Various design elements can make your website look more colorful, entertaining or clean, the number of variations is unlimited. In the followings, we show you some of the actual web design trends, which are not only aesthetic, but also practical.

Dark mode

Dark mode or night mode has become very popular in the last few years. Many social media sites and web browsers introduced it, so that the visitors can now use the interfaces with black or dark background with lower screen brightness. This function is really practical in darker environment, it causes less eyestrain and can also reduce the device’s energy consumption. Besides being useful, dark background makes the webpage’s appearance more exciting and aesthetic.  Because of all these above, night mode is becoming available on more and more websites, which makes the use of the interfaces more comfortable, and even having the opportunity of choosing improves the user experience. 

Minimalistic design

Nowadays, minimalistic design is popular at all places, which means it is also trendy on the Internet. Minimalism uses simple, clean shapes, few colors and huge spaces. This way, a website doesn’t become cluttered, the information appears clearly and separately to the customers. It is much easier to find information about an exact product or service, which makes a better impression on visitors and shows that the company is straightforward. At the same time, minimalistic design doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye to creative elements: you have to be even more creative and artful to get and maintain the attention of users. We hope you find great ideas below.

Interactive design

Interactive design consists of responsive and interactive elements, user-triggered and leadable animation and pictures, which are led by the website users. For instance, the cursor’s movements or scrolling can bring alteration to the web page or picture. With the application of interactive design, you can certainly catch the attention of visitors and can improve user experience, so people are more likely to choose your service in the future. Besides getting and maintaining attention, responsive elements can also be useful when you would like to represent a product. It is very comfortable and satisfying for the customers if they can just rotate the product by moving the cursor. But be careful not to go overboard—if you use too much of responsive elements, your webpage can end up being cluttered, and also that can be annoying and can cause confusion if every mouse move leads to changes. Be brave and creative to use it, but keep it within bounds.

Embedded videos

Embedded videos are very ideal for introducing a company or service on a website, but it can be perfectly added just as a design element, too, and that’s why it became so widespread in the recent years. Videos can provide much more information and tell more details than pictures. For example, if you would like to introduce your company, a video can make a better impact on your potential customers than simple pictures and it is easier to show the company’s values. They can be perfectly imbedded into the head of page or to the sides, so they do not even disturb the readers. The videos catch and maintain people’s attention just like dynamic movements. However, videos are an easy way to make your visitors stay longer on your website, avoid using too much of them, and note that short, compact videos are more practical than longer ones. 

3D elements

Using 3D elements has also become trendy in the past years, as they are easily insertable to any interface. Spatial forms and figures can perfectly direct attention to important information, they can help us highlight exact texts. For instance, a textbox which is at the front is more likely to be read than the other texts. 3D web design takes your web page to a next level, makes it more exciting to browse and if you implement 3D elements appropriately, the interface gets cleaner and more logical. 3D elements can also be used to divide different parts of your webpage, for example by adding textboxes or simple icons, figures.

Accessibility

As technology develops in an exponential way, impaired people have more and more opportunities on the Internet and more and more webpages become accessible to them. It is crucial to take accessibility into consideration when you are designing a webpage, because unfortunately, many visitors are impaired people. You can help partially-sighted people by adding a big contrast to the background and the text by using colors that are easily separable, and also by avoiding tiny font size. It is also helpful to them if you don’t include alt text when the picture or element is not that important, because alt texts can disrupt the continuous automated reading. The screen reader lets the user know, when they have encountered a picture, so you don’t have to start every alt text by ‘In this picture…’, because that also breaks the flow of the reading. Besides these, it can be really useful to them, but can be useful to everybody, if there is a table of content at the beginning of a page which contains the key words and has links which can navigate the visitors to the desired parts. This way, visually impaired people don’t have to listen to the whole text in order to find a part they are interested in. To help hard of hearing people, add subtitles to the videos and provide transcripts of audio contents.

The application of Artificial Intelligence can greatly contribute to making websites more accessible. For example, Alrite, an Artificial Intelligence-based speech recognition solution developed by Régens, can transcribe videos and can also help visually impaired people by implementing it to a website. With speech recognition, anyone can search or can fulfill a form on a website by dictation instead of typing. This function doesn’t only support impaired people, but can be useful and comfortable to everyone and can also make a content or website accessible in even more situations.

Source: Medium, Shopify, Bluecompass