The designer needs to stay on top of the latest design trends. The work style should change and evolve to keep work fresh and resonate with clients and products. The 2019 year collected a lot of trends from the last year and also add some new ones. So take a look at the juiciest trends for this year that I’ve picked out.

Trends in UI design

Colorful and custom made illustrations

Custom illustrations with bold, vibrant colors and funny stylized people are coming back in 2019 and become the main trend of the year. According to statistics, this type of content can convert 7 times better than any other type of visual content. Today companies take more advantage of custom illustrations. Using custom illustrations, the company demonstrates the uniqueness of the values of their brand. This approach in design helps businesses get closer to their customers by making their experience with a brand more personalized. Without a doubt, this custom illustrations are expensive but opting for them you'll get a lot of bang for your buck. The most popular directions are illustrations with simple shapes and isometric forms.

simple shape

isometric illustrations

Liquid graphics

Design becomes more digitized, and designers and artists following these trends bring complex forms of color to the real world. And liquid, holographic, chromatic forms, and glitters are everywhere, including the UI design. It concerns not only graphics but also typography.

Brazen, large typography. Creative and bold

Сheeky and bold typography is extremely popular this year. In many cases, typography is replacing background images and presents the main element of the page. Also, this trend call to another typography trend — Outline typography. These trends are often mixed together and combined with bold and very large bodies.

Dark themes

The dark themes started to prevail after the Mojave update was released. Dark side attracts users and world-known companies have released software updates with dark themes.

Creative loaders

Not for the first year motion design keeps in trends. The public like funny, malleable animation. The UI design also uses motion in different loading cases. Complex, entertaining animation hooks the user, and also allows personalize a user experience.

Custom 3d graphic: animated and static

3D design is one more prominent trend. Now it’s not only a static design but also an animated 3d graphic. Various simulations of natural materials, the movement of objects and mind-blowing combinations of objects in compositions pique users’ interest and make them stay.

Bright, bold colors and gradients

Gradients used in last year’s designs tend to be a bit outdated and those are about to fade away. But gradients didn’t die. The new, better gradients are coming. They will be using rich, flashy, solid colors.

Minimalism

In contrast to the resurgent color schemes popular in 2018, the minimalist design is coming. The severity of the interfaces is chosen by the product companies, emphasizing the static nature, elitism and the high quality of their services and products. Minimalism is achieved by using a monochrome color palette and bold font turns.

Trends in UX design

Voice in interfaces

How many times did you hear “OK, Google?” recently. Google, Alexa, and Siri are our day-to-day helpers. Almost 50% of all searches are being made using the voice because there are many benefits such as no need to use your hands.

Micro-interactions

People use micro-interactions in all software products. Micro-interactions provide a more intuitive perception of the interface. With fluid animation makes, the interface looks more dynamic and lighter and it also makes everyday interactions more entertaining.

Skeleton screens

This method makes users think that your project is fast. While your app is loading skeleton screens give you the feeling of smooth work, fluency and accuracy of it doesn’t leave the user.

Gesture-control

With the output of buttonless phones, where the entire surface of the phone’s front panel occupies the screen, gesture control has become an absolutely necessary approach to navigation. Now everyone wants to reduce the number of controls and increase the intuitive gesture control.

Thumb-friendly experience

Last years the smartphones that were released by top mobile companies get large enough screens (5'7-’6'2). This thing makes our fingers and hands practice at stretching. Thumb-oriented design transports all important and frequently used controls to the bottom of the screen. You can reach fundamental parts of your app using only your thumb, without the help of your other hand. But frankly speaking, the moving of this trend started a long time ago with the emergence of bottom navigation menus.

Trends that are gone 💁🏻

Videos everywhere

Do you remember background videos as the main trend of 2015–2017 years? Now it’s time to let go. Background videos are not trending anymore, users prefer fast data load and sites without delays.

Geometric shapes, patterns, lines and circles

Patterns with a mixture of geometric shapes are becoming less popular this year. They captured designer’s hearts for a long time, now they are replaced by custom illustrations and craft patterns.

Design System is a new black 🖤

I should add that a huge wave of design systems swallowed the world of design now. During the last time, our company was working on the huge family of products and one of the main product is Eva Design System. And now the first version of our design system came out. Eva is customizable and allows to make work of designers and developers faster and helps to avoid a lot of redundant work. It is completely free and open source and available as the symbol-based Sketch file and frameworks for Angular and React Native (Nebular and UI kitten).