Flat Design

What’s to come next?

In 2017, designers and developers began creating clean and simple websites for better mobile performance. Since then, the number of mobile searches has gone ever-upward, and mobile-first design for websites is now a necessity, not just an option. Image-heavy websites load slowly and frustrate mobile users, as we discussed earlier.

Clean, minimalist designs, or flat designs, are characterized by loading quickly and are currently trendy and desirable for two important reasons. First, both mobile users and desktop browsers can experience quick-loading websites. Secondly, they can hold high SEO value. Flat design helps a site fulfill a lot of the speed requirements that search engines are starting to require. This’s why flat design has started to become popular and will continue to be trendy into 2019.

Flat design doesn’t mean that everything is reduced down to two dimensions — it’s all about minimalism and usability. It’s a design aesthetic that gets rid of clutter and focuses on the important parts of your website. Utilizing bright colors, clean and crisp edges, and lots of open space, flat design is a refreshing change from distracting and slow-loading hi-res image-based designs.

In spite of being minimalist, this doesn’t mean that flat design is boring. Contrasting bright colors and illustration with simple imagery and sans-serif fonts, the sum of flat design’s parts comes together to provide an excellent user experience that is eye-catching and engaging.

Since flat design doesn’t rely on pictures to be captivating, it doesn’t have large amounts of extra data to load when a user navigates to the page. This means two really great things for website owners: the first is that customers and clients, no matter if they’re browsing on mobile or otherwise, will have an enjoyable, quick-loading experience on the website. Secondly, these data-light, fast-loading designs make page speed and optimization much, much faster — which looks really desirable to Google, Bing, and pretty much every other search engine. Like we discussed in the speed section, faster load times mean that your site is more likely to rank well, and with an engaging flat design users are apt to stay longer on your site and are more likely to convert.