By Priyanka Jain

Introduction

With technological revolution, we have seen some of the major developments in web design with layouts, design and functionality. Companies are putting a lot of competition in the market to get the innovative and attractive web design in today’s world.

Since the last 10 years we have witnessed evolution in web design which reflects changing factors, tools and technology of the time. First website was made around 1991 with a simple text-based page with only a few links. Now websites have come a long way with high speed and a better design process.

Journey of Web Design

Nowadays creative web design has empowered us to build rich user experiences while browsing the website. In earlier days of internet websites were only text based with basic functionality and few graphics. Web design has changed a lot if we compare it with beginning architecture.

About 30 years ago, websites were around text only because they were accessed through dial up modems and designers had to be conscious while working on web design. Navigation, layout, advanced graphics were not there to make the website interactive and attractive.

Let’s take a look on some major breakdown of how web design has been evolved in past years

Factors That Impacted Web Design

With the advancement of technology, users want fully interactive web design that displays the content logically and ensures that pages load quickly. Changes in web design happen more rapidly and there have been revolutionary factors that impacted website designing.

1. Responsive web Design: Launch of smartphones and tablets generated the need for flexible designs so that  pages could be adjusted to all screen sizes. Designers started working to strip away unnecessary design that increases the load time of web pages
2. HTML and CSS: Adoption of HTML helped the designers in creating appealing and user-friendly web pages. While CSS gave the designers a way to have control over web designs with more opportunities for creativity. Both these made the web pages to work flawlessly.
3. Platforms and Tools: WordPress, Sketch, Figma, Magento, jQuery are some of the platforms and tools which improved the process of web designing in the past 10 years. Platforms and tools helped the designers to communicate their ideas more efficiently.
4. Mobile Devices: There were times when people were dependent on desktop computers to browse the websites but introduction of mobile phones brought many changes in web design. It leads to fast mobile websites and applications.
5. Programming Languages: JavaScript frameworks and libraries helped the designers to decrease the time of coding every little thing manually. Python, C#, Java became essential in backend development of websites.

2021 Web Design Trends

1. Minimalist Web Design: We Designers are working on websites for simple and streamlined user experience. Minimal design is not a new trend but designers are ready to experiment with this by adding more color schemes. Objective is to catch user attention with clear and easy to read information.
2. Dark Mode: To make design pop out from the screen designers are considering using dark mode themes in the background of web pages. It will also help in reducing eye strain as everyone spends more time looking at screens. It also creates a modern look for the website while adding the ability to highlight other design elements.
3. Augmented Reality: To make the website designing easy, accurate and better, web designers are focussed on augmented reality functionality. Many retail and ecommerce companies are working on augmented reality for selling their products to improve customer journey in the buying process.
4. Animation: To help users with interactive websites and enhance experience, web designers are working on animated elements for adding them on websites. It is an effective way for storytelling and informing users about brands, services and products. It also increases the user engagement on the website.
5. Neomorphism: 3-dimensions shapes in the form of buttons and other elements is called Neomorphism which combines the two concepts skeuomorphism and material design. Web designers are trying to create the illusion of extruded shapes with internal / outer shadows which matches the real-life objects. It will help in representing a detailed design with highlights of any product.
6. Asymmetric Layouts: It will help in a more dynamic page with freedom in design. It uses typography, layering imagery with other design elements for presenting creative design. Added advantage will be creating designs as per needs.
7. Artificial Intelligence: AI in web design will help in predicting customer choices to shape the look and feel of the website. It will also introduce chatbots, ADI technology, and voice-based interactions in web designing.

Conclusion

People spend more time on browsing the information and it’s competitive for web designers to gain more engagement and attention. This results in redesigning the website creation to plan website journey.

In upcoming days we will likely see a lot of synergies between the trends that we have discussed. Web designers are trying their best to design their sites based on user experience and expectation. Upcoming days are going to be very critical as it will show how technology will evolve with the physical world.

Designers are working hard to think about how web design can bring change in user experience and in order to create it designers must learn from the past that even small technological change brought something new in web designing.

Resources

1. https://bootstrapbay.com/blog/how-web-development-and-design-have-changed-over-the-last-decade/
2. https://www.lullabot.com/articles/the-evolution-of-design-tools
3. https://www.canva.com/learn/web-design-history/
4. https://everconvert.com/evolution-of-web-design-over-the-years/
5. https://www.ryadel.com/en/html-css-web-site-development-html5-css3-2018/
6. https://jellyfish.tech/web-development-evolution-from-2000s-to-2020/
7. https://webflow.com/blog/web-design-trends-2021
8. https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/ui-ux-design-trends/