Web designers can use web design trends to get inspiration and create websites and projects for their clients. They use these trends in website designs relevant to the user’s current preferences. Current design trends can drive designers to create new designs rooted in their individual perspectives and identities. Trends can arise alongside new technology such as Web3 or by using new techniques to develop interactive and exciting experiences for their customers.
The internet’s next phase has arrived in the form of 2024 web design trends. As always, these digital trends represent emerging technology and its impact on society, and the previous year provided designers with plenty of material to work with.
AI has advanced to the point where it can create its own art, and the Metaverse has propelled VR into the mainstream. Online design concepts highlighting immersion, simulation, and cinematic techniques have since emerged. Simultaneously, a worldwide recession has prompted both a retreat from opulence and a push towards pleasant, escapism-inducing activities. All of this has occurred against the backdrop of the ‘Big Flat Now,’ in which the internet and mobile phones have achieved their peak in terms of global availability. So, when aesthetic innovation becomes a fast-paced global effort, web design trends will no longer be bound by the current and local.
Now that 2023 has passed, it’s time to say goodbye to the old and hello to the future, especially in the realms of web design and product design. Whether you’re hiring a web designer or looking for web design employment, it’s critical to stay up to date on the current trends in web design. You should spend some time incorporating current web design trends into your portfolio or properly plan how to bring them up during your next web design interview.
Considering all these factors, the latest trends in web designs 2024 will probably rock the World Wide Web to its core.
So, here are the top web design trends for 2024.
1. Immersive 3D Designs
Many websites embraced immersive scrolling experiences that made viewers completely invested in their content. This trending web design has now grown into entirely immersive websites—fully generated 3D environments, thanks to continued interest in VR technology.
Some immersion gimmicks are created to go so far as to transport the user through digital space using the flawless tracking of a crane camera. While audio tactics were once seen as a garish remnant of the early internet, subtle music is making a comeback to lend a theatrical touch. Since audio still has accessibility issues, most websites will request permission to play music before loading the page.
This style requires a significant amount of effort to execute, often requiring 3D modelling and sound mixing. Hence it is best suited for one-off campaigns. While these internet worlds are more artistic than realistic, it is precisely because of this that they are appealing—they are imaginative, escapist environments that users will want to immerse themselves in. At their finest, they stand up to the many stale layouts that center the page around a CTA button. Websites like these usually rely on visual experiences to leave lasting impressions on visitors.
2. Augmented Reality Trends
Augmented reality mixes computer-generated content with real-world elements to provide a more engaging experience. As technology advances, more and more businesses are implementing A/R aspects into their websites. Amazon, for example, offers Virtual Try-On to help users choose shoes they’ll love. Virtual Try-On allows shoppers to “try” on shoes using their smartphones, allowing them to experiment with numerous styles and color combinations without placing an order. Virtual Try-On assists Amazon in increasing sales and decreasing the amount of shoes returned by consumers who were dissatisfied with the styles they selected.
IKEA is also utilizing augmented reality to boost user engagement and brand loyalty. Customers can use IKEA Studio to see how well a piece of furniture fits in their current space or to find a rug that goes with all of the art and furniture in a room.
3. Hover Animation
Hover animations have always been useful for passively engaging viewers with micro-interactions. Web designers can now take these hover animations to new heights, converting regular page elements into dazzling product reveals.
These eye-catching website design trends help achieve numerous objectives at once. It promotes fast browsing by allowing visitors to immediately review a product without navigating to another page. It animates the product and simplifies the way it can be used. It improves on a simple interface by displaying photographs one at a time and keeping the page clear of image clutter. It can provide a new front dimension to the site by animating product images on top of the current page.
Finally, like other surprise encounters, these hover animations provide a sense of discovery, making the visitor want to keep exploring to find even more surprises.
4. Typographic Designs
One of the best things about digital design is that it can support multimedia, which means that text, photos, animation, video, and interactive elements can all exist in the same composition. Even so, many web designers still don’t use multimedia and instead, focus on primary text layouts.
The end result is a retro print magazine aesthetic, which could result from many publications shifting digital to avoid escalating printing costs and the environmental toll. In any case, typographic layouts encourage an efficient minimalistic design. Websites designed with such layouts reveal everything it has to say at first glance. But they don’t waste their visitors’ time by saying it over and over again. They also offer their visitors some intellectual credit, recognizing that powerful words and inventive text arrangements can be just as captivating as attention-grabbing pictures.
5. Overstimulation Trends
“Less is more” has been the digital law for decades, requiring that websites be so obvious that users don’t have to think. Many designers have recently protested against these constraints through anti-design and reinventing Web 1.0’s gaudy interfaces. Yet, digital maximalism—designs aimed at extreme overstimulation—will be the uprising against UX simplicity in 2024.
This trend in website design vows an all-out war on white space, with practically every page element customized. A single web page can have flashing images, color splashes, hover and click effects, large font, animated backgrounds, and animated foregrounds all at the same time. As a result, websites that are not just rebellious but also expressive, original, and brazenly odd are created. It takes engagement and enjoyment to a whole new level by focusing experience over intuitive navigation in order to let people explore some more.
At the same time, this approach introduces clear accessibility challenges, and businesses subject to accessibility legislation may find it impractical to develop WCAG-compliant pages in this form.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Designs
You can’t get away from articles about how artificial intelligence takes over everything from design to copywriting. While AI technologies have advanced significantly, they are still incapable of replacing human designers and other creative professions. Indeed, the power of AI is providing new options for marketers worldwide to communicate with audience members.
If you work in UX or UI design, at least one customer will ask you to create a visually appealing chatbot design. Chatbots act as virtual assistants, allowing customers to ask inquiries and receive basic support while human customer service employees are unavailable. Design is one of the most crucial components of creating a successful chatbot since it helps people engage.
Even if you’re not producing websites or products with AI aspects, getting conversant with AI technologies is beneficial. As technology advances, you’ll be able to leverage AI to make smarter web design decisions in a fraction of the time. For example, if you’re involved in prototyping, you might be able to use AI to incorporate common UI components from your company’s design library, reducing the time it takes to bring a new product to market.
7. Overlapping Text Styles
The grid has been a big part of web design for a long time. It arranges layouts in clean, even areas and makes sure everything is in the right place. Web designers have rebelled against this imposed framework by employing rule-breaking tactics such as Neo-brutalism, which softened the most avant-garde aspects of conventional brutalism last year. Their efforts appear to have worked off, as one of brutalism’s more prevalent characteristics—overlapping and cluttered text. These are web design trends that can be seen on websites in 2024.
Even popular websites tend to overlap their page elements which makes them impossible to read because the text is being put over images. Usually, a website will have a clean look overall, with only a few lines of header text overlapping to create a slight brutalist effect. With this, the trend gets a broader appeal as it breaks up the monotony without letting the whole page seem like a chaotic experiment.
Even though the trend sacrifices some immediate legibility, the sheer size of the headline makes the effect only transient. Instead, a styled headline reminiscent of magazine cover writing draws attention to this trend. Overall, this trending web design indicates that rule-breaking is becoming more widely accepted, as almost everyone appears to be sick of the same neatly ordered layouts.
8. Parallax Scrolling Style
The parallax effect is an animation technique that creates a sense of realism and depth by making the foreground parts move quicker than the background elements. It’s been a trendy web design look for a few years, but parallax zoom scrolling is especially popular in 2024.
This trending web design gives the viewers an illusionary three-dimensional movement experience by moving them in or out from the horizon line instead of horizontally or vertically. It mimics the ease of zooming that applications like TikTok have provided video artists. It also clearly relates to the immersive worlds and overstimulation trends: one simple scroll gives visitors the impression that they are being taken on a voyage into the unknown.
9. Scrapbook Aesthetic Design Trends
Massive technological developments occurred this year, culminating in the widely anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. But, with futurism comes a yearning to recapture the natural world. This tendency is presenting itself in the websites of 2024 through scrapbooks and DIY features.
Doodle drawings, handwritten typography, sticker graphics, and cut-and-paste collages are frequently used on these websites. These handcrafted features not only mimic the tactile feel of flipping through an old-school zine, but they also inject a sense of intimacy and imperfection in place of computerized precision. Still, even though the handcrafted style goes against the tricks of more high-tech web design trends, it doesn’t deny that we live in a technological world. These trends in web designs simply embrace both sides of the coin, the physical and digital coexisting as one.
10. Nostalgic 90s Navigation Styles
This year’s web design trends saw a surge in ’90s retro, expressing a communal yearning for the innocence of the early internet. Designers are expanding their creative interpretation of nostalgia with a focus on navigation.
Since the visitors understand how the products work in the real world, they’ll grasp how to interact with them on the website more quickly. Browsing it feels as natural as flipping between albums or reading the back of a record when surrounded by vinyls and entranced by commercial banner marquees. It offers the user a nice, familiar sense of nostalgia.
Nostalgic navigation might take the form of highly literal ’90s design elements, such as pixelated desktop icons or vivid menu color blocks. It can also integrate relics from the 1990s, as shown in SIRUP’s ingenious CD tower navigation menu. Both of these approaches rely on sensory memory, whether it’s sorting through stacked cases by hand or clicking through an outdated but familiar interface.
But, even in the lack of sense memory, the trend might entice younger users by producing a digital replica of a world they did not get to experience. In general, nostalgia is usually good for giving viewers warm fuzzies, especially when they are going through a difficult time. Nonetheless, its incorporation in navigation may imply that we are progressing by adopting cues from the past.
11. Microinteractions
Microinteractions, like other 2024 web design trends, strive to improve user experience and raise brand exposure. Clicking a link, commenting on a blog post, watching a video, or completing a survey are all examples of common website interactions. Microinteractions need even less input from users, making them incredibly useful for enhancing engagement and ensuring visitors can traverse a site without issues.
The usage of progress indicators is a common example of a micro-interaction. These indicators are frequently used on pages that require users to fill out a form or finish a multi-step process. The progress indicator advances to the right as the user completes each needed action, indicating that the site responds to their input. Using progress indicators removes the need for users to question if the page is frozen or if the system recognizes their input, hence improving the user experience. Users can also use progress indicators to help them stay patient when downloading huge files or doing other time-consuming tasks.
12. Mobile-Friendly Designs
Even though the mobile-friendly design isn’t a new concept, its importance has increased more so than ever before, making it one of the top 2024 web design trends. Nowadays, the majority of the world’s population owns a smartphone, with many of these people using their phones to make reservations, view restaurant menus, schedule auto maintenance, and perform other duties. Consumers may transfer their business elsewhere if a company’s website does not perform well on mobile devices, resulting in lost income.
Whether you want to be a web designer or have been building websites for years, you must understand how to create responsive websites. To provide a favourable user experience, a responsive site should adjust to numerous devices, from tiny smartphones to tablets with 12-inch screens. You should also consider the size of the buttons in your designs, as many people use their cellphones with their thumbs rather than their index fingers.
13. Dark Mode Trend
As more people become aware of the advantages of adopting dark mode, web designers should anticipate receiving more requests to incorporate it into their clients’ designs. Dark mode, like responsive design, isn’t new, but it’s more popular than ever. Some users find it easier to see light text on a dark background, and dark mode may even extend a smartphone or tablet’s battery life. From a designer’s perspective, dark mode makes it easier to experiment with design components, allowing you to exercise your creative muscles a little more than usual.
Are you prepared for the web design trends of 2024?
The above-mentioned trends in web design are a broad group that reflects numerous competing impulses simultaneously. Parallax zooms, overstimulation, and immersive worlds are pushing the limits of digital technology and what it means to be a website. Scrapbook components, 90s navigation, and typographic layouts anchor the internet in tactile memory. These web design trends provide entertainment as well as unexpected moments of positivity.
Like the real world, the internet can be a dark place where information is distorted, and fury feeds attention. Design cannot address this problem on its own, but it can provide consumers with a tool to make their life a little simpler. Yet some web design trends aim far higher, providing visitors with artistic experiences and lasting impressions.
Now that you’ve learned about the most popular web design trends for 2024, head over to Wilson Wings, a design-forward company with articles on various topics concerning web Design, UI/UX Design, and other related development related blogs like the web development process and others. If you require professional design development services, Wilson Wings top web design agency is here for you. We have skilled web designers ready to create an extraordinary website based on all the trending web designs. You can be sure of receiving a website complete with immersive experiences and innovative interactions that engage visitors and make them an active part of their website experience.
