Brittany MasloEvery single year, like clockwork, there’s a new ‘it’ look in design.
Glassmorphism, brutalism, neomorphism… It all sounds cool, and designers slap them onto everything. The problem is that nobody ever thinks about the way it affects the end user. You know, the person looking at it.
A lot of what’s popular right now is popular because it’s different.
It feels fresh, so of course, everyone wants it. But that doesn’t mean they matter; visual choices that are actually important are the ones that have an impact on behavior. Does your trendy design help someone make a decision faster? Does the new color scheme do anything but create confusion?
Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves.
In this article, we’ll look at 5 of the biggest trends in design right now and see if they work for real people or not.
Visual Trends That Have an Impact on How Users Interact
Some design trends come and go without anyone really noticing. Others change the way people use a site or an app.
Let’s look at the second group.
Glassmorphism and Layered Transparency
This one is everywhere lately, with its frosted glass panels and blurry backgrounds. The idea is to create depth and make different layers of the interface feel like they’re separate from each other. When it works, it helps users understand what goes together and what they should focus on.
When it doesn’t… Well, it’s a mess. What ends up happening is that people can’t read the text. And to make things worse, the soft/blurry background makes the letter kind of disappear into the haze. And now think about users who have vision problems; it’s almost impossible for them to read it.
But yeah, even though this sounded a bit dramatic, the fix is actually quite simple.
Treat the blur like decoration and make sure the text stands out enough from whatever’s behind it. Nobody should have to squint.
Context-Aware Interfaces
Some interfaces notice what time it is, what device you’re holding, and so on. And they adjust to it; dark mode kicks in when the sun sets, layouts automatically rearrange when you switch to tablet, etc. This kind of design is excellent because you don’t have to stop and tweak settings all the time.
Some of these systems even go so far as to pull in live data to make their adjustments even smarter. So say you’re using a travel app – it might pull in an accurate weather forecast API to add a cool feature that makes it so the background changes based on current weather conditions. Cool, right?
The trick here is to make these changes feel natural because, if the interface changes all of a sudden and you have no idea why, it’ll just confuse you.
Oversized Typography
This one’s having a moment right now. Headlines take up half of your screen before you see anything else. It’s annoying to some users, but actually, it can be useful because you can simply scan text and move on. The giant letters tell you what the page is about immediately, and it works particularly well for storytelling.
There’s a downside to this (of course).
Those colossal headlines tend to push everything down so that it’s inconvenient to reach the important stuff. This causes buttons to get kind of buried, and the whole UX ends up being dominated by ‘endless scrolling’.
In order to fix this, all you need to do is balance the big elements a bit. Allow for a bit of breathing room so that the bits you ACTUALLY want users to see are clearly visible without the users having to play detective or ‘scrolling simulator’.
Brutalism in Digital Interfaces
Brutalism is an architectural style that appeared in the 1950s, and the easiest way to describe it would be to say that it’s the polar opposite of polished. In digital interfaces, this means raw layouts, high contrast, harsh edges, and hardly any decoration. It looks broken, but on purpose, and some people like it because there’s no fluff to get through.
It’s direct; there’s no distracting users by hiding things behind ‘flashy’ visuals.
But some users see that rough look and decide the site is untrustworthy because of it. That’s not an issue for a personal blog, but a bank or a doctor’s office? That’s a huge problem. There’s also the potential issue with usability because that completely depends on the structure underneath.
Dark Mode as a Default Option
Dark mode started with developers and people coding at 2 AM, and now it’s everywhere. Dark backgrounds with lighter texts can be easier on the eyes, and it can save battery on newer phone screens, so it’s great that it has become popular.Plus, some people genuinely prefer the look of it.
But not every ‘dark mode’ is the same. Some websites don’t check contrast, so what ends up happening is that you get gray text on a just slightly darker background, making the text practically unreadable. There are also sites that use pitch black and pure white together; this creates glare and defeats the whole purpose.
To make it usable, follow basic guidelines on contrast and avoid extremes.
Conclusion
Just because something looks cool doesn’t mean it’s valuable. And just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s usable. Even if every single site has a frosted glass effect, you don’t necessarily need it on yours.
When it comes to trends, the best way to go about them is to stick with the ones that reduce friction.
The ones that help users understand faster and move through the site more easily, that’s what you want to pay attention to.
Everything else is decoration, nothing more.
