7 Promising Web Design Trends in 2023 That Every Designer Should Know

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, is it even possible to hook visitors on a website with an average design? Short answer: nope. To make a lasting impact on your visitors, you have to keep up with the latest web design trends. That goes doubly so for web agencies, which have to prove they’re at the cutting-edge of good-looking, smart design that prioritizes user experience.

In that vein, make sure your agency’s own website is up to the mark. Your website is the perfect opportunity to show potential clients your skill sets. Did you know that about 88% of online consumers will not return to your website following a bad experience? Your clients will not want to waste their time on an outdated, neglected website.

What clients want to see is a modern website design with smooth user experience. If you display the latest web design trends on your website, they’re likely to trust your work for their projects. And if yours isn’t good enough, they will likely leave your website and hire another agency.

Given that web design is responsible for establishing a website’s credibility for 94% of internet users, it’s crucial that you learn about the latest modern website design trends in 2023. Offer visitors the latest web design inspirations the moment they land on your homepage.

Here are some modern web design inspirations and trends that will not only help your website design process, but also captivate your clients so they choose your agency over others.

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Top 7 Web Design Trends for 2023 [With Examples]

Many web design agencies are already working on web design inspirations and trends for this year and ahead. Increasingly, they are aiming to simulate reality with their website.

Websites have become a part of everyday life for internet users, which includes your clients and their target audience. Hence, optimize your agency’s website, as well as your clients’, along the guidelines of these latest trends in website design to add life to your digital workspace.

Here are the 7 most promising and modern trends in website design that you should apply to your clients’ websites to win their hearts.

1. Asymmetric Layouts

The website layout is the structural arrangement of visual elements to present information that engages the users. In recent years, there’s been a push towards asymmetry from symmetrical interfaces, which are now regarded as somewhat predictable and boring.

We are not disregarding the stable and harmonized nature of symmetrical layouts. But an asymmetrical layout is likely to have a more dynamic and interesting impact on the visitors, and so it helps you stand out better.

Asymmetrical layouts help create a special and memorable site experience for the website visitors. 2023 is all about organic or fluid shapes, rather than geometric shapes and straight lines. That’s because web designers seem more prone to blending the digital world with ordinary physical life experiences. And as tree branches, hills, and edges of rivers follow their unique asymmetrical styles, so too can trends in web design.

Organic and fluid shapes separate the sections and folds of a website in a manner distinct from using lines or angles. You can also use these shapes in the background on your homepage to give your visitors a smooth user experience while subtly captivating their interest.

If you really want to use lines in your layout, you can use a combination of lines and organic shapes like Slice of Machine Learning.

Worried about overwhelming your clients with these designs? Assess the weight of each visual element in the layout using a wireframe. Work around the color, size, and movement of those visual elements before you compose your asymmetrical website layout.
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2. Retro Fonts

Vintage-inspired colors and typography have staying power. There’s a lot of variety in the use of style and artistry of retro fonts. From cliche and trope to bold and beautiful, retro fonts can add spice to any website’s layout.

Use variation in font style and size. Overlap visual designs, floating elements, bigger typography, and layers. Experiment to convey your ideas with maximum freedom, without limitation, and without overwhelming website visitors. American Scraps, Cuban Council, New York Moon, are great examples of giving bold retro fonts a cool and modern spin, mixing contemporary images with traditional elements.

These ultra-trendy retro fonts list among the best web design trends for 2023.

American Scraps uses a mix of Clarendon, Georgia, Sans Serif, Refrigerator-Deluxe, Arial, and Futura retro font styles to create a vintage feel on the website.

Cuban Council uses a combination of Arial, Geneva, Verdana, Sans-Serif, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Serif font styles.

New York Moon uses the font style Georgia and Serif for a bold retro look on their website, successfully evoking a feeling of nostalgia.

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3. Parallax Scroll Animations

The parallax effect is born of a seamless transition of page elements with foreground and background. Inspire your clients and their audience with breathtaking animations as they scroll through each section  of your website.

Parallax animation produces certain depths in the foreground and background to charm visitors. This web design trend is not exclusive to catching your visitor’s or client’s attention; you can use this feature to incite action from users as well. Use trigger animation by changing the color, shape, or speed of the CTA element to intrigue the users enough to interact with it.
To leave a striking impression on your clients and their visitors, play around with animated texts, foreground, or even background on your webpage. Avoid being too flashy though, and use subtle applications with parallax scrolling.

The Qode Interactive Catalogue, dogstudio, Madwell, and The Story of the Goonies demonstrate why parallax scrolling is such a popular trend in website design in 2023.

The Qode Interactive Catalog uses basic shapes, art, and parallax effects to add life to its website’s layout.

Madwell uses parallax effects, adding life to the visual design elements. The graphic design moves along the cursor which makes for great visuals. It also makes use of bright colors and organic shapes to further beautify its website’s layout.

The Goonies uses parallax effects alongside voice user interface to give a dynamic visual and audio experience to its visitors. It also gives the option to play/pause the audio so users can experience the website as they desire.

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4. Horizontal Scrolling

Horizontal scrolling allows for interaction and valuable engagement, which is why it lists among the latest web design trends for 2023.

Navigating through a webpage using horizontal scrolling involves active participation from the user with what’s happening on the screen. This stirs more response from them, and keeps them interested and engaged.

Many web designers have started playing around with color schemes and animated transitions, along with wholesale shifts in the website’s layout. They can even make each scroll look like a new page.

One thing to keep in mind while using this scroll effect is to use arrow buttons with clear labels to help the users navigate through the horizontal content. Parsons branding uses color transitions and navigation arrows to help the users navigate through its website’s layout.

Think about where and why horizontal scrolling will make the most sense on your website’s layout. Maybe you can use it to display images from a photo gallery, or use little horizontal scrolling to zoom in on large images to look closely at details.

Coupled with visual cues like navigation bar and arrows, horizontal scrolling creates an outstanding experience for the website users. Remember, your website visitors are humans, and they crave human-like, interactive experiences.

Square, D. Potfer Studio, Parsons Branding, and Emanuele Milella, are some of the best examples of using horizontal scrolling to memorable effect.

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5. Minimalistic Extremes

Minimalism is based on the less-is-more approach to enhance user experience, using only a few design elements and soft colors, instead of bold and bright colors.

Flat design, white spaces, muted colors, and an overall cleaner look: that’s what first comes to mind when talking about minimalism. And while this particular aesthetic might have been popular in the 2000s, minimalist web designs have now been reimagined by contemporary web designers.

If you are fond of non-generic minimalistic designs, try using colorful minimalism to feature bold background colors, clean text, and minimal design elements.

You can blend minimalism with other latest web design trends as well. Weave 3D design elements and visuals in your website to add depth to your minimalistic website layout. Make use of minimal parallax scrolling as well to provoke users to interact with your website’s layout and thus boost conversions.

LLI Design, Squarespace, and Symbolset are some great examples that use colorful minimalism to spark interest in the users, highlighting only the spots that matter to leave a strong impression on the audience.

Speaking of modern minimalism, Neumorphism takes a middle ground between flat design and skeuomorphism. It brings depth to flat designs using a soft, extruded look that mimics physicality through the use of drop shadows, semi-flat colors, and digital embossing or debossing for a clean design.

Neumorphism boosts the visitors’ connection to the web layout to heighten interaction and functionality. Look at how Neumorphism has enlivened flat icons into realistic 3D visual elements in the design above by web designer Julien Brion.

Gloria is another web designer who has applied neumorphism in her design while keeping it clean, minimal, and aesthetic.

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6. Videos in Layout

A great web design provides a rich user experience. This can be created through a combination of different visual elements with text, audio, and even video. Beautifully shot cinematography in the background can arrest the eye and produce a unique visual experience.

High-quality website videos leave a much lasting impact than embedded videos from YouTube. For example, you can opt for a fun visual representation of your work portfolio on your landing page to showcase your skills.

Using transparent videos in the background, inserting videos in posts, and adding promotional videos or interviews are all great ways to include videos in your web design. You can even use it as a design element on one part of the webpage.

Some great websites that have used videos and audios in their backgrounds to create magic on screen for the users are Blacknegative, The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks, and Bienville Capital Management. While Any.do uses video as a design element in the stylish shape of a smartphone.

7. Augmented Reality

The popularity of Pokémon Go opened new avenues for Augmented Reality (AR) to step into the zone of web design.

Many web designers are using AR to bridge the gap between reality and virtual reality with computer-generated images on top of real elements and surroundings.

This technology is especially useful for ecommerce websites, letting users try on a pair of their favorite sunglasses, accessories, hair color, clothes, and more through filters like those we see on Snapchat and Instagram. Except AR provides a 360 degree immersive user experience.

These websites benefit from AR using webcams and smartphone cameras to improve user experience, and help visitors choose the best products online.

Time – ”Landing On the Moon”, and Toyota, have used AR for either their websites or ad campaigns for more sales and conversions.

While Toyota uses AR in its ad campaign to bring Corolla to mobile devices, Time has an immersive app that provides users a “Landing On the Moon” experience from their mobile devices.

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Website Design Trends That Work – Experts Perspective

To help you improve and revamp the visual design elements of your website, we shared the most modern web design trends of 2023 with you above.

Now, let us introduce you to some web design trends that worked best for these experts from different industries.

1. High-Quality 3D Visual Designs

Sep Niakan – Managing Broker at Condo BlackBook

“3D visuals have gone a long way and have had a significant impact on website design. These days, we’re seeing a lot of high-quality 3D visuals in online designs. These 3D images are an example of a new web design style that enhances the user experience. The 3D features make a strong effect on visitors, boosting the amount of time they spend on websites.

In minimalist designs, 3D may make a stronger impression. Customers nowadays are looking for websites that are creative and have unique designs. Customers enjoy spending time on websites with 3D features because they give them a sense of uniqueness.”

2. Shadows, Layers, and Floating Elements

Jason McMahon – Digital Strategist at Bambrick Media

“Positive emotions are inspired by shadows and floating images and visions. They give the webpage a 3D appearance by displaying depth in the elements.

This trend can be used for any text, photo, or video. Layering is a technique used by UI/UX design firms to overlay one element on top of another. Soft drop shadows can also be used to add depth. The mix of these features gives the website an outstanding and appealing appearance while also giving it a light vibe.”

3. Soft and Comfortable Colors

Adam Garcia – Founder of The Stock Dork

“Because of the work from home trend, many individuals are spending a lot of time on their computers these days. After staring at displays for lengthy periods of time, many users experience eye strain. In light of this, site designers are emphasizing the usage of color schemes that are easier on the consumers’ eyes.

Soft and comfy colors will be the focus of site designers now since they are a medium ground between light and dark themes. Soft colors like greens, pinks, and warm browns are soothing to the eyes and do not strain them. This current web design trend will continue to affect web design trends this year, and it will also benefit consumers by allowing them to spend more time on a website without experiencing any hassles.”

4. Neumorphism

Lindsey Allard – CEO and Co-Founder of PlaybookUX

“Neumorphism is a new design trend that adds another layer to web design. This trend takes the traditional flat layering of a website and adds height to your website. This new method of layering will make things like your search bar, buttons, and text boxes really pop out of your webpage.This added layering of objects creates depth and adds a whole new

perspective to websites this year!”

5. Story-Telling in Design

Daniel Foley, the SEO Specialist at CloudTech24

“The goal of web design is no longer to create a static brochure about the organization. The website has evolved into a storytelling platform… and there is an art to it. The flow of the webpage (rather than just cramming everything above the fold) is crucial to keeping visitors there. Because humans are emotional and remember stories better than random facts,

websites must incorporate this storytelling flow into their design.

We’ll see a lot more effort put into making sure the website is a scrollable experience that moves people through a story organically. They must be able to answer the question “what do they do?” by the end.”

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Conclusion

Agencies with trendsetting websites hook clients with more ease, and these clients will come back for more once you create attractive, high-converting designs for their websites. This equals more conversion and more sales revenue for your agency.

2023 is all about leveling up your graphic design game, playing with bold colors, but keeping your website clean.

So don’t wait. Get to work on these latest web design trends right now to give your clients an awesome modern website design that encourages a deeply engaging user experience. In the end, make sure your website has a responsive design so all your web design efforts pay off extremely well when you relaunch your website.