2019 Web Design Trends That Are Blowing Up the Market

Designers have an anxious relationship with the idea of trends. “Trends” can often be taken as less than complimentary. However, knowing and experimenting with the latest trends leads to learning new techniques, acquiring more skills and using different styles in a playful way as they appear and evolve.

Typography-Based Layouts

Typography has always been fundamental in design. Typography is taking its rightful place by high level of freedom, expression and experimentation. Words(Fonts) now have a physical presence in design, a structural element around which the rest of the composition flows.

One of the uses and effects of typography to highlight is the treatment of Letterforms as graphic elements, applying deformations, effects and animations as well as the combining of different styles and weights with BOLD, Italic, Serif, San-serif, and outlined.

There’s something elusive about this kind of half-there, half-gone text that immediately draws in and holds the eye, demanding that you follow the letterforms to their natural conclusion. Which makes it a pretty handy technique for some memorable branding.

In a world where chunky sans serifs dominate branding, a visually lighter letterform certainly does capture a feel of traditional — but different. Which in the end is what any new brand needs: a sense that it’s both revolutionary and trustworthy.

Rise of Brutalism

The future will be brutal. There’s no denying that brutalism has moved out of design’s subculture and into the fully branded spotlight. Brutalism’s staying power suggests an interesting facet of design trends’ emergence and adoption.

And it goes way beyond internal meeting posters and iterative concepts. Squarespace’s recent rebrand embraces brutalism by way of New York City’s gritty visual aesthetic and brash personality.

Illustration Styles

Illustration is used as an element of difference because it culturally reminds us of the exclusive nature of art.

Medium’s log-in page introduces you to their unique editorial illustration style.

We’re even seeing designers embracing more abstract and surreal approaches to illustrate less concrete ideas, like staying scrappy:

Helveticization of Brand Identity

All brands identities eventually result in a Helvetica version.

MailChimp classic on left, Mailchimp 2.0 on right. Note the change in casing too! Source

Old logo of Uber on left and brand new logo and identity on right. Source.

Animation: Secondary Elements & Organic Motion

Animating secondary elements is a great way to visually enrich a site without using up excessive resources, which can lead to increased loading times. These animations often form part of the microinteractions, creating fluid user experiences.

We often find vectorial elements animated with organic morphing, imitating liquid or gooey effects in interfaces and microinteractions, and of course, typography is not exempt from these types of animations and transformations!

Color Schemes with Personality

This trend is the color scheme itself and the way in which it is used as a principal design element – we’re talking about color schemes with a personality that are consistently applied throughout the whole product experience.

In general, we’re seeing schemes with two or three primary colors and various secondary colors. Saturated and pastel colors are combined, making way for striking high contrast effects. There are many examples of plain bold colors in the background combined with photography, typography, and illustration.

PWA is the New Responsive Web Design

We can officially say that PWAs (progressive web apps) are the new standard, something like the new responsive web design, due to the advances that they represent. Mobile versions aren’t reduced versions, it’s a different experience which can and should be optimized to have good performance, indexation, and conversions.

Progressive web apps allow developers and designers to create applications based on web technologies typical of native app-like experiences with the fullscreen and custom navigation bar, automatic updates, transitions between sections without loading other URLs, access icon in home screen as well as the ability to work offline and receive notifications.

But the best thing is that they keep the positive characteristics of web apps like SEO and indexation by search engines and, most importantly, avoid the effort of cloning the app with different technologies.