Web design is subject to trends just like any other form of design, and they can be particularly pertinent for brands who want to appear modern and in touch with customer needs. If you are considering updating your website for 2019, try hitting on one of these design trend points – you’ll find that the customer response is sure to be favourable.

Streamlining your content

In the past, web design was all about making something that looked beautiful. Then we became concerned about user experience, and creating an interface that was easy to use. Increasingly, now, modern web design is about speed.

Speed can affect everything. When a visitor comes to your website, researchers have discovered that they are only willing to wait 2 seconds for your pages to load. If they have to wait longer – assuming that their internet speed is good – then they are likely to give up and head to a competing website instead.

Speed can also affect whether they ever see your website in the first place. Google is now including page loading speed in their search engine algorithm, meaning that no matter how much effort you put into your SEO, it could all be lost as a result of a slow-loading page.

So, how can you streamline your pages? It’s all about getting a good web host, as well as making sure that videos and images are compressed to give you a quicker loading speed. If you’re using a custom design, you’ll want to cut down on the Javascript as well.

Flat design

Flat design is all about minimalism and simple lines. It came about as web designers were striving to put together pages that were optimised first for mobile, with computer browsers as the second priority. The way to achieve this was to reduce the amount of unnecessary detail on a page, make it all load in quickly and in a top-down format, and also simplify menus and menu options.

It’s also an aesthetic choice. Clean, minimalist design has almost always been in favour, whether it was a particularly trend for the year or not. People like that simple look, especially when it’s actually pretty complex to put together. To put it another way, we like it when things just work.

With flat design, you can also thing about sticking to white with two or three bold accent colours. These will help amplify the effect of the layout and give users the impression of breathing space. When everything is squished down to fit on a phone screen, that can be very important.

Asymmetrical and broken grid layouts

These layout styles are becoming popular as a way to make your brand stand out from every other site with a white, minimalist look. Think diagonal lines cutting across a page rather than horizontal ones when breaking up content, images with non-straight edges, and unusual placements on the page to make the design stand out. This all comes from the traditional grid system, which is used to ensure that pages look well laid-out, and from designers wanting to break free from those grids and try something different which at the same time still doesn’t look messy or chaotic.

Geometric shapes

Web designers are also using a lot of geometric shapes in designs for 2019. This gives you the opportunity to reach a nice middle ground between flat designs and broken grid layouts. You get the nice, clean lines of a flat design, and then add in shapes such as hexagons, triangles, circles, and so on to make it look more interesting.

There are a number of ways to use them. Repeated patterns can be fun, but have even more impact when the pattern is broken or faded out to allow the text to come through strongly. The use of pops of colour with these shapes can also have an interesting effect.

The shapes you use can say something about your brand, too. People often associate rectangles and squares with stability and tradition. Circles might indicate more of a creative mind with a unified purpose. Triangles and rhombuses are more dynamic and can represent a company that does things outside of the box – in a literal sense. Think carefully about making sure the shapes not only represent the message you want to send, but also that they look good on all screens and aren’t just there for the sake of doing something different.

Conclusion

Web design trends come and go, but the good news is that they usually move slower than most other trends. This means you can set up a website with any of these key 2019 looks and still have a website that looks relevant in 2020. Changing your web design regularly, however, can help to keep customers on their toes and highlight parts of your offering they may not have previously noticed.