The 2021 web design trends review is here! See how renowned designers are designing their websites and how their trends are becoming best practices for web creation in 2021.
Design trends are often influenced by cultural changes that happen around the world. This year, we experienced remarkably dramatic changes in the digital design sphere. COVID-19 has put us in quarantine, pushing us to delve deeper into the digital world, and changing the way we live our lives. The remote, stay at home reality we’ve been faced with has challenged designers to recreate real-life experiences and make them available digitally.
Web creators have risen to the occasion by exploring multiple avenues of visual communication that can generate increased levels of engagement. This includes novelty typography art, unusual color schemes, 3D product simulations for online shoppers, to name a few.
In these 12 examples, you will find individual trends that each accommodate separate industries and user personas. It’s key to remember that implementing these styles isn’t merely an aesthetic decision. It is essentially a balancing act between quality and quantity. This means that applying as many trends as possible to one website will not achieve our web creation goals. Deciding which specific trend suits our business goals, however, is what will positively impact our audiences and their course of action.
The old belief of using sans serif fonts as the go-to font style for web design has been changing with the times. Indeed, sans serif fonts have always been loved by web designers for their sleek legibility and simple structure.
Fast forward to 2021: screen sizes and resolutions are larger and clearer than they once were. Contrary to their “outdated” predecessors, such as CRT monitors of the 1980s, the screens we now design for are more inviting to decorated, heavier serif fonts. Larger screens, for example, enable serif fonts to appear less cluttered and more readable — thanks to increased space around the words. Likewise, the higher resolution makes the heavier or more illustrious letters look clearer.
There are actually specific serif font families that designers have come to love, where we’ve noticed a pronounced preference for “elegant”-style fonts. Examples of such include the well-known font families Georgia or Times (both found in Google Fonts). Less well-known fonts have also become popular — such as Portrait or Noe Display.
As we see in the example above, ferdu.be (who by the way, was a winner for our August 2020 Showcase), uses Noe Display for their hero text, which is without a doubt highly legible and clear upon its dark background. There is a plentiful amount of space around the text so that each letter is clearly carved and distinguishable.