Tuning into current web trends and practices is essential while choosing images for your website. There are many ways to integrate images into your website, but it will depend on your choice what impact will it have on the users’ experience.
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Let us walk through the latest web design trends for selecting images for a website.
You will find web designers inclined towards a minimalist approach to color these days. Often black and white, monochromatic palettes refer to other shades and hues as well; but they focus on a single specific color at a time rather than a rich combination of colors. The concept of monochromatic visuals is best suited for websites that desire to keep a clean and smooth look. They help create a balanced aesthetics and channel the viewer’s attention to the website’s content hierarchy.
Visuals that portray a story or deliver useful knowledge are proven tools in web design. Infographics, as an example, are a great method for encapsulating content in a concise and effective manner. They combine the strength of visualization with textual content; and most importantly, visitors are more likely to read them than to go through the boring paragraphs of texts.
Hero Area is the large portion of space you see at the top of the website, the one that you immediately notice when the page is first loaded. The hero areas have low content density. Rather than stuffing it with many visual elements and textual content, this style calls for spacing out of the hero area, thereby creating one consistent visual message that is easy to grasp. It tends to replace dynamic slider galleries with a fixed graphic or image to reduce disturbance on the website’s layout.
Today’s consumer is well aware about market and wants to see something real instead of fake images of beautiful stock models or fantasized visuals. They take such pictures as ridiculous and cheap. They like to see people and situations that are analogous to the ones from their own lives. These types of images on a website create a sense of familiarity, trust and confidence that a stock image simply cannot provide.
Instagram is up and running for almost four years by now, yet the influence of its photo filters is still quite strong on online image trends. You will find dreamy, blurry and vintage-style images spread all over the web, and they’re particularly powerful when used as backgrounds or header images. In fact, most of the website builders are equipped with advanced image editors. These editors provide a variety of filters and effects to create manipulated images.
Although this trend has a technical background, it plays an equally significant role in aesthetics. Not going into much detail, a simple definition says while regular images are based on pixels, vector graphics are based on strokes. It may not seem like a significant difference, but it affects the image quality and the loading speed. To add more to the benefits, vector graphics are also visually distinct. This is because they are often used to create an effect of digital drawing. The magnificent look and feel of vector graphics is simply perfect for setting background or for embellishing fixed areas of your site, like header or footer.
Another trend that has been and will continue to be a big hit is setting up of the large and beautiful background images and videos. It is indeed one of the simplest ways to make your site stand out of the crowd by enabling the webmaster display great content prominently. This trend, when folded into a larger design philosophy, doesn’t feel tricky but powerful and graceful.
Images grab our attention and trigger a quick response when we encounter them. Hence, they form a very important part of any website that we create. They not only play a significant role in determining the first impression, but they can also be used to communicate what the site is about and can be used to earn customer trust. If used properly, images can prove to be really effective and deliver the intended message to your audience.
