The revolutionary advancements in the domain of web design are not just impacting FinTech, e-commerce industries but also changing the way your users interact with your website as well as business in terms of user experience, functionality, value, responsiveness, and sustainability. Last year, the trend of Conversational Interfaces, AI, and Chatbots was all the rage among businesses to change the communication landscape entirely and provide their customers with improved, immersive user experience. As for 2019, we continue to see entrepreneurs finding their feet around these trends and bringing little agents to their websites. But some new innovative trends are going to ride the wave of change and make us witness the age of digital transformation. Gathered here are the five most dominating, significant web design trends and techniques you need to keep up with this year:

1) Serifs on Screen

Rules “Serifs only for print” and “Sans Serifs for screen” are not necessarily sacred ideologies anymore. This year the rise of using bold serifs in various aspects of the website will advance. While serif fonts don’t prevail for exhibiting text on displays, especially small font sizes on low-resolution screens, their distinct and high-contrast nature makes them an ideal contender for big titles and headings, callouts and for being used in the inevitable text-heavy design. They actually make letters more characteristic, recognizable, and easier to read while at the same time featuring a whimsical impression and adding the much needed classic touch to your website design.

2) Black-and-White Palettes

Experimenting with themed color palettes can generate an impressive, pleasant juxtaposition between before and after design. For 2019’s theme styles, however, the throwback retroelement ‘Black and White’ palette reminiscent of past designing trends and imagery of the 1980s will surface again in a way that intrigues users and offers a striking visual perception. The clean, reserved ‘white’ color scheme creates a professional and fresh setting whereas bold, assertive ‘black’ hue contrasts excellently against white, putting a lot of emphasis on buttons, CTAs, and points of interest. It will help businesses humanize their brand and provide an outstanding experience that is both eye-catching and engaging, thus compelling their visitors to take action immediately.

3) Natural, Organic Shapes

Organic shapes, flat lines, and geometric patterns are widely known as navigation components, framing elements, which typically are used to separate the content, communicate certain subtle messages, and draw users’ attention to specific areas of the website. More and more designers are slowly pulling away from systematic grids and experimenting with asymmetrical shapes and fluid lines.

With their unusual appearance and naturally imperfect attributes, traditional graphics including rectangles and squares with their pointed corners create a sense of stability and add a personable touch to your site proportions. However, instead of enclosing every image, module, text, or other elements inside a box or rectangle, designers are adopting a lot of distinct shapes as well as irregular patterns such as zig-zags, kite, and diamond shapes. Combining the geometric structures with images or illustrations adds an intriguing twist to the traditional approach, keeps your design user-friendly, consistent throughout the website, and also offers an inside look and unique perspective.

4) Glitch Art

No trend list for 2019 would be complete without mentioning the concept of ‘Glitch Aesthetic Art’ that is blurring the line between virtual digital and the real world. The practical approach of using digital or analog errors to create active, animated glitch effects within videos and images is becoming more intense than ever. How can these art executions help businesses grow and stay ahead of the curve?

Well, the distorted, striking glitch-inspired visuals represent a contemporary, digitized take on ancient practices such as Prehistoric, Surrealism, and Psychedelic movements, which conspicuously intensify brand value, grab users’ attention, and keep hold of it. They create a sense of disorientation, amplify a feeling of urgency, and also resonate with users’ experience intellectually, viscerally, and emotionally. This could be by double featuring blurred pixel designs, adding different types of kaleidoscopic effects, glitch shaders, and lens distortion, or otherwise, creating an entire image around multiple glitch elements. Their interactive, edgy characteristics make them an ideal candidate for being used in motion graphics, images, headlines, and even logos in real-time.

5) Micro-Interactions

While it’s been a few years since microinteractions hit the web market and became an integral part of the designer’s art dictionary, the concept is sure to be mainstream this year, staging advanced, complex integrations and empowering businesses to enhance engagement, experience, and usability. Microinteractions are small clickable elements such as refresh, navigation, and Facebook’s like button that help you create inviting and fun events, surprise users, and constructively influence their behavior. Not all the little agents are animations – some are sounds; some happen as for mouseovers; some are the input data or user scrolls.

Examples: Like button on Facebook; Chatbot; Emoji