Nowadays, technology is moving at high speed. The number of websites is growing rapidly. They are progressing and transforming day by day, giving a designer a vast field for creativity.

What is hot in web design in 2019?

This year features a mix of bold experiments and fantastic digital effects, combined with reality and authenticity to make your brand stand out.

Web design trends 2019 are about stronger users’ interaction with the brand, new style, making your site more smashing, accessible, and easy-to-use, and influencing your target audience.

So let’s get to them!

1. Efficient typography

In 2019 typography is becoming increasingly popular. Great headlines and bold statements – stylish fonts are widely used to replace pictures and enrich websites, thus sending a message to the audience and grabbing the attention, too.

This year typography is about:

• cutting parts of letters and words;
• over-sizing;
• animation;
• placing photography inside typography;
• adding negative space, and more.

Good news is that when applied correctly, the font frames your website, introduces the brand to the users, firms its position, and gives your design an exceptional visual effect.

Dennis Berti applies elegant typography, combined with subtle animations and contrast hues on their homepage.

Vincent’s website uses a negative-space area with a plain heading (also paying attention to animated typography).

Louis Ansa experiments with typography by adding animated natural shapes and smooth lines, broken-grid elements, and bold colours.

2. Gradient, over and over again

Gradient has been one of the most trendy web design features since 2017 and it is still strong in 2019. The cool thing is that this year it takes on irregular, often distorted forms pushing aside soft shapes and pastel hues.

Now, the gradient is about bright eye-catching colours, acid provocative tones, and high contrast almost in all elements you can imagine – from logos and CTA buttons to colourful blocks and backgrounds. This UI design trend is about adding colours and texture and creating modern cool web designs.

With this tendency, you can easily help your audience focus on the most essential content on your page and awake emotions. This year the gradient will surely be one of the most powerful mainstream colour.

Apply various techniques, change the radius, opacity, or orientation of gradients, suggested by Awwwards.

3. More natural and authentic photos

Photography is an important part of design that follows certain trends as well. It is a perfect way to attract attention and credibility. Now, users are tired of stock photos featuring smiling managers or a laptop with a cup of coffee.

Today, photography becomes more real, more authentic, and works perfectly this way. It’s a great way to escape from the digital flat world to the natural one. Imagine a very carefully arranged Instagram feed, and you’ll get an idea of your future project. It may look a little bit less flawless, but not tasteless and trivial.

However, you should remember about the high quality of the photos not to look amateur. Even if the style is getting simpler, the resolution should not be of low quality.

Remain true to the tendencies of 2018, but also add natural photos instead of stock imagery to make your website look more real and stand out from the others.

4. Personalized illustration

Illustration is one of the most emotional ways of communication. It plays a key role in user interaction, gets over the language barrier, being more enjoyable and smooth to people.

This year, illustration is in vogue again. From plain icons to homepages and entire sites, pictures remain at the peak of popularity in the design industry. What makes them so special? They are about storytelling and effecting through visual design, provoking actions that result in conversions.

Therefore, it is always a good idea to use personalized illustrations. They are a perfect method to show the brand from the other side, create a strong company idea, interact with its target audience, and make your website more friendly and greeting. Especially, when you are tired of photos.

Intercom’s website is a perfect example of such a trend. Personalized illustrations and nothing more.

Airtable is a flawless example of illustration use, from the homepage to the icons, making them the centre of the website.

Scrumpy added illustrated icons and animation on their website to make the design even more amusing.

5. 3D illustration

Since the last year, brands like Nike and Reebok have actively begun to use 3D illustration, thus adding more realism and volume to the graphics. In 2019, the 3D trend is going to become the mainstream, taking a big part of the web design world.

3D elements remind of the true world, they also can take us to the future, or to distant planets. They enable you to feel them. In general, the possibilities of this direction are enormous, and the growth of technology makes things much easier and more accessible.

We believe that with 3D compositions, users can make purchasing decisions online faster and get better customer experience.

Spotify uses 3D illustration to bring more attention to the content. Besides, they experiment with typography, making the heading striking and brilliant.

Pitch’s website features illustrations and combines them with 3D effect, allowing the design to look more personalized and eye-catching.

Cowboy’s website uses 3D illustrations, making them a distinctive feature. Not only the illustrations have a powerful effect, but also bold colours, organic lines, and neat animations create a cosmic impression while scrolling a web page.

6. Mobile-first design

Smartphones win popularity day by day. According to Statista, global sales of mobile devices reach about 1.56 billion yearly.

Source: Statista

A great number of people prefer browsing websites on their phones, instead of the desktop and tablet. Therefore, mobile-first design is a must in 2019.

This trend changes the way websites are designed in principle. It means you create a project with mobile users’ needs in mind:

• Make it as simple as possible;
• Keep only the required elements;
• Use chatbots and push notifications;
• Design user-friendly CTAs to have more leads and sales.

The mobile-first approach is about convenience and satisfying mobile users’ demands. It influences the number of your site visitors, improves your SEO, thus providing more web traffic.

Adobe’s website pays attention to a mobile-friendly interface, uses acid gradients and organic shapes to look trendy.

Make convenient mobile-first layouts a priority and experiment with typography, colours, and overlapping elements.

7. Micro-interactions

Micro-interactions are tiny animations that get users’ feedback. They are almost invisible, but catch attention and look nice.

Micro-interactions make your brand stand out from the others, as your website will surely become more user-friendly. These neat details create the impression of a company, and call to users’ emotions and feelings. They also help to understand the website, and make your product more usable and the navigation simpler, thus increasing retention. For instance, they can convey the status of a system, warn of errors, help in interaction with an application, and more.

This UX trend is designed to surprise your audience and experiment with no limits. Smartly used, micro-interactions will become a perfect communication tool, provide your consumers with a positive experience, and mount conversions, as they are human and inviting.

Tabbar animation by Kristina.

Add more interactive elements to make the design lighter, like Paarth Desai.

UI8 and their Product review micro-interactions.

8. Unique animation

The motion-driven design has been one of the most diverse and popular trends for a few years already and it is gaining even more popularity in 2019. It is the easiest and fastest way to bring your ideas to the audience.

Animated illustrations can be large and small, bright-coloured and eye-catching, thus helping users to navigate through your design with no effort. In addition to that, they would surely engage customers even when there is no other imagery in the project.

This is what gives traffic to your site or application: fewer static elements, more animation.

Koox experiments with exclusive illustrations and animations throughout all the pages of its website.

Adobe skillfully combines several trends of 2019, including typography, gradients, and animations, allowing the design to look more prominent and fresh.

Paper Plane makes more emphasis on the design itself. They stick with 3D illustration, animation, and gradients to enhance their homepage.

9. Broken grid and overlapping elements

Nature-inspired web design continues to gain popularity through the market, moving from symmetry to overlapping elements and making your website powerful and original. This helps designers to boost their creativity breaking outside of the standard grid bolder and bolder and surprise the audience with open designs.

The integration of colours, images, illustrations, and animations makes the layout more vibrant and attractive. Give the picture a lot of negative space and fill it with a short headline written in a strong font for easy perception.

The main thing is to think in advance about your design displaying on mobile devices. However, with coding becoming more subtle, the ability to add overlaps and broken shapes to your web pages becomes smoother.

NourishEats’ website features not only various shapes that overlap, but also minimalism and pure tones which create an exceptional aesthetics.

Daria Usova experiments with her masterpieces and her website, too. She creates a unique atmosphere by using overlapping elements and asymmetrical grids, colourful tones, thus making the design catching and exotic.

Gestea’s website reveals overlapping elements as the main design feature on the site, strengthened by animations and powerful typography.

10. Integrated Video Content

With the growing popularity of video on social media, it’s a powerful way to provide more data, increase the audience time on a page and grow conversion rates. Dynamic video backgrounds make websites look fresh and catch users’ attention.

Full-screen video is one of the informative elements that inspire confidence to a company – showing the latest products or services offered, interviews with employees, clips about a firm, a certain lifestyle, etc. Besides, we are always happy to know that there are people behind any business.

Video backgrounds are very helpful if you run a business or a restaurant, sell products, propose any service, such as events and tours organization.

But make sure that the video does not interfere with the readability and the overall perception of the information and use it in a proper way.

Badass’ website is about video background combined with strong typography, vivid colours, and authentic imagery.

Conclusion

Web design involves a great number of trends that are constantly changing. However, a well-organized and neat website makes your experience as convenient as possible, evokes emotions, and leads to better conversion.

There are key principles you should take into account:

• improve readability and make the website easier to understand;
• increase your web traffic and higher lead conversion via your site;
• make your website more visually attractive, and more users will stay on a webpage;
• the longer a visitor stays on your site, the more likely they will make a purchase.

We hope we have helped you understand the tendencies of web design and inspired you to make effective and not boring pages. It is worth noting that you do not need to blindly follow all of the latest web design trends. Choose a few that will surely become your magic wand and remember: websites are more than just a medium of information – they are a reflection of your company’s spirit! What could be more important?