Immersive user experience is of vital importance and the UI designers strive for it. In today’s mobile-driven world, when the user interface design Trends keep on changing rapidly, the designers must get to know what is currently popular among the users.

By following the UI design trends, they can make their websites successful with higher web traffic and better user engagement.

Every year new design trends develop to bring the radical change in the user experience for the coming years.

It is certain that the year 2018 will bring new challenges and opportunities for the UI design industry.

In the current age of machine learning, VR or VUI (Voice User Interface), and AR, we can expect the following trends to become more popular in 2018 and beyond.

A few of these trends are already in practice as the designers have started putting their efforts in making the user experience more lifelike and personalized since the year 2016. Pokémon Go is an epitome of such efforts.

All these trends indicate the fact that the lifeless experience will no longer prevail as the user passes through the paradigm shift from seeing to experiencing things.

Let us go through these top seven UI design trends:

1. Long Form Content

We already know the importance of content in the online world. From SEO purpose to engaging users, the demand of content is increasing at a steady pace for various reasons.

However, ‘below the fold’ content has remained a big headache for the designers. Such an extended content can pose a great challenge in the way of offering interactive and pleasant user experience.

We can certainly predict that we would see the new trends to get rid of long-form content in 2018.

One of the ways for it is to include video. A full-screen video can convey the whole aspect more interestingly and interactively while occupying little space. An immersive video has an excellent capacity of storytelling. It is highly effective and one of the most engaging mediums in the online world.

In the current AR and VR-driven age, the video can offer a completely immersive experience to the users.

Be it branding or spreading the message, a video in HD quality can work wonders. The year 2018 will see the dominance of HD and cinema-worthy videos.

2. Typography Prevails

Whether the webpage is filled with long-form content or has full-page images or videos, typography is all set to steal the show in 2018. The concept of minimalism would advance this year and we would see some fabulous examples of creative typography.

Also, as the UI designers tend to use the oversized headline in the web page, we can expect bigger writings, or say supersized typography.

Actually, the concept of big text is not new. It has grabbed the attention of the designers when the flat design was in trend. As the flat design needs minimal and simplistic typography, the only option is to increase the size of text in absence of any other style. Now, as the supersized typography is the in-thing, we would see the flat design to take a back seat gradually.

The bigger, and at times, larger-than-life type of text readily grabs the attention of the user and increases the reading time. After all, this is an ultimate goal of any UI design!

3. Simplicity Rocks

There is no denial of the fact that simple is always attractive when it comes to the UI. Even big text and minimalistic design are also a part of the concept of simplicity. The year 2018 would witness a plethora of websites or apps with simple and easy UI to attract and retain the user.

Be it the color combination or usage of gradients and Illustrations, the designers will keep simplicity in mind to tell the unique story effectively. We can expect the rise in the usage of sophisticated and simple illustrations to offer a pleasant experience to the website visitors.

One more advantage of a simple design is mobile-friendliness. As we see the surge in the number of smartphone users every year, time is now to make a website mobile-friendly.

As a result, most of the UI design trends revolve around making the website as simple as possible. Instead of using flashy UI elements, the UI designers will bank on interactive animations or chatbots in the future.

Babbit and NeoTokio have used illustrations quite impressively and innovatively. Check how they have made all things simple:

We can expect the arrival of many websites with simple and user-friendly design in 2018 onward.

4. Goodbye Grid

It’s time to bid the grid all adieus. However, the grid will not go anywhere instantly; we can certainly expect that gradually, grid will go off. As the trend of borderless design emerges as one of the most important UI trends, fluid storytelling concept has started replacing chunky borders. The iPhone X has introduced us to this trend.

The sleek and borderless design will remain on the center stage this year, and as a result, we may not see the use of grid much in designing.

Traditionally, the grid-based systems enable designers to create consistent and logical blueprints, but, the newfound concept of “edgeless” screens has minimized the importance of the grid-based system.

Adventurous UI designers will explore beyond the grid throughout 2018 with a whole new thinking.

Fluid and borderless design will give new heights to the exceptional and interactive UI. We can expect the complete elimination of rigid lines in favor of fluid designs.

5. Cards will Rule

One of the most significant trends of the previous years, cards, is expected to remain highly popular user interface design trend in 2018.

One of the reasons for the growing popularity of cards is they are awesome for small screens. They occupy a little space and can share a lot of details effectively.

What’s more, designers can readily integrate cards in the mobile version or a responsive version. Even the search engine giant Google has included cards in its material design, so we can certainly say that cards are here to stay.

Cards are miniature or condensed web pages that include basic information like title, a username, a picture, and a brief product description.

Another good thing about Cards is they can come in all kind of shapes and sizes depending on the requirements or the choice of site owners.

Let’s see the example of the card-dominated web page. You will probably recognize instantly that this is a Pinterest page.

Yes, one of the most successful examples of card-based web design is Pinterest. Many websites have imitated this style after Pinterest.

Websites related to news, real estate, and weather can get the most from card-based design. Even social networking sites and eCommerce sites can also leverage the benefits of cards.

It is not that the concept of cards is a new one, but in the mobile-driven era, the importance of cards has grown significantly.

6. Color Overlays

‘An image speaks a thousand words’- the saying becomes more relevant in the age of technology. The right composition of high-quality image shots on your website can make you won the half battle!

In other words, such images assure at least 50 percent that the appearance of your website will look appealing. Color overlays can enable you to come up with impressive images that can enable you to make a good website.

7. Illustrations, Illustrations

When it comes to creating a visual language that suits the brand’s identity, customized illustrations beat the traditional photography. Illustrations provide personality to any product or brand that translates into authenticity and improves trust among users and customers.

In a way, illustrations can enable companies to create a meaningful and long-lasting connection with their customers.

That’s not all! Do you know that even a less visible UI may come in the future?

Remember we mentioned VUI (Voice User Interface) in the second paragraph as an evolving tech concept. Now, we cannot rule out one possibility: the increasing use of VUI will probably reduce the UI relevance.

Now, let us have a glimpse of some other minor but very likely UI trends for 2018:

1. Animation

Today, browsers can handle animations very well, and therefore, subtle animations with less flashy elements will dominate in the future to offer a better UX.

2. SVG

As a high quality, scalable graphics, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) will gain more popularity as compared to traditional PNGs, JPGs, and GIFs in 2018 onward.

3. Geometric Shapes

Lines, circles, and other geometric patterns can fit well with the flat design. We can expect the trend of adding geometric shapes in the web design, which has started back in 2016, will become more popular in 2018.

Also, the year 2018 and coming years will increase the need for collaboration between the designers and other professionals. For example, long-form content needs talented writers, whereas typography requires services of web developers.

Concluding lines:

In brief, we can state that we will see more experiments in the UI design in 2018. UI designers will tend to break the rules, take risks, and do experiments to offer immersive, interactive, and pleasant user experience on every device.

We can consider these seven major trends as a tip of the iceberg. There is much more to come in the web design arena. It is interesting to see what the year 2018 brings for us.

At Solwin Infotech, our experienced web developers and designers always stay in touch with the UI trends to provide the excellent user experience. Experience how our designers use the trends and cutting-edge tools to develop futuristic and user-friendly websites.

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