2017 in Review: Breaking Barriers in Web Design

I hear that at least once a month, and it’s true! As brands work towards the race to creating new and immersive user experiences, we’ve seen the emergence of broken layouts. The trend of seamlessness and asymmetrical balance in web design has made its way into designer’s hearts. Gone are the days of being boxed up within containers, opening up new possibilities for designers to create free-form content layouts to emphasize art direction. This new trend has also urged me to challenge the principles of “making the grid” in favor of breaking it. While designers aren’t ditching the grid altogether, we can now loosely follow it instead, dismantling the standard structure of hard lines and static alignments to create visual impact.

Now this goes without saying that static web design layouts will always have its place within web design, in fact, often times it is the most fitting depending on the brand. A formal corporate brand for example, would probably want a boxier design, as symmetry has its associations with order and class. A retail brand like Rona would want to design in a grid like structure to enhance ease of navigation. Then take this NominoU landing page we made for example, where we created a sense of dynamic energy through the overlapping juxtaposition of elements.

Just as the boundaries of web design are starting to expand, transforming design is as much unlearning our old ways as it is learning.