20 UI/UX Design Trends that will Rock 2023

We’re heading towards 2023 and UI/UX design is already taking care of making thing fun and more exciting for users. As minimalism is finally starting to lose its power, websites are getting bolder, off the grid, and more interactive. With this in mind, let’s talk about the 20 UI/UX design trends 2023 and prepare for more diverse and experimental digital experiences.

 

Grid-based layouts have always been around, however, they’ve become quite trendy in the last year as we started to notice them even more in recently launched high-end websites.

The grid system serves as a common graphic language for designers and developers to create order among all elements in a website. It creates structure and logic that makes the information easier for users to scan and digest.

Moving off-center, however, helps the design give emphasis to a segment and helps create a memorable website that stands out. This idea is yet to be explored more by designers as in 2023. We’re about to witness crazier layouts since, thanks to website builders, it’s become increasingly easy to implement even without coding.

Benefits of using  broken grids:

• Off-the-grid layouts break the logical intuitive structure, creating a visually exciting twist in the design.
• It serves to give emphasis on particular elements or sections.

In the following examples, recently released websites use broken grids to create a memorable user experience. Some even go further to change the structure on-scroll.

Pinguin Web Design

Studio Graphene Picks

Builder Events

You can check out more inspirational examples of rebellious websites with broken grid layouts that break the rules of the standard grid types.

The hero section serves as the introduction to your website and you want to make a great first impression. This is why most websites use their best visuals and animations to grab the visitor’s attention instantly. Recently, however, high-quality visuals have stepped back to give space for eye-catching oversized typography. Designers who are more experienced with fonts take full advantage to create amazing website introductions above the fold with aesthetically-pleasing font combinations and animated typography.

Benefits of using typographic hero sections:

• Big and bold typography in a monochromatic color scheme gets the user’s attention more than videos and photography.
• It gives the opportunity to make a big bold statement. Literally.

In the following examples, recent websites use typographic hero sections to introduce their concepts or intrigue visitors with mystery.

Dragonfly Crypto Projects Agency

Etuk Josiah Benjamin Portfolio

Lazarev Product Design Agency

You can check out more examples of hand-picked websites with creative typographic hero sections.

As a continuation of the previous trend, oversized typography can transform any text into a captivating visual element. Whether it’s used in extra large fonts and animations or more subtly, it depends on the context and what you wish visitors to focus on. Usually, this technique works best with a simple background and high contrast between the font and the background.

When it comes to trends, however, oversized typography works best with animations. You can capture attention with moving text, transitions on scroll, hover effects, and other creative ways to give life to your typography.

Benefits of using oversized typography:

• Big and bold typography stands out from its surroundings and instantly grabs attention. 
• When used as an integral part of the overall aesthetics, it creates a clean yet interesting design.
• It’s best used with UI animation.

Let’s see a couple of recent examples that use oversized and experimental typography to create brave and memorable designs.

Standish Creative Agency Portfolio 

Artemii Lebedev Portfolio

Evil Martians Product Development Consultancy 

 

Recently, grid lines have become very popular in web design, as they make it easy to read and understand the content and add edge to the overall aesthetics. This trend, however, evolves into more freestyle content bordering giving design a more futuristic look.

Benefits of using visible grids:

• Borders make it easy to distinguish one section from another.
• It gives visual content structure.
• Grids and frames create simplicity and order which guides visitors through the content.

The following examples use lines and borders to separate sections and content elements. Each website has a different style and aesthetics, yet visible grids and borders work well with all of them.

 

Bored Cow 

 

In spite of the never-ending minimalistic trend and clean design, brave designers have decided to challenge conventional elements and add layers to the picture. Take this in a literal sense, as multilayers are here to become a strong trend in 2023 and take elements to stack, merge, and overlap them. Such layered effects not only establish a strong connection between the elements but also adds depth and immersion.

Benefits of using overlapping elements:

• Overlapping elements add depth to the design and create immersion.
• When used with parallax effects and less text, layers can create a visually cohesive experience.

The following examples overlap elements and use parallax effects to add depth without overwhelming the design.

Mica Rino Website

Option5 Studio

 

 

Oversized pointers and mouse hovers are becoming very popular UI elements. Usually, these pointers appear as oversized circles that change colors or expand when they come across a clickable element.

Benefits of using oversized pointers:

• An interactive element that helps visitors engage with the design more.
• They only work with animation: increasing size and changing shape, or color when they hover over a clickable element or shrinking when they hover over a non-clickable area.

Let’s see a couple of recent websites that use oversized animated pointers perfectly. In most cases, these pointers appear only in specific sections that need to draw the visitor’s attention.

Twice Pictures Brand Studio

 

Microsoft’s fluent design system, Mac OS Big Sur, and Google’s redesigned logos are definitely to thank for the smooth gradients’ popularity. The biggest thing about the trend is creating extremely soft barely visible smooth drop shadows to give your design elements depth. These shadows work well for both static elements and hover effects.

Benefits of using smooth drop shadows:

• Barely visible smooth drop shadows look realistic and stylish.
• They add depth to the design and give elements emphasis, so they work great for both static and interactive elements.

In the following examples, a couple of smooth drop shadows turn a clean standard design into something much more interesting.

Companies Tools Featured Stacks

 

A memorable experience is an interactive one. What really makes a website stand out is the interaction that accompanies users on their journey and keeps them engaged. Of course, it’s important to never sacrifice usability for the sake of interaction. With this in mind, the next leading trend brings UI animations one step further with a fully animated scrolling user experience that gives visitors control.

Benefits of using scrolling animations:

• Brings interactive design to a whole new level of engagement.
• Gives users full control over their own experience.

The following websites add entire sections of scrolling animation experience that spice the design up without sacrificing usability.

Grids Obys Agency

Quiet Games

 

Kinetic typography keeps evolving with new techniques, as we can often see on new websites. So far, animation of hover, especially in full-screen navigation menus has been the most popular technique, however, now we see a shift to non-interactive slide-in text.

Moving text helps capture attention, highlight important information and guide visitors through the design. With this in mind, it’s fair to say that in the upcoming years we’ll see a lot more exploration of the slide-in text serving a specific function rather than just decorating the design.

Benefits of using slide-in-text:

• Serves a specific function to guide the user’s eyes through the page.
• It highlights important information and separates it from other segments.

The following websites take advantage of non-interactive slide-in text. You can see how the technique works with different styles.

Apoc Blaze Type

 

The footer is that one small section on the bottom of your website that contains all the useful information that isn’t included in the primary content. Visitors would scroll all the way down to find the links they can’t locate anywhere else. This is why one of the must-have design elements is a mega footer that includes helpful navigation, policies, contact information, social media links, job opportunities, and more.

Benefits of using  mega footers:

• Helps users see your entire website in a well-structured comprehensive way and find what they’re looking for.
• Mega footers visually take up most of the screen which eliminates all distractions. This is why they work well even with fewer links.
• They work well with any kind of design style, including brutalism.

The following websites have mega footers for cases with more or fewer links.

Vape Superstore eCommerce

AI Model

Proof Finance Business Website

 

Moving beyond 3D with realistic shadows and layer effects, the trend continues with hyper-realistic 3D graphics, especially with the rising popularity of VR and AR technologies.

Hyper-realistic graphics allow designers to turn the most fantastic and absurd visuals into realistic and mercerize users with sheer high-quality execution.

Benefits of using  hyper-realistic graphics:

• CGI can turn even the wildest and most fantastic concepts into visual reality.
• When executed well, they elevate the design into a very high-end one and, therefore, speak of a high-end brand.
• Visitors spend more time simply admiring the graphics.

The following websites feature high-quality hyper-realistic graphics animated so smoothly and realistically that you can almost touch them.

IRL URL Agency

Mint Venture NFT

Osiris VR

 

VR isn’t just for gaming anymore as they become a significant trend on the web as well. Interactive museums, space travel, and product presentation in 3D are just a small fraction of the possibilities VR brings to web design. Especially when shopping shifts to an online experience, this technology helps users perceive information visually in the comfort of their devices. In 2023 and forward, we can expect bigger physical shops giving users realistic visual tours to bring the products closer to the buyers.

Benefits of using  VR/AR:

• Great for eCommerce projects as it allows users to view products from all angles and interact with them.
• The approach is ideal for giving tours, meetings, conferences, and lectures.

The following websites give users virtual museums to help them explore and perceive the information visually as they would in the real world.

Convexity Space

Fave Studio

Check out more examples of virtual reality website design.

 

Minimalism serves to give users the most important information by removing all possible distractions. This trend will go further in 2023 with text-only pages or ones that include only the absolutely necessary minimum amount of images. Of course, although we might see a lot of text-only websites, this trend appears mostly on homepages, while product pages, case studies pages, and other pages that rely on image and video presentation, will remain visually rich.

Benefits of using  text-only pages

• Allows websites to rely on a copy, by giving a few choice lines to guide visitors.
• A modern uncluttered approach to clean design that turns any homepage into a map that’s easy to navigate.

The following websites cut the visuals out to give users clean comprehensive homepages. This allows visitors to understand what the website is about and choose how to proceed.

Women Tell Women

Without Form Space

 

Animated micro-interactions are the perfect way to stimulate user engagement, in a world of short attention spans. Animations on-scroll, animated menus, navigation interactions, and gesture interactions are only a small part of what you can do to make your website engaging. The trend that rises in popularity in this department, however, focuses on layered decorative elements that users can play around with.

Benefits of using  interactive image elements:

• They don’t serve any particular function rather than engaging the visitor to play around with the decors.
• They give users a fun experience and provoke them to explore the design more.

In the following examples, users can click and drag around the decorative sticker elements for fun. Design over functionality at its finest.

Astrology Club Spotify

 

Let’s proceed with another upcoming trend that serves strictly design purposes rather than functionality. Since split-screen doesn’t work well for usability and responsiveness, it’s now just for fun desktop aesthetics. As the name suggests, we have two screens, split horizontally or vertically. There are a couple of ways you may encounter them:

• Each side of the screen with functional or click actions.
• One side of the screen is purely decorative and unclickable.
• One is purely decorative and unclickable and the other one is scrollable.

The very fact that we see the comeback and evolution of trends long thrown aside for lack of usability, might be a sign that minimalistic, uniform corporate designs are finally taking a break and we’re about to enjoy fun and more engaging websites in the following years.

Benefits of using  split-screen:

• The split-screen design provides a strong visual experience.
• It can be used to give visitors two different entry points into the content.

The following examples show split-screen in the three most common uses.

Hyumanking Hyam Designer Portfolio

Readymag Awwwards Website of the Year

Captain France Rail Network

Check out more live examples of websites with split-screen layouts.

Video hero images or video backgrounds refer to automatically playing background videos in the hero section. Unfortunately, in most cases, background videos slow down page loading, and can even be distracting. For that purpose, we’re about to see websites using them much more carefully and strategically. For example, the videos aren’t just abstract and conceptual, but rather show actual footage of the event or product the website is promoting. They are much shorter so they won’t eat too much data or prevent the website to load properly.

Benefits of using background videos in the hero section:

• Autoplay background videos: They serve to give important visual information about the product or service.
• Non-auto-play video next to the page title: It’s a great opportunity to put an informative and helpful product video.

Salt Project

 

Horizontal scrolling, when done right, subverts expectations from the uniform vertical scrolling experience, and makes a website more interesting, fun, and most importantly, memorable. It’s becoming a trend to use mixed scrolling, usually, websites start with vertical scrolling and then shift to horizontal for certain sections, especially ones with large gallery images or animations.

Benefits of using horizontal scrolling:

• It subverts expectations and gives memorable experiences.
• It works great for large galleries of images and animations.

In the following examples, horizontal scrolling gives more space for the elements, saving the design from clutter.

Henry Northington Portfolio

Orb Space Studio

 

Although you can’t control 404 errors, you can still take care of your visitor’s experience and use your 404 pages to recover the inconvenience of arriving at a dead link. Let’s call it a happy accident.

This trend allows businesses to show they care about their users and manage to negate any negative emotion with cool animations, games, humor, and other memorable and unexpected content.

Benefits of using a custom 404 page

• Custom 404 pages help your visitors recover from the poor experience of hitting the error page and ultimately help you bring them back to your website.
• They show you care about the experience of your users.

Now let’s see a couple of beautiful custom 404 pages that bring a smile to the visitors’ faces.

Hematogenix

Santa Teresa Fest

Responsiveness is an obvious requirement, however, considering mobile usage has surpassed desktop for shopping, consider going a step further. Unlike responsive design, with this approach, you design the layout specifically for mobile devices and adapt that design for bigger screens later on.

Benefits of mobile-first design:

• The better you design a site for mobile, the easier the use, and the better the performance.
• Makes the content consistent with the space of a mobile screen.
• Eliminates the usual headache of having to exclude content from your desktop version.

Website:  Cubitts