It’s safe to say that 2019 is a very exciting year when it comes to web design.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of advancements in this field, with many companies paying special attention to their website’s design and overall user experience, and no wonder why!

Statistics show that 75% of website users judge your brand’s credibility based on your website’s design. It affects everything, from conversion rates to public image.

The website users of today are more demanding than ever, expecting the best possible user experience out of all websites that they come across, and rightfully so.

If you want to come across as a respectable company, business, brand, you need to make sure your website is up to the modern standards. The best way to catch up to modern standards (and even overtake them!) is to follow some of the leading trends in the field of web design.

In this article, we explore the top 5 web design trends for 2019, so let’s get straight to it:

1. Flat Design

One of the biggest web design trends is the growing obsession with flat design (with both users and designers).

This website from Mawla is a good example of a modern, flat design style:

Flat designs feature a minimalist approach to web design, focusing on clean space, bright colors, and the use of simple graphic elements to demonstrate the key point. The trend can be largely attributed to the demand for better user experience, faster loading websites, and less visual clutter.

In short, flat design is often described as:

• Modern
• Simple
• Clean
• Easy
• Efficient

In fact, flat design became so popular that it may even be considered a standard for web design as of 2019.

It’s not just the designers that are obsessed with flat design approach, the users love it too. As the years go by, more and more consumers get comfortable with modern, slick designs, and not having one is a big disadvantage.

2. Brand Customized Graphics

Most websites in this day and age are somewhat similar. The usual website design follows a certain template, with some brand elements such as custom images and colors, and that’s it.

Some designers recognized this, and they decided to go the other way. Instead of using templates, a whole new trend of customized brand graphics and illustrations came to life, with companies such as Slack on the forefront.

If your website has unique brand graphics, it already stands out as one in the sea of millions. Truth is, most websites can’t afford such illustrations, but it is certainly a growing trend in the world of web design and a good way to stand out and capture attention.

One of the websites that perfectly showcase this is Gare Centrale, Montreal’s central station. Just by visiting the homepage, we can already see how they differentiate from the competition, using custom illustrations:

They use these custom brand elements all over their website, and it looks just marvelous. Other great websites that utilize this trend are Ark and Slack, and they even go as far as using these illustrations in their blog posts.

We expect this trend to fully take off starting 2019, as more and more brands look to differentiate from the rest.

3. Asymmetrical Layout Design

Following up on the “lookalike websites” issue, here we have another interesting web design trend that came to life in an effort to combat this old issue.

As we all know, most websites follow a somewhat similar, symmetrical layout design.

The logo is usually found on the left, menu at the top, and we have the main copy along with the image in the middle. Finally, there’s usually some kind of a call-to-action button, and it’s all set up symmetrically to please our eyes. It works, but you have to agree that it’s somewhat overused.

Nowadays, websites are experimenting with asymmetrical designs, just take a look at this crazy homepage:

After taking a moment to realize the internet is still working and everything is loaded properly, one can’t help but to stop and marvel about the design of Studio Revele’s website.

The idea of asymmetrical layouts and broken grids is simple — the website’s goal is to stand out, attracting a different kind of audience, one that appreciates a different, unique experience.

Daniel Spaztek is one of the leading web designers when it comes to this trend, and this is his own website:

It’s a crazy trend for sure, but it deserves our sincere attention nonetheless.

4. Using White Space

Web design is slowly but surely moving towards the minimalist mindset. We talked about this earlier, but many websites are now following the “less is more” philosophy, giving birth to trends such as the use of white space.

Think of your website as a fragrance for your business. The fragrance enhances your appearance and pleases the people around you, however, if you apply too much it ends up repelling them. The same thing happens when your website is overpacked with content.

The trend of using white space makes sense — keep the website as clean as possible and remove all visual clutter, so your customers can focus only on the important website elements. We can also call it “empty space” since it’s not necessarily tied to the white color, it’s just a spot with no relevant content, providing a breathing room for your users.

Wavemaker Labs website makes great use of this trend, as you can see here:

Without visual clutter out of the way, your users are encouraged to explore your website and find out what they require, without being overwhelmed by too much content.

5. Focus on User Experience (UX)

There is no other way to top this article but to talk about the biggest web design trend:

User Experience.

Let’s face it — the website users of today are used to modern designs, and having a “2000s” style just won’t cut it.

If you think about it, all web design really comes down to providing the best possible experience for our users. We want to make sure they are visually entertained while quickly providing them with relevant information.

Although some trends in this article may break some visual UX rules by being messy and lacking clarity, they still provide the optimal user experience in other ways. The most important UX element in 2019 is to have a mobile-friendly website, as more than 52% of global website traffic now comes from mobile devices.

On top of all that, UX statistics show that mobile users are 5 times more likely to close your website if it isn’t mobile optimized, and for 48% of them it leads to frustration and annoyance, and no website owner wants that.

Apart from having a mobile-friendly website, it should also be visually clear and easy to navigate.

Having poor UI/UX will lead to more bounces, fewer sales and overall dissatisfaction from your users. By keeping up with the latest web design trends, you are also keeping up with the customer demand which works in your favor and grows your businesses, day in and day out.