Top Web Design Trends To Watch In 2018

It’s that time of the year again. What’s going to be hot in web design next year?

Previously I covered web design trends to watch in 2016 and 2017. This year, I reached out to seven experts from various fields and asked what they feel is going to dominate web design in 2018.

I can tell you that 2018 is going to be an exciting and innovative year.

Let’s see what web design trends you can expect to see next year.

1. Bright and bold minimalism and engaging photographic content

Paul Jarvis has been a designer who writes since the 90s and worked with brands like Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft and Warner Music. His work and weekly dispatch can be found at pjrvs.com.

Paul Jarvis: Bright and bold minimalism. Simple will never go out style, but with advances in monitors, color saturation and brightness, minimalism doesn’t have to be boring. Large fonts, vibrant colors, 2018 will be a fun year for easy to use yet interesting online interfaces.

Engaging photographic content. Gone are the days of boring whitewashed dudes in cheesy corporate stock photography. 2018 will see a huge uptick in photography featuring people of color and women, and the photos will be brand matching-ly customized, not just generic and boring.

2. Polished web applications

Jane Portman is an independent UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design. She’s an active conference speaker and author of four books, including The UI Audit. She publishes actionable design content under UI Breakfast brand, including UI Breakfast Podcast. Jane’s currently focused on growing her SaaS products: Tiny Reminder (as a founder) and Userlist.io (as a co-founder).

Jane Portman: Since I work primarily with web applications, my forecast relates to them. I hope that 2018 will bring better answers to the same old questions! How do we figure out if the user is truly getting value beyond simple “activation”? What is the real-life formula for success metrics? How do we build an app for multiple use cases? The tools keep improving, and affordable technology — from basic personalization to advanced analytics and AI — should help us find the right answers.

In terms of visual design, we’ve already polished the popular apps to the moon and back! Maybe too much, if you remember Skype and Dropbox redesigns in 2017. Now it’s time to make high-end aesthetics more affordable for SaaS founders around the world. As SaaS craftsmanship becomes more refined each year, we should expect another wave of frameworks and ready-made UI solutions.

It’s a wonderful time to live in. Let’s keep the wheels turning!

3. Interactive content

Josh Haynam is the co-founder of Interact Quiz Builder, a tool used by more than 30,000 businesses including The American Red Cross, Home Depot, and Forbes. He’s probably seen more quizzes than any other human on earth right now.

Josh Haynam: 2018 will be the year of interactivity. Consumers crave a more personalized and entertaining experience when it comes to how they connect with brands, and content such as polls, quizzes, and games can deliver exactly this experience. For example, this winter storm experience quiz from The American Red Cross uses trivia format to test people on their knowledge of storms, and this one from Forbes itself helps potential college students find the right school just for them.

This type of content draws people in by asking them personal and challenging questions and then delivers exactly the right resource or product based on how someone answers the questions, just the type of experience that people are craving in 2018 when everything is getting busier and crazier online.

4. Asymmetry and brutalism inspired free-form

Vytautas Alech is a user experience designer and product developer who helps his clients to solve big problems and delight their users. With over a decade of digital craftsmanship experience Vytautas believes in simple, high impact solutions.

Vytautas Alech: Asymmetry and brutalism inspired free-form. This has been developing over the past few years. But only recently with a rise of such design expressions as brutalism and bolder visual fragments it became useful. There are a few great examples of asymmetry in web design, but all of them intentionally disrupt otherwise static design, and direct user attention point-to-point much more effectively.

5. Illustrations and animations

Alexey Galyzin, Product and Lead Designer at Crello. Alexey is a dedicated product designer striving for perfection with over 10 years of work on education, e-commerce, and entertainment projects.