The benefits mobile apps can bring to business and a startup are endless. In particular, this is one of the best options for a startup to gain momentum. In this article, we will guide you through the top design trends to make eye-catching startup websites and will share tips on how to make your new business stand out.
Why design trends matter to making the best startup websites
With no inclination to slow down its evolution, web design trends that help startups to distinguish themselves will differ from year to year. UI/UX design has made the grade to help not only inventive startup owners but also help users of those inventions to savor the coolest web experience entirely.
Below, we will discuss how to turn your efforts into the best startup websites with as new as already proven techniques in the website design world.
1. Dynamic and interactive storytelling
Successful storytelling requires great content. Neglecting high-quality content for a website can mar all your design efforts giving an impression of shoddy work. The task here is to make content consumption easier and accessible with the help of divergent design techniques.
A startup, especially an early-stage one, should take marketing efforts like nobody’s business. Websites with interactive storytelling, in this case, can tell a story of your brand in the most fascinating, attention-grabbing, and informative manner than many other marketing resources. This is especially great for websites for startups as they need to be attention-grabbing to gain popularity.
Every brand has a story to tell, just decide in what way you will lay it down on your website. Today designers often use Parallax as such an approach that makes annoying scrolling interactive and tell an elaborate linear story assembling it into a beautiful presentation.
Graphics, animations, parallax, and juicy content try such a recipe out to make your website speak for your brand.
Websites telling interactive stories that we like:
2. Animation
Being not the newest trend, a technique of infusing animated features into a website is still very popular with users. In UI/UX design, rich and fascinating animations are exactly the distinctive features to make your brand stand out, especially when you create startup website design.
The diversity of animation elements and libraries nowadays are really impressive. You can find these various physics-based animations, 3D effects, transformation, and transition effects, even good old GIFs and other motion graphics elements.
The role of animations in UI/UX design can not be underestimated. First of all, it helps to arrange a huge amount of information into a concise and appealing picture, which can also interact with a user. Make animations serve a particular purpose – be tempting for your target audience. It’s about their and your choice – be it even an excessive, elegant, or absolutely crazy way you animate your website – doesn’t matter, in fact, unless your users like it.
Websites with animations that we like:
- Animation as it is: Cartoon Network Studios by MediaMonks
- Android 404 by Google (U.S.A.) Left Field Labs
- Heineken Go Places By Superhero Cheesecake (Netherlands) Wefilm and Cloudfactory
3. Material design
Nothing new here, material design is among design trends that are here to stay; it continues to pick up the steam. When compared to flat design which seems to have reached its peak as a dominant web design trend, material design has numerous advantages. First of all regarding user experience. Designed objects look similar to in the real world but a bit simplified – what can be better for s today’s busy user? The material design creates more depth with the help of contrast and shadows used in such a way to create more realistic images of the company’s brand.
Keeping with the realistic UX theme, when creating websites, designers often use tactile and dynamic elements resembling paper and ink. In the case of this trend, more realistic means more intuitive for users so once again, your brand’s UX is at an advantage over flat design. However, it will be fair to say, that material is an evolutionary continuation of flat design but with bigger user engagement through interactions, functionality, layout, and color systems.
Final point here, it’s created and promoted by Google and not like a design style only but more like the entire ecosystem. Will you refer this fact to advantages or disadvantages of a material design as a big trend for 2016 and further – it’s only up to you.
Websites with a material design that we like
4. Custom icons
Spending hours looking for stock visuals, be it pictures or icons, should really be long gone. Instead, websites should be filled with visual elements that feel much more like designed and personal to the user interacting with it. Putting time and care into your work is always appreciated by users.
Moreover, we are constantly coming back to the importance of the customized and high-quality content. With custom iconography, your website content will be perfectly framed with additional meaning and will be quickly apprehended. Only such content can speak directly to your users.
In the era of total flattering of design, such comparatively small elements as icons can make a big difference for your brand. In other words, custom iconography is one more way to stand out for your brand when UI/UX modern trends make websites more and more alike.
Websites that have built their iconography in accordance with the latest design trends:
- History of Icons by FUTURAMO
- Target Nuclear Weapons by Pollen / BWM
- Lawrence Boone Selections by Phoenix The Creative Studio
5. Typography
The use of topography is also among popular web design trends these days. Its popularity is caused, first of all, by the rising appreciation of flat and material design, use of unique fonts is one more way to stand out from the all that flat and material pile of websites.
Highlighting specific keywords, call to actions or titles will make a website more attractive and brand proposition easier to apprehend. With the help of a particular custom font you can make your brand really memorable, so that once a user sees a particular font or font of the similar group, they will associate it with your brand. It is said, that people might have similar responses to fonts as they do to colors. Moreover, you can use several typefaces to diversify the general picture on a website. Though, it’s better not to use more than two of them not to confuse a user and sacrifice readability and overall impression from the website.
However, it’s always up to you, which number of typefaces to use and which style to stick to. They might complement each other or vice versa, create striking contrast – experiment, try something new and break the rules unless it attracts your target user.
Websites with typography that we like:
- Google Fonts by Google
- The Next Rembrandt by J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam and Superhero Cheesecake
- FAY by Bordel Studio
6. Richer backgrounds on web pages
One of the most appealing components of your website should be a background of your web pages. However, too many companies are missing this big opportunity to grasp visitor’s attention. It is so, even taking into consideration the fact that rich background images filling the whole browser window have been nothing new for over three years or so now. Many websites have just black or white letters on black or white background supposing that it’s stylish and informative enough. But still, they miss the opportunity, to show more than letters can tell.
Using the background images is the easiest way to make the background more attractive than just selecting a specific color for it. If static images are too boring for your startup website, think of an HTML video. Incorporating video in a website will most definitely increase engagement or your potential clients. Of course, having fully responsive HD video embedded with HTML5 is the way to go for it which is by the way not that complicated to implement.
The coolest and the most progressive way to decorate your web background is to use something in between the static image and video, something like a disruptive image can be. Add some interaction; users like to interact with your brand which not only adds engagement but makes your product/service/brand more memorable. Adding some mouse hover effects on the background image can be just enough to achieve the desired effect.
Great-looking websites with background images we like:
- Adidas Climachill By Resn
- Disrupted background images: Trainrobber VR by Bryan James
- Fullscreen video background: The Revenant: 200 Miles by Osk Studio
Many new design trends continue to emerge with the forthcoming year. UI/UX teams do not lack resources now: you can implement literally everything and web trends we suggest sing in 2017 only support this thought. Still, the biggest trend web designers should use every year sounds like this: never sacrifice usability for what is beautiful or in style, and you will be on the right track to getting yourself one of the best startup websites. Hope the design trends enumerated above will help you with this task.
Bonus by Pixetic, check out the interactive showcase explaining why UX really matters: