The field of web design is always changing and as trends quickly become passé, new web trends are becoming staple features. With best practices, tools and workflows adapting all the time, to remain efficient it is important to recognise the latest web design trends that will generate influence for a while as opposed to a quick — and passing — craze.

This column highlights the most influential web design trends that will be here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Hero images

They offer one of the best ways to capture a user’s attention from the get-go and show them a website’s most valuable content. It is the first thing a user sees on a website, the first thing they will draw an opinion from about your brand and the first thing that will help them decide if they want to stay or bounce. High-definition “Hero” images need to have three essential features:

An impressive and eye-catching image.

Well-crafted copy that communicates the relationship between the image and the brand.

A strong call to action to guide the user.

Card layouts

A combination of a mobile-first formats and Pinterest have driven the popular “card layout” design style. Typically, the layout is used to present both text and images in a square or rectangular shape. They make it easy to reorganise for different device breakpoints and this flexibility makes this format attractive, especially for websites with large amounts of content. The shape and design of these containers also help to provide a consistent user experience.

Material design

Material design is a visual design language designed by Google that combines the basic principles of design with innovation. The goal of this initiative is to allow for a unified experience across all platforms and device types with the aim to create elegant designs focused primarily around user experience. Material Design Lite, announced in July 2015, is slightly more lightweight in terms of the code and hopes to make it easier to append the look of Material Design to websites.

Material Design Lite doesn’t rely on a specific framework, so designers can still use front-end tools.

Micro-interactions

Each time a user changes a setting on their phone, syncs their device, sets an alarm or sets their status on Facebook, they are engaging with a micro-interaction. They are everywhere — within appliances in our homes, the apps on our phone and so on. Micro-interactions are good to help finish a single task, to connect devices together, to adjust a setting and so on.

They are important and typically separates the good from the great. If done well, they make the user’s life easier and more fun. Micro-interactions will continue to be an important factor in user experience design as developers optimise these on websites to be more human-like.

So there we have it. Hopefully the above helps you to focus on the web trends that will be the most impactful in the medium-term.

— The writer is CEO of Prototype