Top 5 graphic design trends for 2018
As they say, content is king. Web content means not only text, but also illustrations, photos, charts, animations, video and other visuals as well. To provide attractive and engaging content for your website or app you need to avoid content marketing mistakes and follow web design trends. The later will be discussed today. Let’s look at what graphic design trends will continue being popular and how they will develop and change in 2018.
Main graphic design trends for 2018:
Gradients (color transitions)
When the famous brand Instagram changed its logo from a Polaroid image in a skeuomorphism style into a more simple icon in vibrant gradient colors, it was just the beginning of this trend’s rise.
Skype supported color transitions and designed new themes made in multiple color gradients to highlight the lines in dialogues.
Color transitions will be keep on being applied in the near future as website backgrounds and other website elements. You can use gradients either on their own (like Mixpanel did), so that the space don’t look as boring and shallow as one plain color, or as overlays over images (like NYC Pride did).
Double exposure duotone
Two-toned images were originally obtained by printing one halftone on top of another halftone of an another color. In duotone, this old printing technique has found new life today in the digital era, making web design eye-catching. In addition, duotone is a way for you to reuse stock photography in a unique way.
Many websites (like NewDealDesign) and applications were using vibrant duotones last year. However, we expect classical duotone to be done, and double exposure duotone and other iterations of this trend to develop in 2018.
Animations and cinemagraphs
One more graphic design trend in 2018 will be moving visuals of different forms and formats. The GIF format, used for soundless short looping animations, will be more and more applied for animated logos, landing pages (like Bloom’s home page), app interfaces, email newsletters banner advertisement, etc.
Something in between an animation and a completely still image — cinemagraph — is making a come back and is in web design trend again in 2018! Subtle repeated motion of a selective image part (like on The Deep End’s header) can unobtrusively occupy users’ attention and bring life to a website.
Bold typography
Typography plays an important role in web design. Not only what is written, but how it’s written matters. In 2018 we can observe a tendency towards extremes — huge font sizes and huge headlines. The bigger the letters, the better impact. This way large but simple shapes allow readers to focus on the actual message that the inscription conveys behind its typography. Sans Serif will dominate when it comes to fonts.
Typeface often creates a sensation of real-life objects when being a part of the composition, tightly interacting with other design elements.
Hand-drawn illustrations
Custom artwork and illustrations drawn by hand will never go out of style and popularity, because they always bring a special vibe to the piece of art and add uniqueness to a brand.
So in 2018 designers can feel free to express their creativity and use hand-drawn illustrations in combination with photography (like Mamy Factory does), negative space, 3D structures and other graphic design trends. This variations and experimental fusions give the composition a new, edgy look.
Conclucion
So 2018 will be the year of bright, vibrant and bold colors as well as bold, huge typology. Color transitions, duotones, double exposures, custom photography and hand-drawn illustrations will gain vast applications in web design in 2018 and will be combined with each other, making up subtrends. There is so much space to experiment! Our web designers will make your brand look trendy.