As you are approaching your new website designs, you want to be confident that your new content feels up to date and is leveraging the best practices that are on the market today. As one of the premier firms for web design in Los Angeles, we make a point to continuously review new content that is being produced. While looking over some recent projects from some of the top creative agencies and branding agencies in the business, we’ve been able to identify some key trends emerging on the market.

Your website design company should be constantly reviewing new output in the field. If you look up a web design tutorial from the early 2000s or 2010s, there is a clear difference in the tone, design, and structure of older websites versus ones that were made more recently.

Embrace Simplicity

One of the most enduring styles that have continued to show its relevance in recent projects is a trend toward minimalism and simplicity. Keeping your space spare of text helps to reduce the number of elements competing for your user’s attention while emphasizing the images and text that you’ve decided is most important.

Inside this trend toward simplicity, there are a few ideas that have been rising to prominence recently.

• Gradients: It keep your site looking simple since backgrounds to pages or borders softly give your page a sense of motion without drowning out or overcoming your content. However, they still offer depth and interest. They direct attention from the color where your reader starts to where you want them to go without a word said. Blending colors also allows you to transition between navigation bars and other elements. It creates different zones of action, which easily harmonize with design decisions made at different places across the page.
• Bold Typography: Bold but simple typography has been a distinctly increasing trend recently. Bold typography stands out on small smartphone screens and draws the eye toward it, highlighting important information or elements. This is particularly important to distinguish responsive vs. non-responsive elements.
• Microcopy: It is basically simplified content. It should be brief and direct – explain to users as simply as possible what to do. Microcopy guides the reader to act. This type of copy stands out even more in sites that leverage negative space. These short content pieces are generally taken more seriously when there is less to distract from them, making simplicity in language another crucial element of positive UX.

AI Generation of Color Palettes

Advances in artificial intelligence, or AI, lets designers explore color options that they may not have considered before. Recent innovations in AI allow you to upload images or color palettes that you find inspiration in and rapidly offer a few different color palettes that fit the prompt you are starting with.

The AI will work differently based on the particular tool the designer uses, but most will gather colors from the plethora of sources across the universe of the internet. After extracting enough of these color palettes based on keywords, the AI will begin to learn what palettes work for each brand and generate even more combinations.

There are many options available. For instance, AI Color Wheel offers a user-friendly art board that will learn your palette and preferences with time. Another AI tool, Colormind, will automate the color palette during the design phase. Huemint goes a step further. Rather than just suggesting color combinations, it offers insight into how to place colors in varying design elements in the final product. Each of these tools has its own unique take on color and how it can work in web design.

Web Analytics Optimization

One of the most important things in web design continues to be optimization for Google and other search engines. One of the key ways that this is achieved is by prioritizing the ways in which it evaluates websites. As a result, web design has evolved in ways that both help its users and push the sites up in the search results.

Touches of Embedded Complexity

Even though much of the design out there has emphasized minimalism and simplicity, there are a few more intricate touches that have made their way onto the scene recently, and it’s likely that they are here to stay. Optimization has reduced the overhead and made it radically easier to include some of these elements, which previously would have led to long load times, slow scrolling, and laggy interaction. 3D features can make your web pages more visually interesting to users, along with animated interactions and hovers. These elements can make your website stand out amongst others.