2023 is just about here and as we enter this final year of the decade, expect to find your feeds flooded with year-in-review and even decade-in-review listcicles. Looking through past trends is a fun way to see how far we’ve come, but when you’re planning a website design – or redesign – look to the future using cutting edge web design modern trends.
Computer rendering capabilities improve every year, so take advantage of all the new ways people are viewing your website by giving them something fresh, something that tantalizes their senses and shows them they’re looking at some great content.
Cutting Edge Web Design Trends
Ready to design like it’s 2023? Check out eight web trends that are gonna be big next year:
Glitches Cutting Edge Web Design Modern Trends
It can feel like the line between the digital world and the natural world is blurring faster than ever before. Don’t expect that to change in 2023. Expect it to become even more of a focal point, and designers will play with this concept and work “what if?” scenarios into their designs. What if a massive DDOS attack locked you out of your checking account or made it impossible for you to order groceries?
Think of all the stuff in your house that uses the Internet of Things. Now think about what might happen if your refrigerator or the keypad to enter your home got hacked…or if Alexa decided to revolt.
It might sound far-fetched, but in 2023, it’s not. And that’s what glitch art plays with. Glitchy designs remind us that we’re just humans living in a rapidly digitizing world and that none of us can be sure where we fit into that digital world…or how we’ll make sense of its breakdown.
Organic Shapes
There was a time when the average screen’s resolution limited the kinds of graphics that could appear on websites. Website grids were very obvious; design elements had corners and angles, and symmetry. That’s not the case anymore.
Continuing with our theme of the digital world meets the natural world, one of 2023’s standout web design trends will be the use of natural-looking, organic-feeling shapes that crawl, ooze, and drip down device screens. Shapes like this remind us of nature because nature isn’t perfect. Think of a vine snaking up a garden wall or raindrop splatters on a window.
These shapes feel alive. They feel fresh. As you plan your website’s new design, use a design that looks hand-drawn to give it life using the design future trends.
Diversity in Cutting Edge Web Design Modern Trends
The internet connects the world. Now, you can chat with somebody on another continent and accept a job in a country you’ve never been to. In 2023, designers will be ramping up efforts to show the world as it really is through diverse images.
Diversity in design is nothing new. Remember when Apple added multiple skin tone options to its emojis? Expect more moves in this direction in 2023. Expect to see images of people with different skin tones, people from different cultures, people from across the gender spectrum and at different phases of life in the designs coming next year.
The internet isn’t just for young cis white people, and designers are making that clear. Expect to see a whole lot fewer stock photos and a whole lot more raw, real, candid images from the lives people live because showing humanity’s diverse range of experiences is communicating our diversity and our strength.
Screen-friendly Serifs Cutting Edge Web Design Modern Trends
Just like organic shapes are becoming popular because technology’s made them possible, get ready to see more serif fonts on your screens in 2023. For a long time, it was rare to find serif fonts on webpages because they can make copy hard to read. And that’s still true.
If you’ve got dense blocks of web copy, a serif font probably isn’t the right choice.
But for the bigger content on your website, like your headers and your call to action, a serif font can class it up and draw your reader’s eye exactly where you want it to go. Use a serif font to separate bodies of text that are meant to stand out and text that really communicates who your brand is, like your logo.
Site visitors might not notice why they’re drawn to your font because let’s face it, people who aren’t designers just don’t analyze fonts that closely, but trust that choosing a bold serif font will make your site feel fresh because people just aren’t used to seeing them on websites.
Video, Video, Video
Video’s been getting more and more popular since the beginning of the 2010s, and that trend’s not slowing down in 2023. Just the opposite is happening: it’s ramping up.
Why? A few reasons. One is that Google recently changed its search algorithm to push websites with video content higher on search engine returns than standard pages. Another is that video just makes communication fast and easy.
Reading takes time, even when the text is short. Video gets your message across without making the viewer slow down, stop what they’re doing and focus on your site’s text. Video’s also easy to share, making it the perfect medium for getting short bursts of information out to the world.
A video on your website doesn’t even have to be that complicated. It can also just be an easy way to get away from boring, static backgrounds. Use a video background to show off your brand in action.
Better Conversations with Chatbots Cutting Edge Web Design Modern Trends
We bet many of you remember SmarterChild and the less popular AIM chatbots. And more recently, you’ve probably had conversations with Siri or Google Assistant.
In 2023, expect to have more conversations with chatbots. And expect them to be smarter.
Advances in machine learning and AI have made it possible for chatbots to learn more about the people they speak with and get them to what they’re looking for, automating many of the interactions that would have previously required an email or a phone call.
Expect chatbots to be featured more prominently on the websites you visit, more responsive to your inquiries and more personable than they’ve been in the past with friendly faces.
Black and White
You know how important your color palette is to your overall branding. You probably spent a lot of time constructing the perfect color palette that tells as much of your story as a color palette can tell.
That was great…in 2018. In 2023, all the cool kids will be dropping the colors and going for a bold black-and-white look.
Black is bold. It’s assertive. It’s loud. White is clean, crisp, and stark. Together, they create images you can’t look away from. Without color, your eyes are drawn more to the textures and shapes in the images. You need to slow down and look twice, which’ll require you to temporarily hit the “pause” button on our lightning-fast modern web world.
Don’t take this to mean colors are going away completely. On tomorrow’s striking web pages, color is going to be used selectively to highlight critical information and calls to action – the content that converts.
Microinteractions
Microinteractions are those little animations that happen when you mouse over images and pieces of text. They’re feedback that says “hey, yes we see what you’re doing.” The most effective microinteractions are the ones the user doesn’t expect.
Make them fun, make them pop, make them feel inviting and warm and, despite being just bits of animation on a screen, human.
Not all microinteractions are animation. Some are sounds. And not all micro interactions are for mouseovers; some happen as the user scrolls or inputs data. No matter how they’re used, they’re used to recognize what the user’s doing.
They bridge that gap between warm human user and cold, unfeeling device. In that way, they’re not too different from chatbots and organic shapes – they make web pages feel like they have lives of their own.
Need a Designer to Bring your Website?
Want more web design inspiration? Check out the amazing website designs on 99designs. There’s a million ways to twist and reimagine all of next year’s up-and-coming web design trends and we can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!
