatest artists and performers — the big question on every designer’s mind has to be: what will define design in 2017?
1. Layouts that let content shine
The last few years have seen a sea change in how people view design’s role in business. Design has shifted from a late-in-the-process “optimization” stage where designers swooped in to sprinkle on some “pretty” like mystical fairy dust to a real competitive advantage.
It’s been an amazing evolution to watch.
And a fascinating element of that evolution has been the shift back toward a focus on content: the meat on the bones of the web. Designers worldwide have realized that people visit websites for their content — whether it’s raging tweet storms, thoughtful long-reads, or the latest “user-generated” meme — and that design’s ultimate role is to present content in an intuitive, efficient, and “delightful” way.
2. Better collaboration between designers, and between designers and developers
As design has taken a greater and more influential role in shaping businesses, more and more attention has been paid to designers’ collaboration with both their fellow designers, and their developer colleagues.
The emphasis on designer collaboration has arisen in part from the massiveness of the web and mobile apps we’re building these days. Gigantic platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn require not only huge design teams working on disparate aspects of the platform, but also better ways for designers to stay on the same page — and that means more collaboration, and better communication.
All kinds of tools have arisen to help facilitate that collaboration, from the shared templates and dashboards and you can bet 2017 will bring both improvements to those platforms, and all-new options.
3. Improved design-to-development workflows
As design and prototyping tools for the web gain maturity and sophistication, the traditional handoff deliverable has transformed from the aforementioned static files to more dynamic visualizations that range from animated Keynote files to fully functional websites. These more dynamic deliverables shorten the feedback loop, simultaneously improving design and dev team agility and lowering frustration. They also facilitate better communication with clients. In fact, for many users of Web-flow, client meetings have become actual live working sessions, where designers are able to quickly bring ideas to life so everyone can experience them almost immediately.
4. Big, bold type
As the design world comes to the consensus that our focus should be on content, more and more websites feature lines of resonant, inspiring copy set in type that’s just as big and bold as the statement itself.
As you’ll have noticed from the sample screenshots, “big” and “bold” doesn’t necessarily refer to the weight of the font! Rather, it’s about dedicating significant screen real estate to a single, simple yet all-encompassing statement about the product or service. And, refreshingly, a lot of these statements seem clear and to-the-point, free of the bloviated claims to disruption and greatness we’ve seen a lot of lately. (Okay, “design the impossible” might be bloviated, granted.)
In a world that’s as fast, busy, and information-overloaded as ours is, these concise yet powerful statements will become bread-and-butter for companies of all kinds.
5. Complex layouts rooted in graphic design principles
If we want to predict the evolution of web design (at least in visual terms), we should refer to the evolution of graphic design.
For the past few years, web design layout has been constrained by CSS’s limitations, but new tools like flexbox and CSS grid will allow for much more expressive layouts on the web.
Our main challenge now: understanding how these new web layout methods should work in the world of responsive design.
The Experimental Layout Lab of Jen Simmons
Grid by Example
6. More SVGs
SVGs (scalable vector graphics) present web designers and developers with a lot of advantages over more traditional image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF.
The key advantages of SVGs come through loud and clear in the format name itself: scalable and vector. Instead of being raster or pixel-based, SVGs are composed of vectors: mathematical descriptions of the object’s shape. This means SVGs are resolution-independent, so they’ll look great on any screen, on any device type. No need to worry about making everything retina-ready.
But that’s not all. SVGs also rock because they don’t require any HTTP requests. And if you’ve ever run a page-speed test on one of your websites, you’ve probably noticed that those HTTP requests can really slow down your site. Not so with SVGs!
7. Constraint-based design tools
Responsive design has completely transformed how we browse and build for the web.
But, oddly, it hasn’t really changed how design tools work, in general. With obvious exceptions like Webflow, most of the popular design tools require you to simply rebuild the same screen over and over for different device sizes and resolutions.
In an industry that’s all about rapid development, ideation, and launches, that massive time sink just isn’t sustainable.
Hence a new wave of design tools (such as Figma) that use the idea of constraints to lessen the amount of repeated work designers have to do when building cross-device layouts. These tools focus on the spatial relationships between elements and strive to preserve them as composite elements are resized by devices and users.
Less work for designers for the win.
8. More and brighter color
As movements like minimalism and brutalism came to the fore in 2016, designers sought ways to infuse more personality into their design work that still worked within those stripped-down aesthetics.
And in at least a few cases, bright, bold color became the natural answer.
Witness Asana’s color-drenched redesign.
And the much-derided, but undoubtedly brand-revivifying, Instagram app icon redesign.
9. More focus on animation
Animation has long played a key role in our digital interfaces, and there’s no reason to think that’ll abate in 2017. In fact, as designers get more and more visual tools to help them build engaging and smile-sparking animations, we’re sure to see them become both more prominent and more refined.
The latter characteristic will become particularly important as it becomes easier to create animations. At 2016’s Design & Content Conference, animation guru Val Head stressed that designers should look to their brand voice and tone documentation when building animations to ensure that they reinforce the tone content creators are aiming for. This helps ensure that animations perform meaningful, on-brand functions for users, instead of just inspiring migraines.
10. Unique layouts
The year 2016 — much like the last several years preceding it — featured an ongoing debate about web design either dying, or losing its soul.
Overdramatic as the web-design-is-dead argument may be, you can’t blame any creative for seeking innovative ways to present content to readers. And one of the most enticing methods for breaking out of the box-centric layouts many blame responsive design for is the broken grid.
11. Flexbox
If you haven’t dived into flexbox yet, you’re in for a treat. This relatively “new” CSS layout module offers both incredible responsive-friendliness in its functionality, but also makes a lot of sense to visual designers used to manipulating objects on the canvas with the align and distribute tools offered in the likes of Sketch and Illustrator.
And with every modern browser (and no, I’m not counting IE11) now fully supporting flexbox, there’s no reason not to dive in — as long as your audience isn’t full of IE diehards.
12. Complex CSS grid layouts
Coming up hot on the heels of flexbox in the race for newer, better layout modules is CSS grid.
Grid is the very first CSS module created specifically to solve the layout problems we've all been hacking our way around for as long as we've been making websites.
While flexbox helps us solve some seriously aggravating and long-standing web design problems like vertical centering, it really wasn’t intended for use in full-page layouts. (Though it’s certainly capable of them.) Grid, on the other hand, was built for full-page layouts. And like flexbox, it allows you to easily rearrange content order for different media queries.
Grid isn’t yet ready for use in the wild, but that just gives you some time to familiarize yourself with the spec. Which is great, because it’s going to be big.
If you want to start playing with CSS grid today, here’s how:
13. A focus on designing for content delivery, personalization, and conversion
One consequence of an increased focus on design as a means of effectively delivering content will be a stress on delivering said content to the right person at the right time — all with an eye to increasing desired actions, naturally. (All good news for you content strategists out there!)
Personalization of content has been an extremely hot topic in content circles for quite some time now, but no one seems to have perfectly cracked that nut yet. Essentially, the goal is to serve up content based on characteristics like:
We’ve seen some interesting experiments in this direction across the web, many of which revolve around a manual personalization of content recommendations by the user, recommendation of “related” reads, and some algorithmic solutions more akin to what Facebook is capable of doing.
Fubiz features manual personalization through its “Creativity Finder,” a conversational-style form that lets you pick from a range of predetermined options about you, your location, and what you’re looking for. It’s a bit “low tech,” but it does offer a feeling of agency most content platforms don’t really offer.
Fubiz
Redshift
A step up from that is Autodesk’s new Redshift blog, which deepens the level of user agency by offering a range of manual customization options like:
It’s mostly stuff a savvy reader can achieve on their own, but Redshift dramatically simplifies those functions. And more importantly, it represents a shift away from a paradigm that views blog posts as the content version of vaporware, turning it into more of an evergreen learning resource.
If a lot of Redshift’s functionality sounds familiar, it might be because it’s largely replicated from Medium. Unlike Redshift, though, Medium has the advantage of a much larger base of readers and writers, not to mention tight integration with Twitter — all of which boost its ability to algorithmically recommend content to you.
14. More focus on conversation (yes, bots, but also...)
You might call 2016 the year of the bot — though whether it’s been the beginning of the bots’ triumph or just a somewhat underwhelming launch is very much open to debate.
That said, if the volume of bot-related launches on Product Hunt and Google’s deep integration of Assistant into Android are any indication, 2017’s going to see a lot more bots popping up across your life.
But bots are really just a specific instantiation of a more abstract, and thus more pervasive, idea: that conversation is an interface. And we’re likely to see that idea shape a lot of 2017’s top design work.
What this might mean, exactly, we’ll have to wait and see. But possible impacts include:
Comments
Post a Comment