An overview of the ongoing trends: Flat design, Material design, Parallax Effect and other design techniques!

Design is an accepted way to present what you have to offer and the way how you design, matters. The use of design techniques and the method is usually influenced by the current trends.

Trends doesn’t show up in a day or a week, they take time to flourish but sometimes they do disappear all of a sudden. Consistency is highly unpredictable, whatever in trends now may or may not exist in 2017.

This is the year that not just brought new designs but also kicked off some old designs with a refined look. Almost the entire web felt back the old era in a modern way with retro, flat and material designs.

It’s almost mid of 2016 and by this time all the designs are supposed to be outdated. However, some of them are still flying high. In this article we will together explore those trends that make most of the designs on web.

Material Design

By using this design type you can add quite a unique elegance of real 3d world into your designs. This design makes use of light/shadows, depth and wave like movement in animations to give some sense of realism. Though Google introduced this design only for mobile and web but now material design is being used in all kind of design formats. Google’s design has a lot of similarities with its competitor design flat design that’s why some people prefer to call it as Flat 2.0. Also, a lot of material design frameworks have been developed to help web developers incorporate material design into a website easily.

Being a minimalistic and clean design, it leaves a great impression on visitor’s mind with a feeling of realism but to the negative side sometimes the shadow effect looks exaggerated.

Nothing can be better than Google’s own website, which is a perfect example of material design.

You can check out the full site here.

Flat Design

Flat design makes use of minimalistic styling techniques in illustrations which conveys the meaning much better than detailed illustrations. While material design is more towards realism on the other hand flat design more towards idealism i.e. making use of illustrations and flat colors to make a scenery. Many tools paid or free are available for incorporating Flat design in the web design. In Flat design techniques things are kept in utmost simplicity and it makes use of space around the elements in the best possible way.

Talking about the pros, Flat design techniques can be used to give any feeling to a web design or illustration be it warmness, coolness or professionalism. They convey more meaning to illustrations than other techniques used. The major advantage over Material Design is that it reduces the amount of code used in making a website since shadows, depth effects are not necessary in flat design. However, on the flip side some Flat Designs result in misuse of color and contrast.

I have selected two different examples for you, check out these Flat designs available here at Freepik.

The above image shows a beautiful scene of nature captured in a flat design. Oh wait! I don’t think I have to explain what’s in the image. Being a flat design, every image speaks by itself. With one glimpse, you will understand what the design wants to portray.

Modern Retro

Refining the elements of past with the effects of present is what makes a design look Modern Retro. Talking about Retro, we remember it as an era of designs with both sharp and faded colors, old techs like floppy disks, cassette players, handheld gaming consoles, black & white TV set and much more. All this stuff may be considered outdated now but still we love to relive those memories.

That’s why unlike other designs, Modern Retro design is not something new, it’s about using the same old styles by adding the touch of current era and crispiness. The famous term “Old is Gold” perfectly fits here.

Adapting the design of Modern Retro into a website helps gain the trust of users as they like to see what they already know rather than using a completely unfamiliar one.

Some of the examples of Modern Retro designed here at Freepik:

Modular Design

Modular Design is a mix of variable sized blocks or modules that fit inside a single grid. This design stands true to its purpose as it allows a visitor to get an eye on various contents at the same time. These modules can be arranged in a certain pattern or be placed in random with a slight space in between.

Some modular designs do support infinite scrolling, an example of which we know as Facebook where independent modules with variable content are displayed in a single frame.

It leaves us with an advantage of quick loading of content in-comparison to the page system. Though there is an added disadvantage as well of not knowing which content is where, in case you went deep down and want to directly jump back into some (since everything is on same page). In that case all you have to do is just keep your eyes open when scrolling back upwards.

Check out the following image of a temperature app.

Though, you want to see the present day temperature but at the same time you will get an idea of how much hot/cold the coming days are going to be.

Parallax Scrolling

Parallax is an effect in which when you scroll a webpage, the image in a particular container (with parallax effect applied) moves at a different speed from the rest of the page.

Parallax effect is generally applied with an image in the background of some foreground content usually text or videos. So that when you scroll, it gives an illusion of foreground text or video frame in that container being still while the background image as moving at a different rate than the rest of the page.

Check out the following website to see how efficiently they have implemented parallax effect into their design.

ANAKIN

Other Miscellaneous

Apart from the design techniques discussed above there are lot more approaches to web design seen since last year such as the use of large background images to convey the message to the desired audience through the use of that image.

Some websites do fill their hero area with a background video in order to tell their story. These videos carry out the brand message through the audience and therefore help the brand establish its trust. To the disadvantage, I can say not everyone have a good internet connection to play high quality video and hence the buffers may result in design fail.

Last but not the least, some website owners instead of a stock photo, use their personal photo on the homepage and it really works by contributing towards brand building. I have seen that visitors like genuine websites rather than those who operate anonymously. In comparison to a stock photo or sometimes even regardless of the content, visitors are more interested to know who is the owner of the website and his lifestyle.

Well that’s all I have discovered till now. If you have anything to add or want to correct, do leave your comments below.