Dear Designer: It’s time to get trendy!
Welcome back to our Dear Designer series! A recurring post that shares insights, tips, and stories from our team to you, our fellow designers. As the year kicks off, we’re putting together our New Year’s resolutions of design trends we’d like to try in the upcoming year.
Text-only landing:
Typography is one of the most important elements in any design. Through its size, color, and placement, typography can go beyond a means to convey information and become a design element of its own. A text-only landing is a great alternative for someone looking for a bold, non-traditional design to stand out from the many full-bleed image landing pages. I’d like to explore using large, bold text and high-contrast colors to create an eye-catching landing page.
Editorial Layout:
Editorial design involves creating layouts for print. The content is aligned on a grid, often using a three-column grid. A layout like this is perfect for a site with a story to tell and a lot of content that needs to be broken up. Translating this static, storytelling layout to a responsive website seems like such a unique challenge to tackle this year.
Oversized footers:
Oversized footers save the best for last as users scroll to the bottom of a website. These large footers have more than just navigation links. They can be styled with bold colors, large graphics, and other design elements. A design like this would be perfect for a site with a lot of information they want available to the user without the section being too congested.
Written by: Chelsea Davis, Junior Web Designer
Parallax scrolling:
Parallax has been with us for a long time, but what’s interesting about how designers have been experimenting with it lately, is that they pair them alongside animated graphics or dynamic imagery. Thinking about how the user can follow the narrative of a site while interacting with branded elements at the same time. I’d be interested in seeing more of this on restaurant websites, so I will challenge myself to find those opportunities since we work with so many great brands and could utilize this to bring importance to specific messaging or CTA’s.
Large Buttons:
One of the “smallest” elements that can be emphasized this year are buttons and, more specifically, prominent CTAs. These actionable items are super essential to drive a website’s narrative and grab the user’s attention. Knowing that many people will not scroll through an entire page, we have an opportunity to ensure the main call to action is noticed. Especially on restaurant websites, there are so many exciting announcements and information we want the user to digest that I think, particularly on landing, we can explore exciting layouts that focus on a primary CTA or two to drive the restaurant’s messaging.
Grids:
Each year, there is some form of a grid trend in place throughout not just web design but all design formats. People love order and structure when digesting a brand’s story, so it makes sense why we’d want to find new and improved solutions to iterate on year after year. If you know me, I LOVE a good divider line or border, so sign me up for any type of grid or compartment design. This setup has the potential to create user-friendly structures that enhance the user experience by presenting information in an easy-to-digest, visually appealing format that feels like a step beyond a standard layout. We’ve pushed the boundaries of what this means on BentoBox sites so far, and I’d love to continue exploring new ways to approach our content types in a grid manner.
Written by: Kayla Scheidel, Senior Manager of Web Design
