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Effective Uses of Ineffective Designs

The Basic Trends of Web Design

Web Design has changed a lot over the years, partially due to changing ideas about what looks "good", but also because technology's capabilities have grown immensely over the last few decades. If you had told me at age five that I would live to see cameras that could augment reality and insert my favorite characters into photos and videos as they were being taken, I would never have believed you, because at the time most cameras couldn't even prevent red-eye. Now a days I'm pretty sure most kids don't even know what red-eye is.

Lots of things have changed about the internet since it first started getting popular, and while with technology advancing web designers can do more now than they ever could before, there are some definitely some more popular trends out there. I don't have the time to talk about all of those trends, but here are some of the ones that have been dominating 2019 so far.

1) Video Background

Thanks to some serious advancements in technology, it is now possible to build a website with a video background. Where once this was either impossible or would result in your site slowing down to the point of being unusable, now video backgrounds are a piece of cake, and hundreds of websites have started using them, LINGsCARS.com actually being one of them. These backgrounds don't just look cool, they're also a good way to draw in an audience or show them something new about your products/business/organization/etc.

2) Asymmetrical Layout

With the rising popularity of grids and widgets in the 2000's, designers started looking for new ways to break the mold and make their website seem different. Thus, the asymmetrical layout was born, and it will probably soon become the new overused, go-to design for websites. This layout is the digital form of "messy on purpose", it's artsy and can be a good way to organize information of varying importance.

3) Non-Traditional Scrolling

Gone are the days of every website using the same simple scroll-bar to navigate every website. Instead, we've got parallax scrolling, horizontal scrolling, and other, admittedly cool, ideas for making websites more unique. Parallax scrolling is the practice of making your background and foreground move at different paces to create depth, and when done well, it can take a website to the next level. Horizontal scrolling can be useful for timelines or galleries, though it may not be the best option for long paragraphs. The biggest thing to remember when you decide to rework website scrolling is that it still needs to make sense to your user, and you probably shouldn't use non-traditional scrolling unless you have a purpose for it.

4) Interactive Content

Since the dawn of the internet, making a website an interactive experience has been a great way to make your site more interesting. It used to be that this interactiveness came from simple flash games. Now, your entire website can be designed around the idea of letting a user explore it and discover new things about what your site is capable of. The more control you give the user over what they see and when, the more engaging your site will be for them.

5) Minimalism

Once upon a time, everything you added to a website was a way to show that you knew what you were doing, and so long as it worked, it was something new and interesting that would wow users. When the internet was new, everything on it was cool, and no one had too many expectations for what a website should look like. In 2019 though, web design is all about clean lines and simplicity. When designing a website, most people will aim for modern, sleek, and minimalist. Crypton.com is a good example of this practice in action.

There's nothing wrong with these design trends; they look very nice when done well, and their popularity stems from the fact that they work fairly well. They also follow the four gestalt design principals, balance, alignment, grouping, and consistency, which were derived from Kurt Koffka's work with gestalt psychology (Johnson-Sheehan, 183). These designs are pleasant to look at, they function well, and they can be fairly engaging. But they're also popular beyond all belief, like the Top 40 Hits on your favorite radio station. They're cool at first, but you can only hear a song so many times before it becomes just another set of four chords.