A Guide to 2017’s Web Design Trends

4 Minutes
Mark Gregory

If you want to make sure you are keeping up to date with the latest web design in 2017, we have provided a run-down of a few to look out for if you are about to redesign your website.

The Big, The Bold & The Beautiful

Yes, big, bold & beautiful typography is a powerful visual to any website helping to create personality and evoke emotion. Because device resolutions are becoming sharper and type is becoming easier to read, we can increase creativity on typography to appeal to users. We can expect over-sized and full screen type that is unique and beautiful often used with image layering to compliment the use of parallax scrolling which we will come onto later.

Think Bright

In the past, brands have often stuck to web-safe colours. But again with technological advancements and device resolutions becoming sharper, screens are now adaptable to reproducing richer colours we see brands being brave and embracing bright and vibrant colours. Bold colours attract attention and they can be used to break new ground. Spotify is a great example of moving away from their once safe green. Now they use a vivid hue.

Innovative scrolling and parallax

Scrolling was once purely used for getting from the top to the bottom of a page, but now it is 2017 and the capacity to deliver creative content online is forever increasing. There is no more worry about keeping the most important content ‘above the fold’ due to users viewing content on various screen sizes and at various resolutions.

Scrolling has become so versatile and can work with many types of content with introduction of the parallax scroll. Video can be introduced by beginning as a full screen and then pausing as the user scrolls down. Animations can move and change and many layers of text can be added.

Animation & Movement

Quite simply, movement catches the eye and you we are starting to see more websites move away from static imagery and use more parallax backgrounds and animation. Just take a look at your Facebook app. Images, slideshows, and videos fill your feed as proof. Animation is a way to story-tell and create a personality for a brand in the hope of catching user attention. 

Animations can serve different purposes and come in all different shape, sizes and styles. They range from tiny loading-devices which keeps the user entertained while waiting for content to load, to an interesting hover-state used as a UX device to show a user they’re hovering over a link. If you haven’t already seen it, check out our animation on the Wish website homepage here.

Authentic photography

Photography will always feature in web design, but rather than using stock imagery that can often be cheesy, consumers desire authenticity from a brand and they know a stock photo when they see one. Brands and designers will begin to be more careful about the imagery they use on site and hire professional photographers to take their shots which frame them in the way they want to be portrayed and keep things authentic. Unfortunately, it’ll probably be a long time before much of the cheesy and cringe-inducing stock photography completely disappears, but expect to see it start falling off a little more quickly this year. 

Card and grid UIs

One UI pattern which is being seen more and more across the web is the use of card-based UIs, a fundamental principle from Google’s Material Design.

Cards, first famed by Pinterest and other social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are UIs where pieces of content (text, imagery, video) are broken down into individual ‘cards’ which the user is able to navigate through. This allow brands to show larger amounts of content on a screen at once, but in manageable chunks for the user. This way the users can quickly scan to see what’s appealing to them and ignore what isn’t.

Card’s tie in nicely with Mobile-First design that we mentioned earlier and the fact users want to quickly consume as much content as possible in little time. Cards also allow brands to build a sturdy system for creating and organising content, as users can filter, customise and sort to suit their own needs. This in turn allows brands to cater to the needs of their users on a much more personal level.

Not all of these trends may be relevant to you and your content, but it’s always beneficial to know what’s happening in the industry to help progression and to assess your website. 

View