Web Design Trends 2023

by Frida Nyvall

Our predictions for what will trend in web design in 2023.

Much of what we wrote about in the trend report for 2022 is still relevant this year, such as 3D worlds, strong vibrant colours and design influences from the early days of the Internet.

Trends from 2022 that will stick around in 2023

Strong, vibrant colors

In 2022, we talked about the fact that the colors on the web would become clearer in step with new technical possibilities. In addition to the possibilities to display more and brighter colors, there will also be greater possibilities to manipulate them using the future color-mix() feature.

Movement

Since it is becoming increasingly difficult to capture visitors’ attention, and the time to do so is getting shorter and shorter, the time to deliver your message is decreasing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is the value of a video? In addition to video, motion can also be used for micro-animations to enhance and clarify the user interface. A trend within the trend is animated cursors, where the usual mouse pointer can be swapped for your own graphics.

In the future, we are looking forward to greater technical possibilities to be able to animate the position of elements in the same way as in mobile applications, with the help of the upcoming View Transitions API.

Nostalgia and Y2K

Last year’s glitchy images trend and 1990’s spirit has evolved about 10 years, continuing in the early years of 2000. Pixelated types and images, vibrant (dare I say garish?) colours and design inspiration from the early days of the Internet. Get inspired at the Web Design Museum.

New Trends in 2023

Maximalism

More is simply more. The style is characterized by overlapping elements where texts and images are animated on top of eachother when the user scrolls the page, strong vibrant colours and big bold text titles.

As attention spans are getting shorter, maximalism can be a way to capture the user’s attention.

One challenge using maximalism, is that the website can easily become difficult to navigate or difficult to use as it risks becoming a bit chaotic.

Big Titles

Another trend is to make title texts larger than ever. Often using a carefully selected font that is slightly odd, quirky, or personal.

Our analysis of the trend is that the size of title texts has increased to help capture the notoriously short-lived attention span of the visitor. Sometimes you need to shout to be heard above the noise.

Depth

Images and animations are to be 3D and have a visible depth, and realistic effects are popular. The 3D trend has evolved through previous trends like glassmorphism and claymorphism. The purpose of adding depth to the design is to create engagement and bring to life interactive moments and tailored experiences.

This trend can be adopted in different ways depending on the budget. Examples of uses for larger budgets:

Immersive worlds in 3D, where the user’s navigation and experience are reminiscent of a computer game. See example from Google Interland.

Gamification as adaptive stories where the user can make choices that shape the course of events. See the example “The Magical Pantry”.

Interactive products, for example used at Lacoste’s interactive product page.

Examples of uses for a smaller budget:

Parallax scrolling is still a popular effect, in spite of having been almost overused a couple of years ago.

Micro animations for e.g. menues, buttons, loading icons and popup modals.

Blogs

Twitter’s changes have caused many users to consider the risks of relying on single third-party platforms for marketing and building knowledge. Previous discussions about paywalls (for Medium among others) and who actually owns the content posted on social media or blog platforms have led to more people wanting to take control of their content.

For users who have used Twitter to publish and gather information, a blog of their own can be a way to do so.

We therefore predict a boom for the personal blog and thus also an increase of smaller format web sites with a more personal design.

AI Generated Content

AI generated content can provide images that are more personalized and leads to fewer standardized images. Generating content this way makes it faster and cheaper to get the images you want. Stock image vendors will become less popular, and the risk of discovering the same stock photo on a competitor’s website decreases.

The AI generated images can be very realistic, but with imaginative unrealistic elements mixed in. These types of images have suddenly become much faster and cheaper to achieve when you can ask the AI to create the image for you.

The robot in the hero image at the top of this page is generated using the tool DALL-E 2.

In addition to images, there are also AI-powered tools for generating color palettes such as Colormagic, Colormind, and Khroma.

Galileo AI is developing a service for creating user interfaces based on text descriptions.

In the future, it will probably also be possible to generate videos via text. Google is working on a system for this called Imagen Video and Make is a similar project backed by Meta.

• trends
• web design