Sara McGuire — January 26, 2017 Follow @sara_mcguireNow that 2017 is here, businesses are going to make good on their goals for the new year. For many businesses, updating their UI and visual content is one of those goals.
Part of keeping your brand relevant is keeping it fresh. Staying on top of the latest design trends is a good place to start. After all, you probably want to position your brand as a trendsetter, right?
If you haven’t updated your site’s design in a while, it might be time to give your site a makeover based on some of these trends that are going to dominate 2017.
Many of the biggest design trends this year are going to be taking cues from Google’s Material Design. One of the key tenets of Google’s design language is flat design that places equal importance in intuitive functionality and pleasing aesthetics.
We’ve already seen this in the increase of card-based UI, and that’s a trend that is going to carry on into this year.
Vibrant Colors
But we’re also going to see an increase in “unexpected and vibrant” colors, as the Material Design handbook calls them, as opposed to the more neutral and muted color schemes that dominated the previous couple of years. We’re also going to see a lot of bold color filters applied to images, like gradients and dutones.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is also going to dominate typography. Offering more than 810 free fonts that are versatile across multiple platforms, we can expect to see fonts like Roboto and Open Sans on the regular.
Truer Minimalism
Perhaps one of the most significant trends this year will be a projected shift towards designs that express a truer minimalism than we have seen over the past few years. While Apple popularized pared down designs and neutral color schemes that focused on bringing information and functionality forward, that style has been co-opted many times over by other brands who focus on the neutral style but fail to let the functionality shine through.
Some critics have even accused Apple of losing touch with their original focus on user-friendliness.
This year, minimalist design will return to its roots by suing bold colors, clean lines, crystal-clear fonts, and card-based organizational of information, bringing information and functionality back to the forefront. And, once again, Google is one of the major players in this shift.
Hand-Drawn Illustrations
One trend that we already saw gain popularity in 2017 was a rise in the use of hand-drawn illustrations in brands’ ad and site content. Hand-drawn illustrations are playful and stand out from the droves of standard edited stock photos. These illustrations ad a personal touch that a lot of people are missing in this age of mass-generated content.
Venngage, a graphic design software, published this infographic listing eight of the top design trends to watch in 2017:
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