The economy continues to teeter along under inflation and constant predictions of a recession Yet, people still have businesses to run.
Just in America, there are around 33 million SMBs. Some are brick-and-mortar ventures with employees, while others are online-only operations conducted from the nearest coffee shop.
Yet, they all intersect around one common necessity: websites. It is an exceedingly rare business without one these days. Of course, your website must keep up with evolving design considerations.
If you haven’t updated your site recently, keep reading for the top web design trends of 2023.
Minimalism
Minimalism is a design approach that focuses on the essential. It’s an approach that aims for light use of colors when colors are used at all. It also, for lack of a better term, embraces decluttering.
For websites, that generally means keeping the site as clean as possible. Design elements are simple with clear separations between them.
There are few distracting visual elements on the page. When imagery is present, it’s crucial imagery. Think in terms of logos or headshots on a staff page.
In other words, the entire design work to make the written content on the page the star of the page. This is one of the web design trends that never really goes out of fashion. That often makes it a safe choice when considering web design ideas.
Nostalgia
The internet is a place where nostalgia often takes the form of memes or tribute videos. Yet, the pandemic changed all of that. Stuck at home and cut off from social outlets, a lot of people looked back to objectively better times in their lives.
That inclination to look back didn’t skip over the web designer community or the people who hired them. This has led to a resurgence in color palettes and design elements from the early days of the modern internet or even back to design elements for the 80s and 90s pop culture.
For example, you see a lot more websites with bright, contrasting colors and simplistic graphics. While this approach can potentially work with some websites, it’s an approach that may alienate customers who expect seriousness from businesses.
Custom Typeface
Any time you use a professional web design service, you should expect them to ask you a lot of questions. A lot of those questions will center around functional elements of the website. In other words, what exactly do you need and want the website to do?
They’ll also ask questions about colors. For example, they might ask if you have an established brand color scheme. If you do, they’ll look at ways they can incorporate that on your site.
You might not think it matters, but website visitors get strange when the colors they associate with a brand don’t turn up on a website.
These days, though, they may also ask you about the typeface. Some businesses are happy just going with whatever the designer recommends.
Others, though, want a purely custom typeface for their website. While it’s subtle, it is a way for you to make your website unique.
3D
The rise of sophisticated virtual reality has put a new emphasis on immersion in design. While nothing can truly replicate the real world, yet, 3D art is a way to bring more depth to your website.
Some websites keep it simple with just one or two main 3D images. Other websites aim for a bit more with entire groups of 3D images. For example, you can get a group of 3D characters that highlight important elements of the website.
As with all things, you can go overboard with 3D design elements. Unfortunately, it’s often a judgment call about where the line is for any given website.
As a general rule, if your business or brand runs on the quirky or funny side of things, you can get away with more. You can also get away with more characters. If you’re business runs on the serious side of things, you’ll likely want a less is more approach with 3D.
Premium Content
While creators on the web are nothing new, more and more of them are looking at ways they can monetize their content. This has led many down a road that was once primarily used for business and teaching websites.
It’s the membership website or at least sites that employ elements of membership websites. Gated content is the most popular design element.
In essence, you put some of your content out front for free to draw in an audience. However, if that audience wants access to the “good stuff” you offer, they must pay for the gated content.
Bringing in web design pros for that is often helpful because you aren’t just locking away some content. This usually involves integrating some kind of payment gateway into your site.
Gamification
Gamification itself is nothing new. You see it in everything from fitness apps to language learning. You use the achievement elements of gaming to encourage people to do what they need to do to lose weight or memorize vocab.
Yet, it’s relatively new for website design. Rather than hosting a game on your site, you make parts of your site into mini-games.
It’s mostly a way to encourage engagement with the site. However, it can prove effective in keeping people on your site long enough to really look at your products or services.
Leveraging the Web Design Trends of 2023
The web design trends of 2023 offer you a lot of potential avenues to go down. Unfortunately, they’re often mutually exclusive. For example, you can potentially mix nostalgia with gamification. Yet you can’t mix either with minimalism.
Custom typography and 3D images can work on almost any website, as long as they don’t become distractions. Gated content proves hit or miss. It depends on your business and website catering to a particular kind of audience.
WSI is a global presence that offers web design services to businesses of all sizes. For more information about our web design services, contact WSI today.
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