Our top 5 website trends for 2020

2019 saw a lot of advances in website design, below are what we think will be popular throughout 2020:

Imperfect hand-drawn designs

Including imperfect hand-drawn design elements as shown in the examples below allows you to showcase your personality and bring a personal, sometimes emotional touch to your website. In doing so, the end-user can begin to relate to your brand and its values.

An example of this can be seen throughout Mailchimp’s website design and marketing activities.

Mixing photography with graphics

Another way to add personality to your website, which we expect to be a huge trend throughout 2020, is to customise your imagery included in your website design, by mixing photography with graphics. Overlapping graphics on top of real photographs allows you to add your own personal spin on the photograph and what you’re trying to represent with it, which most importantly makes it more memorable.

However, this trend can also be used in a more formal manner to further explain complicated concepts, processes etc. Whilst the trend is versatile it is important to know that the illustrations/graphic used to overlap should match and follow the style of your existing brand guidelines to remain recognisable as your work.

This trend was used in our birthday post back in October.

Horizontal scrolling

A trend we expect to see throughout 2020, which could be considered a shift in user experience (UX) in website design, is horizontal scrolling. People no longer expect all content to be squeezed onto one screen. This gives web designers the opportunity to tease content without forcing the end-user to scroll down significantly.

A great example of this can be seen on Tesla’s website.

Solid frames of whitespace

This trend is something we had already adopted throughout our website designs at mso in the latter end of 2019 and something we will continue this year. By framing an image allows it to stand out more within the website design and is perfect to draw attention and highlight the key images or graphics within the website.

We incorporated this trend throughout the design in one of our recent projects, Bedford Modern School.

Dark mode

With many following on from the industry leaders Apple ‘Dark Mode’ (shown below) arrived in September with iOS 13 for iPhones and has been appearing pretty much everywhere ever since. This trend will give your website an ultra-modern feel and make it visually appealing, especially when teamed with a contrasting colour to make elements ‘pop’.

Keeping your website on trend

Inspired to update your website from the trends above? Get in touch with our Business Development Manager Sam to discuss any plans you have this forthcoming year for your website.