3 Essential Design Trends, July 2019

Carrie Cousins.
July 01, 2019
Every month we post a roundup of the three biggest trends that we see on the web. Sometimes they’re old favorites that are experiencing a renaissance, sometimes they’re new ideas that are just building up momentum.
3 Essential Design Trends, July 2019.

This month we’re taking a close look at above-the-scroll presentation. It’s the first thing you see, and the first impression a user has when they type in your URL. So, it’s a logical place to spot trends in website design. Here’s what’s trending in design this month.

1. Text That’s Almost Hard to Read

With so much focus on readability and accessibility, this trend might be a little surprising. Designers are experimenting with hero text elements that are difficult to read. It’s not that the text elements are unreadable; you just have to stop and think about them for a minute. Why would this technique work? Text in these instances is more of an artistic element, and while the words have meaning, they draw our attention because of visual components. Text is designed to make you look longer on purpose. Each of the examples below does this in a slightly different way. MetaView uses a split screen design with text elements that change color on the split screen. On the left, color is muted and more transparent while it is bolder and lacks transparency on the right. The words are readable but you definitely need a few extra seconds to process them. meta Perfection includes two layers of text. An oversized foreground layer makes you think about the letters that are missing from the screen to fill in the words. A pale, soft background layer is behind it and the words are turned 90 degrees, also making you look closely to understand the message. perfection Next Creative Co. mixes an outline font into the mix with animation and a gradient stroke border. While this might be the least difficult to read element of this set of examples, it shows distinctly how a design like this forces you to slow down to read. Your brain processes Let’s make it” rather quickly, and almost takes the full duration of the animation to understand the final word in the phrase. next

2. In Your Face Faces

It’s hard to find a more immediate way to connect with a user than with a striking image. Using a face to convey emotion creates an even more distinct connection. The in-your-face-faces design trend does that with stunning close-up images of people. The visuals create an immediate focal point and impact. The user feels something right away before even beginning to process the words or other information on the screen. What’s nice about this trend is that it is designed to connect users to content. With each of the examples below, you might find it hard to look away. You look first at the face on the screen and with something like the Coulée Creative design, you may even smile a little. It piques curiosity. You start to scan the rest of the design to find out what it is about. coulee And this trend has you. It’s easy to get engulfed in a design with such a strong, striking visual from the start. Each of these examples has an extra element as well, with animation that keeps adding interest to the faces. Coulée Creative includes multiple people making a variety of faces, Muax has a scroller of images (although the pictured image is the most in your face), and Roobinium uses a glitchy animation as the character turns to look directly at the user. muax roob

3. All the Text to the Left

For a while, the trend in hero headers was to use large text in the middle of the screen. You’ll still see a lot of that in designs. (It’s one of those concepts that never gets old.) What is beginning to gain steam is a more one-sided layout with all the text on the left side of the screen, while imagery and graphics are on the right. It’s tempting to call it left-aligned, but it’s more than that. This layout creates a different type of symmetry when appropriately weighted. The elements on the left and right sides of the screen need to feel equal in weight so that the eye travels across the information well. Responsive design has really powered this trend. (Visit the mobile versions of the Creact and Few designs, below, to see it in action.) creact few Text and image elements stack on smaller screens. The left-most element – here text – floats to the top of the design on small screens. This provides excellent display for messaging above the scroll on a small device while maintaining the consistent look and design that desktop users experience. What really makes all this left-hand text work is that it’s not flat. Each of the websites uses stunning typography and color to make the most of what could easily be a boring display. drawmote

Conclusion

Just because something is trending doesn’t always mean that the design is good.” It doesn’t mean that it’s bad either. Trending designs just show new techniques and visual elements that are popping up more regularly. It can be fun to go back a few months and look at trending elements and see if the trend has grown of fizzled. Of the ones above, I expect the in your face faces” to stick around for a while. This image style is so impactful.

Carrie Cousins

Carrie Cousins is a freelance writer with more than 10 years of experience in the communications industry, including writing for print and online publications, and design and editing. You can connect with Carrie on Twitter @carriecousins.

Read Next

3 Essential Design Trends, June 2023

This month we are focusing on three trends within a bigger website design trend – different navigation menu styles and …

15 Best New Fonts, May 2023

The choices you make when selecting a typeface have more impact on your design than almost any other decision, so it’s …

10+ Best Tools & Resources for Web Designers and Agencies (2023 updated)

Having the ability to envision a tastefully designed website (i.e., the role creativity plays) is important. But being …

20 Best New Websites, May 2023

This month, there are tons of great new agency websites to get excited about. 3D animated prisms are a popular theme, a…

How to Find the Right White Label Website Builder for Your Agency

Web design agencies face a lot of obstacles in closing the deal with new clients. One of the most common ones is the ar…

Exciting New Tools For Designers, May 2023

There are hundreds of new tools for designers and developers released each month. We sift through them all to bring you…

3 Essential Design Trends, May 2023

All three of the website design trends here mimic something bigger going on in the tech space, from a desire to have mo…

10 Best AI Tools for Web Designers (2023)

It’s time to stop worrying if AI is going to take your job and instead start using AI to expand the services you can of…

10 Best Marketing Agency Websites (Examples, Inspo, and Templates!)

Marketers are skilled in developing strategies, producing visual assets, writing text with high impact, and optimizing …

15 Best New Fonts, April 2023

Fonts are a designer’s best friend. They add personality to our designs and enable fine typography to elevate the quali…

20 Best New Websites, April 2023

In April’s edition, there’s a whole heap of large-scale, and even full-screen, video. Drone footage is back with a veng…

Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2023

The AI revolution is having a huge impact on the types of products that are hitting the market, with almost every app b…