Some web design trends for 2024

Your website reflects the face of your business. No one wants their website to look dull and out of date. Awareness of the latest website design trends means ensuring your website keeps attracting visitors. It’s not about chasing the latest fads, which you should be careful to avoid, but rather understanding the current state of best practices and applying them to your site where relevant.

Fluid layouts

Fluid layouts are fully scalable and ‘fluid’ design systems that mean a website no longer snaps to predefined breakpoints and instead proportionally scales to a user’s viewport, ensuring a more consistent experience for users across devices. In design terms, this means no longer using pixel-based measurements but instead percentages.

Elements within the grid adjust proportionally so the layout smoothly adapts to different sizes. This is the most effective way to ensure your website looks great on all devices. With the rise of new device types, such as smartphones with folding screens, like the Galaxy Z fold, ensuring your website is perfectly flexible to whatever device your visitor is using is more important than ever.

Focus on accessibility

Website accessibility is nothing new, but new developments this year mean it’s receiving more attention than ever. The WCAG standards, which set out the official requirements for websites to reach different levels of accessibility, have recently published updated guidance – WCAG 2.2, currently in draft and due to be finalised in late 2023.

In the UK, all public sector websites have been required to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards since 2018. The updates to the WCAG guidelines mean that web design teams will be looking to accessibility afresh in 2024 and building more accessible websites than ever before.

Retro style

It is now 2023, and the 90s are midern again.

Fashion moves in cycles, and strange as it may seem, there’s now enough time between us and the early 90s that a current pop star’s music videos deliberately cultivate a 90s look.

Web designs are not immune to this. Certain websites are embarrassing 90s or 2000s fashion trends and applying them to their design. Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery, for example, opted for a nostalgic, 90s-inspired design for its new website.

It’s fun, quirky, and stands out from the crowd. It’s a great example of how trends can be unpredictable. They don’t always go one way. Sometimes, you must leap back into the past to be cutting edge.

Microinteractions

Microinteractions in web design are subtle interactive elements that enhance user engagement and experience. They provide feedback, guide user behaviour, and serve various functions such as loading indicators, form validation, and gamification.

These small design elements play a significant role in brand identity and contribute to user satisfaction and usability on websites and digital applications. The interaction itself may be just a simple animation on a button to indicate a change of status, but these little elements of movement help bring a website to life.

By giving the user subtle clues about changes in status or interactive elements, they can help improve the UX whilst adding to the aesthetic feel of the website, such as in the example below.

A simple but effective micro-interaction website rotates the hamburger menu to indicate when it is opened. Or you can animate it to become a cross, indicating that you tap there to close it once opened.