Design Trends
Keeping up with design trends is important as a website is a user more likely to stay and engage if it looks and feels new and exciting. These web trends have been sourced from pages dedicated to looking out for and analysing them.
Floating Navigation Menus
Floating menus are a way of incorporating sticky header menus into a design but make it feel more like it is part of the site and less part of a browser. They are done by adding in the menu so that is a few pixels below the top of the page. Often a sticky header can be just a bar slapped across the top of the page can look a bit boring and interfere with the rest of the design.
Weecom’s website demonstrates how the menu can make a design feel like a 3D element. It enhances the websites animations as the website scrolls and makes it more dynamic. Williams (2017) says this technique “reinforces the feeling that the navigation is a global object, not necessarily a part of any one page, but there to follow you reassuringly through the site”. The menu bar does move to the footer, but this is to make the site more useable as the header is so close to the screen centre.
Loop Backgrounds
Looped backgrounds are essentially a way of adding video to a site in a more fluid way than an embedded Youtube clip. They create a high quality image, unlike a gif, and create an unusual background which is more engaging. It’s a good way of saying less and instead showing. In the case of Blacknegative, it has been used to highlight their business in a creative and engaging way. This technique is particularly good for sites like National Geographic who are based a lot in using dramatic, high quality images.
Oversized Typography
Using huge typography on a page like this immediately catches the audience’s attention and creates an instant hierarchy in the design. The impact of this text with the audience is that it can make the opening statement more memorable. By using the large type, it contrasts with the rest of a page even on the smaller mobile sites. The text can be enhanced by a textural image background instead of an intricate illustration which can make the site feel more modern.
Williams, J. (2017). 19 web design trends for 2018 | Webflow Blog. [online] Webflow.com. Available at: https://webflow.com/blog/19-web-design-trends-for-2018 [Accessed 14 Oct. 2018].
