6 Popular Typography Trends in Web Design

Whether you’re a graphic designer, a typographer or a web developer, finding ways to merge your creativity with current audience expectations is always a welcome addition to your skillset. According to Tech Jury, 48% of people cite a website’s design as a deciding factor in establishing a business’ credibility, with two out of three people preferring to read well-designed content on the web.

Given the recent push for responsive design, mobile-first optimisation and omni-device website compatibility, applying creative typographic solutions to your site can indeed elevate its performance and appeal on the open market. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the most popular typography trends in web design, as well as how you can utilise them in your projects and personal website for great effect.

Typographic Highlights

Text highlights are commonly associated with typing machines and their inherent inability to accommodate creative design decisions. However, text highlight options such as Bold, Italic and Underline have crept their way into our text editors and design software out of respect for the past more than anything.

With 2020 underway, text highlights are slowly making a comeback as they allow for a higher degree of freedom and text-flow control from the designer’s perspective. Highlighting certain words, phrases, hyperlinks and other important elements in your web design, as can be seen in the Weston Vierregger portfolio website, can improve your website’s navigation and the impression it leaves on would-be visitors.

Typography Layered with Visuals

Merging typography with well-selected visuals such as images, animated backgrounds or videos can further elevate your project and give it an aura of professionalism and exclusivity. Carefully selected lettering which corresponds with the background (serif for fashion, jewellery and hotels, sans-serif for legal and medical firms, for example) can give the website a more welcoming appeal.

Websites such as All Year Round exhibit this trend quite well by showcasing products and services in conjunction with sales pitches layered atop of visuals to great effect. By utilising writing platforms such as Trust My Paper and Evernote, your web design project can take full advantage of attractive visuals combined with impactful copywriting messages present throughout the website.

Polychrome Lettering

Regardless of what anyone says, when it comes to the way you color your typography in web design, only sky’s the limit. As such, you can safely apply gradient effects and different colouring throughout your landing page and navigation elements to create visual context, as long as the colours you choose complement each other and create a harmonic composition, an effect easily achieved via tools such as Adobe Color.

Michele Briar, Chief Creative Officer at Studicus had this to say on the topic: “Pointing to examples such as Jenny Johannesson’s portfolio website and its introductory typographic animation, we can spot an effective merge of monochrome background with polychrome lettering. Creating such a juxtaposition of positive and negative elements allows web designers to deliver very impactful written messages or annunciate certain segments of lettering without disrupting the site’s visual composition.”

Minuscule Typography

Visual data in the form of photography and infographics should carry your web design project and allow visitors to glean useful information from the website in a quick and straightforward manner. You can merge headings and subheadings with visuals by introducing minuscule typography into the web design layout, rather than go for macro lettering which is typically associated with typographic hierarchy.

Projects such as Mikiya Kobayashi give us a great example of what minimalistic typography, carefully positioned on the website’s layout, can do for the platform’s professional appeal. By using writing tools such as Grab My Essay and Hemingway Editor in conjunction with a font which fits your project’s niche and client’s wishes, you can utilise minuscule typography to maximise the site’s aura of exclusivity.

Outlined Lettering

Using the negative space of your fonts can be an effective way to differentiate the project you’re working on from others on the web. Outlining your typography is best done with sans-serif fonts and macro lettering which allows for layering with the background. Short, all-cap messages can be written via tools such as Grammarly and Best Essay Education, further improving your design choice’s effect on the visitor.

Even if you use popular fonts standardised by Google Fonts, outlined lettering with transparent filling will create an appealing 3D effect for your typographic design solution. As an example, we can point to Zoccon and their landing page, coupled with a looping animation which helps annunciate the outlined lettering to a greater extent.

Calculated Typographic Manipulation

Lastly, the best way to showcase your mastery of typography in web design is to deliberately break your fonts and lettering in order to create a new visual composition which can help your project go viral. Typographic messages which contain intentional errors, grammar mistakes or pixelated segments should only do so in a controlled and tasteful manner.

Breaking your fonts for the sake of being different and without a clear message or intention will appear like kitsch and have the opposite effect for your website’s appeal. Referring to examples such as Big Eye and their landing page gives us a great example of how typographic errors can be used to your advantage rather than a mistake in need of fixing.

The Ever-Shifting Trends (Conclusion)

Typography, just like any other aspect of design, is prone to subjective criticism and target audience’s appeal. However, baseline compositional rules and design postulates apply no matter the scale or niche in which your project fits into.

Typography trends tend to shift with emerging fonts and innovation in other aspects of visual design, making the web design niche ripe for experimentation. Think outside the box when it comes to creating future web design projects for your clients and their performance on the open market is bound to reflect those efforts.

Author Bio: Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a freelance writer at WoWGrade and Supreme Dissertations writing services and is trying to improve her and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That’s why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process via the best online essay writing services review to help to inspire people. Also, she writes for LiveInspiredMagazine, rounding out her professional writing career.