Navigating the Digital Canvas: A Journey through the Evolution of Website Design Trends

Visiting a website for the first time, the first thing users notice is the design. Although some users might not have an idea about fonts, colours, images, and other design components individually, nonetheless they perceive the overall presentation of the website and can tell if it is good or terrible. The design a website embraces tells the users about the brand, and you need to get it right to avoid misrepresentation. Besides the representation of your brand, your website needs to communicate with users on the steps to take to act, especially around Call To Action (CTA). The design you adopt can either help represent your brand, make it intuitive and accessible to users or confuse users and throw them off to your competitors, and there are many design trends you can use and learn from their principles.

Over the years, countless changes have existed in the design ecosystem on how websites look, from the common minimalist design found in almost every e-commerce web application today to the almost obscure skeuomorphism design that aims to replicate real-world objects virtually. In between these two designs mentioned are flat design, neomorphism, and glassmorphism trends. While some of the mentioned design trends are considered outdated, we can still find them in old operating systems like the earlier iPhones, Microsoft Vista, and old websites.

This article goes back in time to the point of skeumorphism, navigating through the designs in between, up till the current design trends. It discusses the principles and key features of each design trend, its impact on UX and aesthetics, and its transition to the next design trend.

Skeuomorphism: Designing for Familiarity

The Interaction Design Foundation defined skeuomorphism as “a term most often used in graphical user interface design to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. It’s an attempt to replicate real-world components in a digital world through designs. The design principle of skeuomorphism is based on the fact that users can easily recognise components they are already familiar with and interact with in their day-to-day lives. Two popular examples of skeuomorphism components are the recycle bin for deleting or storing deleted files and the floppy disk for saving changes. Skeuomorphism designs are characterized by their close similarity to items we can find in our physical environments. Using this reason, the proponents of this design trend argue that it helps users get accustomed to the different components on their devices faster.

Skeuomorphism came around into the design ecosystem in the 1890s but the term was coined in 1889 by British doctor and amateur archaeologist Henry Colley March from two Greek words, “Skeuos” and “morph”, meaning container and shape respectively. It gained its popular design adoption when Steve Jobs used it heavily in early Apple mobile device user interfaces to improve usability and familiarity among users. Its use in iOS was regarded as the reason many other designs adopted it and users found it easy to use on a touch-screen device. The era of skeuomorphism featured a glossy finish on buttons, a camera lens for camera icons, an open drawer with files for archives, and a bin filled with papers for the recycle bin, among many others.

The proponents of skeumorphism justified its use with 3 main benefits:

• Ease of identification: You can easily tell what function an app does by the way it’s presented—the icon.

• Feedback: Shutter sounds, and flashlights in some apps like cameras, just like it is in real-world counterparts, give immediate feedback to the users.

• User Immersion: It gives an idea of the physical world within the digital realm by aligning the user’s expectations with the experience.

However, the justification didn’t last long before opponents began countering them.

The era of skeuomorphism soon began to decline as opponents began dropping their two cents about its style. Although the designs mimicked real-world components, they added unnecessary complexity to the UI. The unrestrained use of drop shadow and monochromatic elements to make the components resemble their real-world counterpart affected user accessibility. Due to their designs, skeuomorphic components are heavy, requiring more CPU and graphical processing power to compute. This causes performance issues as there’s a need to constantly load and refresh to see the components on the web. Also, contrary to Steve Jobs's reasons for adopting skeuomorphism, opponents argue that it didn’t improve usability as the designs are cluttered and the drawbacks listed above have already overshadowed the benefits.

In a bid to offer a new design to replace skeuomorphism, in the 2010s designers came up with the Flat Design.

Flat Design: Embracing Simplicity

In the early 2010s, the Flat Design came into play as the latest design trend, gaining widespread companies with large OS companies like Apple and Microsoft. As the Chief Design role was assumed by Jonathan Ives, iOS devices began to adopt a cleaner user interface design defined by simplicity, and the adoption became public with the release of iOS 7 in 2013.

Apple was not the only big company to adopt the Flat design in the early 2010s, as Microsoft and Google bodies the design in Windows 8 and Material Design respectively. However, Flat design’s origin can be traced to the Swiss Design Movement of the 1940s and 1950s, a minimalist design pioneered by Swiss graphic designers such as Ernst Keller, Armin Hofmann, and Josef Müller-Brockmann. From their concept of minimalism, the 2010s Flat Design took inspiration.

Flat Design is a two-dimensional user interface design style with bright colours, elements, and typography, that preaches simplicity, a complete contrast to the skeuomorphic design. It is literally flat. It abstracts unnecessary definitions to design elements and retains only the necessary information. It features crisp edges, grid-based layout, white spaces, and minimalist typography, all of which contributed to its usefulness in building responsive UI. Due to its lightweight, apps and websites using the Flat design require less computing power and internet connectivity to load up the pages. Also, due to its grid-based layout, it gives a mobile-first responsiveness to websites and mobile applications. It was easy to develop an application or website that adopted this design due to its simplicity.

Nonetheless, despite the simplicity and responsiveness qualities of the flat design, it had its drawbacks. It had been oversimplified to the point it gave no interactive experience to the users. Since all the elements had the same flat design, no texture finishes, and no depth by gradients or shadows, flat design websites and applications did not give any cue of interaction. Also, in the process of abstracting unnecessary information, flat designs sometimes reduce important information on a page. Since whatever images also used on the page are minimalistic, they do not compensate for the text content and vice versa. This prevents users from accessing essential information on a website or mobile application.

In a bid to salvage the design, flat design advocates came up with Flat Design 2.0—flat design styles but with added shadows, highlights, layers, and gradients to improve interaction in elements. Elements in the second version of Flat Design became more interactive and user-friendly but the ecosystem had moved on to another design, one called a balance between the benefits of skeuormorphism and flat design.

Neumorphism: The Next Level of Realism

Another attempt at Skeuomorphism by designers, merging the benefits of Flat Designs and Skeuomorphism, birthed Neumorphism. “New Skeuomorphism”, coined to give Neumorphism or neomorphism as other articles would spell it, rose to prominence in late 2019. Advocates for this design system claimed it struck a balance between hyperrealism and minimalism. It uses colours, textures, and shadows to embody physical reality—a feature of skeuomorphism—without being overly detailed—another design concept culled from Flat Design.

Neumorphism features soft shadows and highlights, monochromatic colour schemes, minimal contrast, rounded corners, and simple shapes. Neumorphism relies heavily on dual shadows—a darker shade on one end and a lighter shade on the other. Combined with the background colour, these shadows create an illusion of depth, giving the design a tactile, button-like feel. Neumorphism often uses limited, muted colour palettes to emphasize the depth effect. For instance, soft shades of grey help enhance the shadows and highlights without visually overwhelming the users. The soft rounded corners and smooth edges give the design a gentle, approachable feel, reinforcing the design’s false 3D look. Also, while not hyper-realistic, neumorphism’s depth illusions—created by the shadows—make the elements realistic enough to feel interactive without becoming too distracting.

Neumorphism's soft, tactile look gives the user interface an aesthetic appeal, making it more user-friendly and engaging. It offers a unique look compared to its precursors, and with its focus on simplicity, it fits well in clean, modern UI designs.

The same features that give Neumorphism its unique feel can be disadvantageous to users with disabilities. Neumorphic designs can struggle with contrast issues, making it challenging for users with visual impairments. Also, it can be difficult to maintain neumorphism across larger applications. Subtle inconsistencies could seep into the application’s styles can break the harmony. Finally, neumorphism’s use is limited. Designers might be tempted to use it for complex interfaces which is not ideal, as its subtle highlights and shadows are only useful for simple interfaces.

Glassmorphism: A Blend of Depth and Transparency

Glassmorphism is a modern UI trend that takes inspiration from the transparency and feel of glass to provide an element with a translucent, almost-layered look. This design came into the limelight when Windows Vista was released in 2006 and MacOS in 2010. The design style was used in several UI elements, from taskbars to dialog boxes. However, it wasn't until the reintroduction of this design in Apple's MacOS Big Sur update in 2020 that glassmorphism became a popularly accepted trend by designers and developers. By 2020, glassmorphism had become cleaner and better than in 2006 and 2010.

The main feature of glassmorphism is the blurred, frosted glass effect. The transparency allows background elements to be partially visible, giving the illusion of looking through a frosted glass. The blur effect is often created with CSS backdrop-filter: blur style in development. In addition to the glassy effect, it features layering and depth. Glassmorphism uses multiple layers and a sense of depth to make elements stand out. This effect is achieved by stacking translucent layers with shadow and blur to create a multidimensional appearance. Also, glassmorphic designs employ vivid, bright colours in the background to contrast the frosted, semi-transparent layer on top. This gives the design an engaging appearance. With rounded corners and subtle borders, glassmorphic designs assume a friendly, modern feel and a 3D effect.

Buttons, cards, and modals are UI components that work well with glassmorphism without overwhelming the other interfaces. The translucent effect works well when placed over a vibrant background, as in navigation bars, sidebars, and popups, adding sophistication to backgrounds and overlays in user interfaces. Due to its transparency, glassmorphism is effective for dashboards where background content or data charts must be visible but less prominent than the foreground content. Due to its features and the touch it adds to UI elements, glassmorphism is commonly used in lifestyle, media, and fashion apps, where aesthetics and user experience are essential.

Although glassmorphism adds depth and visual interest to applications, giving them an aesthetic feel and a unique look to a brand, it can be challenging for some users accessibility-wise. With high transparency and low contrast, readability can be an issue, especially for visually impaired users. Its intensive blur and transparency effects can strain performance, especially on lower-end devices or in cases with many glassmorphic elements.

Glassmorphism can be a great addition to design systems aiming for a modern and dynamic look. However, it is important to strike a balance between its applications for aesthetics and its usability and performance, especially in complex applications.

Minimalism: Stripping Down to Essentials

Minimalism is a design philosophy emphasising simplicity and function over aesthetic semblance to the components’ real-world counterparts. It is well known for its clean lines, generous whitespace, and focus on essential components, creating UI interfaces that are visually appealing and easy to navigate.

The De Stijl movement and the Bauhaus school established the foundation of minimalist principles in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1960s that minimalism became an art movement focused on simplicity and objectivity. Early visual arts and architecture minimalists focused on “less is more” and used simple forms, unadorned surfaces, and neutral colours. Over time, minimalism extended to graphics design and web design. In the 2000s and 2010s, top tech companies like Apple adopted minimalism, popularizing the trend in tech through sleek, streamlined products.

Minimalism features simplicity and functionality, concerning itself with only the vital elements to enable a clear and user-friendly experience. Prominent features include clean, open spaces or "white spaces" that reduce visual clutter, drawing attention to key components. Monochromatic and neutral colours like white, black, and grey dominate minimalistic design aesthetics. In some cases, accent colours are used to highlight prominent features. The Minimalist designs have little or no complex visuals but use simple icons or vector graphics to add some visual interest. High contrast may be used in the design for better readability. The typical layout for this breed of design is grid-based, providing order and structure by which users can easily ascertain content hierarchy. These features combined create a balanced, visually calming interface that stresses function and usability.

Minimalism has wide applications in digital and physical design to bring more user-friendliness and better aesthetics to the various aspects. In web and mobile app design, it cleans up the visual noises and makes interfaces instinctive, focused on the key content especially quite effectively for blogs, portfolios, and e-commerce sites. Branding and logo design also witness great use of minimalism in providing simplicity, hence fostering brand recognition; this is epitomized by logos like Apple, Nike, and Google. Its usage is not limited to just tech products. Minimalism finds a place in architecture, interior design, and content, which includes infographics, graphs, and presentations, among many others.

Minimalism has several other advantages, mainly in enhancing levels of usability by encouraging users to focus on the most important features. The look is timeless, and professional, and tends to age well in many industries. With fewer graphical elements, minimalist designs often load much faster, hence finding efficiency in websites and apps. The modern look is sophisticated, and appealing in business and tech contexts. However, it does have some disadvantages to minimalism. Sometimes very watered-down designs can come across as incomplete or not given enough thought, especially in complex applications when one might want to show more information. Its restrained style can also hinder creativity, and minimalism in detailed interfaces can be prohibitively problematic, making navigation and comprehension more laborious at times.

Emerging Trends and the Current Landscape

The design ecosystem includes significant transformations given technological advances, sustainability concerns, and evolving user expectations. Some of the key emerging trends and current landscapes include:

Artificial Intelligence Incorporated into the Design

AI is changing design processes by allowing the possibility for generative design to take centre stage, creating multiple design variants through algorithms based on defined parameters. It enhances a designer's ability to consider a much larger solution space that would result in much more innovative solutions.

Blending of Digital and Physical Experience

The physical and digital worlds are increasingly blending; for example, product design now uses augmented and virtual reality to the point that people interact with a product before it is even made.

Retro and Maximalist Aesthetic Revival

There is a resurgence of retro and maximalist design elements, which combine vintage styles with modern technology to create unique and personalized spaces.

Emphasis on Wellness and Nature-Inspired Designs

Well-being through design and nature is certainly a growing trend. Biophilic design, in which natural features within a built environment help improve well-being, is one example.

• NB: This is not an exclusive list.

Conclusion

Design is a beautiful concept to behold and each design is unique. This article has explored the past, present, and future of design. Of the mentions in this article, you can create an entirely new concept coining the pros of similar trends and doing away with their cons. The choice is all yours.

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