At TUK, we're eager about examining thoughts that convert into practical solutions for the dev community. In this blog, we’ll share some ideas to improve interaction design that will help you cut through the upheaval.

Interaction design is a part of the user experience. It’s a discipline of design that revolves around the design of interactive products and services in which a designer focuses on the way the user interacts with an element or product. Interaction design stays relevant due to the continuous stream of new ideas and practical implementations that demand continuous personal improvement on designers’ part. Keeping yourself up to date with contemporary design trends can become compelling but forming some proven UX habits, that’s the real deal to ensure continuous improvement in your design thinking. 

This blog will discuss some practical habits that you can adopt for the successful implementation of interaction design in your web projects.

Each page of your design should answer the following questions for the end-users:

For what reason would I make those actions?

What will happen once I do take those actions?

While forming personas and user streams, you should follow these simple techniques for adding clarity in your interaction design: 

Choose appropriate UI patterns – To know popular design solutions to common problems, use different sites, for example, UI Patterns and free guides like Web UI patterns. For instance, cards are famous because they assist with getting a lot of content sorted in a streamlined manner. Hero images are extraordinary for item locales since they have an immediate hunch. Utilize these examples as a standard, then, at that point, build on further with your imagination.

Don’t break mental models – Design based on what individuals are already familiar with. Such as symbols in the upper left should connect back to the landing page. Calendars should allow you to pick dates rather than expecting users to type the date and time.

Use good copy – content is a major building block of interaction design. Ensure that the tone of the copy matches the visual design since everything is part of a similar interface. Any disparities will confuse your users and negatively affect your user experience.

Include meaningful labels & icons – Don’t complicate things too much with labeling interface objects. It ought to be clear what is and isn't interactive.


Designers can have a specific measure of auteurship in their work, yet the design should eventually revolve around the client's necessities. The easiest way to unlock particular design requirements is to listen to user feedback. Client feedback is often treated as an annoyance to disregard, but there is a rich lode of intuitions present within every customer's assistance team. Don't drift apart from customer feedback as it enhances your design sense. There are tools like Get Satisfaction, where the features are designed to bring out honest conversations. The more noteworthy insights, the more prominent experiences.

Ask the Right Questions by Observing User Behavior

User participation is a significant part of Interaction design. There is no interaction without the users performing an activity. 

Such practices are presented in the Lean UX Lifecycle methodology, which states that you should consistently improve your design depending on the hyper-centered usability studies, insightful tools, heatmaps, and eye-tracking.

Tracking down the right design arrangement starts by posing the proper inquiries. In any case, sorting out what queries to pose takes a bit of time and practice. Whenever you notice a prevalent issue faced by your users, make sure to find the right examining questions to distinguish the foundations of that specific design issue.

Spend a good amount of time on Interaction design because knowing about users' context and motivation to interact with a specific product makes it easy to create venture maps and design interaction patterns. The attention and focus on interaction design, during your design process, can help you elevate the experience for your user and save you the effort of coming back to repeat the process again.  

A basic rundown of ways that help you improve interaction design in your web projects

People don’t care about your backend code when they first visit your website. They only see the design and then decide if they want to stay and explore it or not. Since this growing industry has a lot of attraction, many ambitious UI designers appear in the scene. We have listed down some mistakes that UI designers should avoid while building a web design.

Most inexperienced UI designers like to experiment with many things like playing with colors and fonts, eventually making their design look messy and hard to understand. Users crave consistency that can be achieved by keeping things simple. This gave birth to minimalism in design. Being consistent with colors and fonts makes the design look appealing and less complicated. It’s a good thing to experiment, but the trick is to know when you’re overdoing it. 

During 2020, we’ve seen massive growth in mobile user visits on websites as 68.1% of website visits consisted of mobile users (according to statistica.com). In this day and age, everyone is falling for ease. Due to the increase in mobile user visits, designers are following the approach of mobile-first (where they build the design for mobile-first). There are so many choices out there that no one will waste their time struggling with this problem. They will simply move on to something better. Bounce Rate is a scary thing, try to keep it to a minimum. There are many responsive testing tools to check your website’s responsiveness. Use them and live a life with fewer problems.

With time, the attention span of people is becoming shorter. The key is to say a lot with minimal text. Most people are bound to skim through pages and won’t even read all the details you have added for your visitors. Try to give away the major information that users are here to read as early as possible to save time and make them stay at your website. 

I don’t know a single person who doesn’t hate long forms with multiple input fields. We talked about the continuously decreasing attention span of users before and how it is absolutely important to keep things simple and short. 

The best practice is to make forms with minimal input fields for the information that you absolutely need from users. For example, asking users for their date of birth is pointless if you’re not going to send them a birthday wish. So only ask for information that you can’t do without and make your user’s journey as easy as possible.  

Big animated carousels are just useless, and nobody likes them. They look like ads and cover up too much space. Auto-rotating carousels can be simply annoying for some users where the slide gets replaced in 5 secs, and one can’t even read the text even if he/she/they want to. If you’re on your phone then it is just an everlasting loading time that eventually makes you go bonkers. Please avoid putting carousels on the web pages unless it's extremely important.

People just hate sitting idle and waiting. Suppose your page is taking some time to load, Now you don’t want your user to stare at a loading screen doing nothing. Most users will easily give up and move on. Instead of just a rolling sign with the text “loading”, try adding an interesting animation, some puzzle, or anything else in that time that keeps a user glued to their screen.

In this digital era, there is so much content out there that people don’t like waiting. Everyone just wants what they need at the snap of their fingers. However, it’s essential to keep the user experience smooth and less time-consuming. Always design the website according to the targeted audience. These insights can be a great place to start if you’re trying to pinpoint the stage where things usually go wrong in the design process. 

A checklist on how not to mess up your Web Design

There are a lot of factors that play a vital part while designing a web project. From deciding a color scheme to designing the layout, and making a perfect logo, everything holds massive importance. Another factor of paramount value in defining the theme of your web project is its fonts. In some cases, font alone can make the reader glued to the content of your website. While we’re discussing the importance of fonts, you should always be mindful of the negative impact a bad font can have on your web design and completely ruin the user experience. Therefore, choosing the right font for your content and elements is very crucial. In simple words, each font has a specific vibe.

This blog revolves around the things to take care of when you’re choosing the fonts for your design and content. We’ll also discuss some of the basic practices that will help you choose the best font for your web design. 

Believe it or not, but users do judge a brand from its website and content. The font you use in writing content plays a massive role in how people will perceive your brand. For starters, If your brand identity resonates with a sophisticated audience that values luxury, you can go with the serif fonts. Similarly, if your brand is for a laidback audience, you can go with Sans serif fonts that will keep things clean and modern. Using the right fonts will allow you to impart an appropriate first impression to your user. The idea is to communicate through the content and set an overall mood, so make sure the font you choose goes along with the message that you’re trying to convey.

The art of typography is complex and incorporates multiple factors like readability, text alignment, and spacing. For fonts, the best place to start is to get the basics right. Here are some quick summaries of some of the most widely used fonts, and how they can be used:

Serif fonts: The serif is a thin line at the end of a letter or symbol. Serif fonts are considered classic, elegant and have been closely associated with printing. Some of the timeless fonts in this category are Georgia and Bodoni, and Times New Roman.

Sans serif fonts: These are fonts that do not have serif lines at the end of their characters. The sans serif is clean, modern, and looks neutral, making it ideal for minimalistic web designs.

Script fonts: Scripts, including cursive fonts, are created after handwriting styles. It’s best to keep this style limited only to topics because writing your body text in a script can be a problem for your audience. For example, Lucida Handwriting and Lobster. 

The rule of thumb suggests that you should never use more than three fonts on a web page. Along with the aesthetics, it helps with accessibility and maintains a consistent feel in your design. 

Firstly, each of the three fonts then carries different levels of importance. To keep a clear concept of royalty, choose the main font, second font, and optional font. Your primary font is the most visible and should be used in the titles of your website. This is the font that will greatly affect your brand perception, even if it is not widely used everywhere. As a result, the main font can be very powerful and different from other fonts on your website.

Secondly, your secondary font can be used for most of the content written on the website. This includes categories, descriptions, blog articles, and more. While your primary font can be eye-catching and unique, your second font should be simpler and easy to read. Extremely colorful fonts are difficult to read when used over long sections of text.

Lastly, your accent font is the only one you use for a specific purpose. When it comes to websites, an accent font is often set to call to action, to draw attention to your most important button on the page. You can use accent font for your logo design font too.

No one’s got the time to wait for a page to load. It’s imperative to avoid using fonts that take too much time to load. Here are some tips to avoid the delay:
   1. Stick to a limited number of font families. Around 2-3

   2. Avoid downloading irrelevant font languages

   3. Only select weights that you absolutely need

Some designers don’t pay much attention to what kind of image a font portrays. Your font speaks a lot about your brand and a user can know a lot about the style or vibe that you carry. For a consistent user experience, it is important that your content is readable and aesthetically pleasing.  You can check out some quality fonts on Google fonts to get started and move to dafont.com to access extensive font libraries for choosing the perfect fonts for your next project.

A beginner’s insight into the importance of choosing the right fonts

Choose the right fonts for your Web Design

Hello to all the fellow devs out there! 

At TUK, we’re passionate about discussing ideas that translate into real-world solutions for devs everywhere. As someone who’s getting into the grind himself, I like to talk about my learning experiences and share what I have learned so far with the community out there. If you’re into web development and new technologies in the industry, we’re going to have a hell of a ride learning new things together.  

Visual tension is a concept of manipulating the viewer’s cognitive discomfort by the arrangement of graphical elements. It is created by the manipulation of the relationship between design elements that deliberately causes a visual imbalance. It’s about capturing the viewer’s attention by creating a cognitive conflict. Visual tension is a key factor in establishing visual hierarchy, and consequently, the creation of visual hierarchy holds key importance in any design. Visual Hierarchy is utilized to arrange design elements in order to influence the order in which the viewer collects information. By using different principles of contrast, size, proximity, alignment, etc, designers arrange different elements in their “right place” to make important elements stand out from the rest. This blog revolves around the technique of tension in the graphical arrangement of elements in web design. 

In graphic design, tension has been a great asset for the designers to make the audience focus on elements while making them “uncomfortable” with an unusual arrangement of typography, framing, and design elements. 

Another take on visual tension is the impression of the environment that causes cognitive discomfort for the viewer. For example, a glass of water at the edge of a table as compared to it being placed in the middle of the table causes more cognitive discomfort. The glass placed in the middle gives a more balanced image to the viewer.  

In web design, we see that certain graphics or design elements are arranged unconventionally to create visual tension in the layout. Although visual hierarchy has several principles to make elements stand out in a design, tension is applied in scenarios where the designers pick focus points and do things outside the bounds of design principles. The careful consideration in this technique is to go all out and to make the users identify those uncomforting spots where you want them to focus. In web design layouts, designers use visual hierarchy to create a hierarchy of importance for the users. With tension, they can create out-of-the-box experiences by playing with ideas outside the typical principles of design.  

You can establish focus points for your viewers by using tension with different elements to make user experiences more hierarchically sound. The tension can help you to maintain the interest and focus of the user as well. Creating visual tension itself is a vast subject and involves many other techniques that we’ll discuss later on in another blog. 

Visual tension is an interesting concept that has been around in arts and graphic design for quite some time now. Web designers can also use the concept to create focus points for their users by creating tension with respect to the importance of elements (CTAs, buttons, etc) and make user experiences more engaging. Just like any good thing, too much tension can result in the disorientation of the user’s focus. Hence, it’s vital to dive into any technique and its use before you implement it into a final web design. Experimentation with knowledge is the key to success here.

The importance of Visual tension in web design today. 

We’ve been publishing quite a few blogs on emerging design trends and concepts to keep you up-to-date with the industry. This weekly blog dives into an exciting idea of Dopamine and its connection with web design. 

With a more accessible web each passing day, designers are tasked with not only capturing the attention of their users but also influencing the behavior of their visitors. Their primary objectives also include building a structure towards an overall goal that varies from selling products or getting visitors to sign-up for something. It has been proven by research that from the first nanoseconds of visiting a website, your brain and biases start to make judgment calls about the website and design. 

The Behaviour and Information Technology journal has also reported that people make a like or no-like decision about a design of a website in the first 50 milliseconds. Hence, it becomes imperative for designers to tap into the viewer’s psychology right from the get-go to influence their visitors’ behavior.

Dopamine is known to play a key role in the motivated pursuit of rewards, happiness, and pleasure in human beings. It’s a neurotransmitter or a chemical produced in the brain. Dopamine usually kicks in when we discover something exciting or interesting. It is greatly linked to the reward and motivation of our brain. Its also released in anticipation of something that we think will be enjoyable like a kiss or a glass of wine. It becomes a reflex of the mind to release the stream of dopamine whenever you set your mind to do the same thing.

Dopamine can be instrumental in designing interfaces that take motivation and reward into account. 

Dopamine in web design can be building a structure of design and interface that involves creative activities that are enjoyable, leading to a state of hyper-focus called flow. Flow allows people to cut out the distractions and truly be productive with their tasks, as well as enjoying the process with their complete attention. Designers can facilitate dopamine production in designs that are detail-oriented and incorporate rewards (micro and real) for being engaging with the design. A detail-oriented interface and design can give you the edge that keeps your users engaged by using the release of dopamine to influence user behavior of revisiting the website. 

Techniques for using Dopamine in web designs

Rewards can serve as a great motivator that infuses dopamine in the user behavior to repeat processes (clicks or engagement) or actually sit through a process that is otherwise mundane. Progress bars also keep the user motivated to complete the signup, payment details or even a blog to achieve the end result. Tangible rewards for signing up for your mailing list or even a sign-up can help to elicit dopamine production and influence users to associate positive feelings of likeness for your website. 

For positive first impressions, your design can incorporate striking graphics and details that allow the user to get a minor dopamine release of finding something exciting and different.   

The conclusion lies in the answer to a simple question. Why would people want to visit your website and complete the goal (signing up, sales, or subscribing to your newsletter) that you’ve set for them. The job of a designer does not end at creating a landing page that minimizes the bounce rate. It also involves building activities that elicit dopamine through capitalizing on fulfillment of their motivation. The key is to incorporate the element of discovery and detail orientation that elicits dopamine production in order to build on the motivation of the user to enjoy the process and stick around till the end. 

How designers use dopamine in their web designs and structures.

Tailwind CSS is one of the most famous utility-based front-end frameworks today. We’re sure that you’ve read this statement a dozen times on the internet now, so we’re here to summarize some key points that might give you some insight if you should actually give it a shot. 

Here are some reasons why you should consider Tailwind CSS as your primary front-end framework: 

Respecting the Rule of least power, Tailwind CSS is actually easier to debug than other Non-CSS solutions where you have to go through your docs, Github issues, and so on for simple prototyping and debugging tasks. With Tailwind CSS, you know that either you’ve gotten the class right, or not. This seems like a small thing at first, but it actually lets you focus on what you should be doing rather than going through circles to fix something that can be dealt with in minutes with Tailwind. The class names in Tailwind CSS represent one or multiple CSS declarations. Hence, you get to build complex components from a set of primitive utilities in no time.  

This might sound like a bad thing at first but hear us out first. The constrained set of primitive utilities also bound your creative capabilities but in a good way. You get a consistent style in your design that can become a signature. The Class names can be shared between elements so which also results in consistent bundle size. Not only does the CSS become easier to read, it fast tracks your workflow as the whole process becomes much quicker. And with writing faster styles, you get loads of pre-built classes for size and colors which also make it easier for other devs to learn the styles in a jiffy to get right on the project.  

With the CSS sharing elements and as the code grows in size, we can re-use the elements by making it a component and sharing it between elements. You get to reuse optimizable CSS for your elements. Generally, your fonts and colors are based on relative values but with Tailwind, you can darken your text by 5% or make the text smaller by 15%. The arbitrary values allow you to really get the little things right. Moreover, the real catch of small and composable utilities is the enforcement of consistency for every developer in the team as they have fixed options. So the design is unique yet consistent at the same time. 

Responsive Design right in your browser 

Tailwind lets you design right in your browser where you get to add transitions and even animations while you just play around. Prototyping and responsive design do not get any easier than this where you’re in control without the need of establishing a local host. The HTML is completely responsive in your browser, so you don’t have to go back and forth multiple windows to test a component through the eyes of an end-user. As a result, you cut out the tabbing between HTML & style sheets and fast-track your workflow resulting in quicker developer hand-off. 

Tailwind has also emerged as a great solution for devs who like to focus on development. It makes it easy for them to drop in components and cook something up in no time. The one thing Tailwind does best is truly fast-tracking your workflow with the help of UI libraries of beautifully crafted components so they get to put all their attention to the development bits rather than getting stuck in the design process themselves or hiring a designer. 

There aren’t any built-in templates or components with Tailwind CSS like Bootstrap but here are several options available for every kind of dev. These UI kits have a variety of responsive components for you to have a solid base for your design. They enable you to achieve your requirements with proper responsiveness and very little code. Tailwind CSS is also known as the go-to, especially if you value customizability to a higher degree in responsive user interfaces. You can give the component a go right now with Doge build (a no-bullshit browser editor) and see how stuff looks in real-time.   

Tailwind CSS sure is a great solution for most devs who are familiar with CSS. There are some clear downsides too that we want to cover here. Firstly, complex animations do become a lot hectic. You can add complex animations through configurations but if your project needs a complex animation, it does backfire on your workflow. There’s a rigorous process of creating classes for each element. Although this can be solved with an animation library as Tailwind supports some pretty good ones out there. 

Secondly, readability does become a bit tacky as you are adding loads of CSS classes. Especially when you’re getting the hang of things and you’re not familiar with the wide range of classes, readability is not a piece of cake when you’re starting out with Tailwind CSS. 

Lastly and most importantly, Tailwind bears great fruits for devs and teams with their own design systems. There may be quite a few other considerations for big dev teams to make the switch from any other front-end solution that they currently have.

Tailwind CSS is a great low-level framework that solves many drawbacks of other CSS solutions. It does fast track the workflow for many devs but it’s not a solution for every web dev need out there. Front-End devs have the luxury to mesh different solutions as long as we guarantee maintainability, scalability, and performance. Tailwind does serve the purpose greatly for a great number of devs and provides a quicker approach to doing things seamlessly. Although, before adopting any new framework, it’s vital to factor in the effects on your workflow, productivity, performance, and scalability. 

A beginner's insight into the widely famous front-end framework today.

We’ve talked about how designers have to stay up to date with the latest trends to innovate and provide unique solutions for their clients in our previous blog (Emerging Design trends). This blog revolves around some other design trends that are taking over the design scene like a storm. Trends come and go, but keeping up with the contemporary trends allows you to expand your creative domains, so you’re able to make a lasting impression with every experience. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss two of those new trends. Parallax animations and three-dimensional colours. 

A Parallax is an optical illusion where objects near a viewer appear to move faster than objects that are farther. This real-time experience has allowed web designs to seem more realistic and catch the user’s attention. The effect is coupled with animations (usually triggered with the cursor’s movement) or scrolling (the effect occurs when you scroll down or up). 

Parallax Animations is the effect that’s on the rise where the use of foreground and background creates depth in the design. It can be triggered by mouse movement or even automatically as it allows the user to get more input in a short amount of time. It’s generally coupled with scrolling (called parallax scrolling), where the user’s scroll controls the speed of the animations. 

 As you scroll up or down a website, the parallax effect makes you focus on the fleeting parts of the design as they may appear to be moving at a higher speed than other components. Although criticized by some devs for being too complicated for some users at times, parallax does come in handy when you want to blow your end-users mind and have their undivided attention.  

Using web-based animations doesn't sound odd among web designers and users. Aside from conventional strategies involving micro animations, parallax impacts have increasingly shown up as a vague concept. Parallax animation centres around segregating the forefront and foundation components of a page, making a parallax impact. It gives the design a more considerable depth, making the experience more vivid and surreal. Moreover, it gives the overall layout a more dramatic feel, which makes it engaging.

Colour schemes in web design have leaned towards gradients for a while now. The concept of three-dimensional colours is delicate shading around the edges of icons to make them feel more lively. This concept is usually linked to app icons, but the neat look of gradients can be substituted for a more imperfect yet vibrant blend of colours through this technique. Two colours can be smeared together, leaving their shadow or depth around the objects. This gives a realistic impression of a more live yet clean design. This could be your go-to if your client is looking for a sleek yet simple design.   

Designers, just like artists, are known to channel their creative expertise to make a genuinely new thing. We keep seeing new exceptional designs that become pioneering trends by exploring different visual communication channels and creating layouts to amplify user experience. The discussed trends signify the shift towards realism in today’s design trends, as the inspiration seems to be stemming from the depiction of real-life instances and experiences. 

Design trends: Parallax Animations and Three-Dimensional Colours 

In the last blog, we discussed emerging design trends and the importance of staying up to date with design trends in order to expand your creative horizons. This blog revolves around the approaches to take in order to build a design for multiple screen sizes, as users today, prefer different devices for accessing the web according to their user profile and goals. As diverse user profiles prefer different devices for the same website, designers try to provide a consistent experience across those devices. The ultimate goal of a design across multiple devices is the consistency of experience. 

Design experts define these key concepts that ensure Interusability for any cross-platform UX, for a coherent experience:

Composition of functionality across those platforms

Consistency of interfaces across these devices

Continuity of content and data for possible transitions between platforms

During 2020, we saw a noticeable growth in mobile users visits on websites as 68.1% of all website visits consisted of mobile users. Statistica.com also conducted research on mobile users. According to their projection, by 2025 there will be 311 million mobile users in the US alone. Forget numbers, your average screen time on your phone and desktop while scrolling through web stores and apps sums up the story. People have started using their phones for accessing websites and actually reading content rather than doing the same on their laptops or desktops. What we’re trying to get at is that you can optimize your website for mobile use but usually at the expense of functionality or interactivity that affects the experience of your mobile users.  

Before we dive into further discussion, here’s some phrases that you should know about:

Progressive Advancement: An approach where a lower version is designed first with the most basic features and functions. We advance on to more complex versions for different devices (Desktops and tablets) adding interactions and features along the way.

Graceful Degradation: A completely opposite approach where we start from the most “perfectly intended” version and gradually degrade according to compatible mobile versions by cutting down on interactivity and functionality.

Responsive Web Design (RWD): The widely followed approach today where the design is flexible, responsive and can be rendered across different screen sizes. 

The mobile-first approach stems from the concept of progressive enhancement. The idea with this approach is doing the hardest part first. Hence, designing for other devices becomes easier. It comes down to the most essential features that the website, store or app can’t do without. The core concept is designing for a smaller screen to take care of your user needs without any constraints and then progressing to the bigger screens with more freedom. In simple words, mobile-first focuses on giving optimized views to mobile users followed by desktop users. On the contrary, the responsive design prioritizes desktop readers. Generally, it is easier to design a site that fits the content in a mobile device first as then it’s able to render across different screens. 

The desktop-first approach can lead to the trouble of aligning the content and some last minute compromises on user experience for mobile users. Responsive web design and mobile-first design are not the same. A Responsive design is mobile friendly whereas mobile-first caters to the mobile users as a priority. Similarly, Desktop-first can be an approach in Responsive web design where your priority can be a Desktop design (like most cases in RWD)  

A couple years ago, Google started indexing and ranking websites by their mobile content. Historically, the content on desktop versions was used for indexing that greatly influenced the SEO and user query results on Google. Google's take on the move was that the majority of users are online on their mobile devices, hence their Googlebot primarily crawls the pages with their smartphone agent now. 

The mobile first approach usually prioritizes users resulting in the process being more content-centric. The smaller screen breakpoints allows the design to naturally fit around the corners. Moreover, the approach compels you to design multiple layouts based on different screen sizes and orientations. Although the approach can make you go the extra mile and make some extra effort, it also saves you the compromises in the desktop first approach where you are prone to the risk of “cutting down” on the experience. 

In conclusion, it boils down to the user experience and objectives of the design for its audience. A good design is always built for the end-user, therefore, before you decide to follow an approach you must keep your end-user and their journey in mind. Your consideration should account for the screen size, device type and orientation that the end-users prefer. Moreover, your approach has to accommodate the audience and product/service. For example, if the majority of your end-users prefer desktop, you may decide to go with Desktop-first approach so your priority is catering to that audience first. Alternatively, if your end-user prefers mobile devices, your approach can be Mobile-first for the very same reason.

Hence, following the approach that’s most appropriate to cater to the experience and journey of the end-user seems like the way to go in order to get the results you’re looking for. 

Importance of different design approaches for consistent cross-platform experiences

Mobile-first, Desktop-first and Responsive Web Design (RWD)

Web Designers have to stay up to date with graphic design trends in order to gain an advantage over designers that stick to what they learned in college or design school. By knowing what is trending in the design industry, you can offer your clients innovative ideas for their needs instead of relying on the basics. Creating new design works that meld with the latest design trends will help not only make your design unique and creative but will also give you that competitive edge over other designers. In a previous blog we mentioned some of the latest design trends in 2021 and there are many design trends that have taken the internet by storm but here we will only talk about glassmorphism and gradients and how they’ve helped bring more creativity and uniqueness to the visual aspects of a webpage. 

Glassmorphism has been quite popular for a while as it has brought a fresh trend in UI design. It is characterized by a translucent, frosted glass like effect, that adds a visual hierarchy and depth in your UI. Glassmorphism can be used to put focus on the content you want to highlight. It can be used in creative ways to add an appealing visual interest to your UI, from landing pages and dashboards to UI components such as cards, login screens and onboarding screens. We’ve worked with glassmorphism a lot and we’ve found that glassmorphic elements work well when layered on top of vibrant backgrounds, colorful shapes, and images that show through the translucent glass elements and showcase the effect. The most defining characteristics of glassmorphism are:

Transparency (frosted-glass effect that is applied using a Background Blur)

Multi-layered approach with objects floating in space

Vivid colors are used to highlight the blurred transparency

A subtle, light border on the translucent objects.

Before glassmorphism, neumorphism was the trend which basically imitated an extruded, plastic surface, but still looking like one layer, however glassmorphism goes a bit more vertical and because you can see through it, means that users can establish hierarchy and depth of the UI. They simply see which layer is on top of which, just like pieces of virtual glass placed on top of one another, giving your webpage a unique design and overall appeal.

Gradients aren’t an emerging design trend. They have been used by designers to add an extra design appeal to the overall UI for quite a while now. However, with glassmorphism the concept of gradients has been very much in use by designers lately. Gradients are a gradual blending from one color to another color or, if you’re in a colorful mood, from one color to another color to another color—gradients aren’t limited to only two shades, they are also called color transitions. This is an extremely versatile trend. It can be bold or subtle depending on where you want to use it or why. And because gradients mix and blend different shades of color, they can also be used to create new color combinations that feel different, modern and creative, giving your design the uniqueness it needs. When designing for glassmorphism for your UI it is necessary for you to establish a subtle background on which the glassmorphic elements can rest and portray a visual hierarchy. Though it may very well work on plain single coloured backgrounds, gradients help establish more depth and visual appeal to the overall design and also help facilitate the glassmorphic effect. When designing a gradient background you can use a combination of soft colors for a subtle background. You can add a fun, funky vibe with a photo overlay or make a big impact by adding a gradient with bold colors to design accents without it being visually overwhelming. When it comes to gradients in web design, pretty much anything works, so you can take the advantage of the pool of opportunities and be as creative as you want and incorporate this trend into your web design while facilitating the glassmorphic effect as well. 

The glassmporhic and gradient effect are design trends that designers are using to add more visual appeal to their design and specifically for glassmorphism, it also provides a visual hierarchy in your UI design. There are many more trends out there that designers have been using to create modern, out of the box designs which we will be covering in future blogs but the reason we started out with glassmorphism and gradients is because they look and feel amazing and have taken the internet by storm. 

Importance of using glassmorphic and gradient effects in your UI design

Emerging Design Trends: Glassmorphism and Gradients

Our world is steadily developing, new technologies are being introduced day by day and the same is for the world of web development. New technologies like social media and GPS systems to artificial intelligence and digital twins make this world unrecognizable from what it was 20 years ago. The technological revolution has impacted our lives greatly and it will keep on doing so in the future as well. The websites of the future depend on the websites of today, technological evolution doesn’t just happen, it’s a steady process of development and growth that takes time and effort. Keeping ourselves up to date with the latest web development trends is not only necessary to compete with the market and provide our customers with the latest tools and technologies. (which is also very important, there's no denying that), we should rather look at it with a holistic approach and look at the bigger picture. Web development is steadily being revolutionized and for this evolution to take place and pave the way for a more technologically advanced future, we need to understand that as web developers, we should also play our part in helping this revolution. The only way to innovate is to first, be up to speed with what is going on. Listed below are a few web development trends. If implemented, they will help create modern web solutions and pave the way for a more technologically advanced future for websites and mobile applications. 

Artificial Intelligence has been around for quite a while now. Since more companies have started investing in it, we have seen quite an evolution in it. However, it still seems as though the full potential of AI is yet to be seen. From web crawlers to chatbots to auto subtitles, these are just some of the capabilities of AI. Machines are now able to independently process bits of data, analyze them and take action. This does seem scary. If you've seen Terminator, it feels like AI might be Skynet. Though we still have a lot of ground to cover, before we can doom the world with artificially intelligent robots. But for now, AI helps us engage with our customers and helps businesses run auto analytics on their business operations, which saves time and money. So adopting AI for your next project might just be what your customers want and what the world needs. 

Building native mobile applications for every device can be very time consuming and costly, not to mention the amount of work it takes to build it. Progressive Web Applications or PWAs are websites that basically function as an application. Instead of making an app for every device, they are platform-independent and run on the browser. It interacts with the customer as a native application. PWAs help reduce the development and support costs, can be easily distributed, and save device power and storage.

Initially, websites used to be only textual based. Now, due to recent advancements, users prefer to communicate via audio rather than text. This is because it is easier to understand and communicate things via audio, rather than text. Audio and speech interpretations are becoming one of the most rapidly emerging technologies in web development. Companies are investing a lot of time and money into making the web more user friendly. Providing audio and speech recognition not only facilitates users but also helps businesses to analyze customer behaviours. 

Single Page Applications or SPA is the most current web development trend in 2021. SPAs avoid loading separate HTML pages from a server in order to show a specific page to a user. Instead,  SPAs load only markup and data to dynamically render the different pages of a website on a single web page. This makes users feel like they are browsing through a single page for all their needs. Examples of the most famous SPAs are Gmail, Google Drive, Facebook and Twitter. 

Currently, there are a lot of new technologies that are trending. According to us, these are the ones that can help revolutionize the web and pave the way for better, more user-friendly and innovative websites for the future. These technologies will also help businesses because eventually in a digital world, what will matter the most is whether or not the company’s website is competitive and offers a great user experience. So, staying up to date with the latest web development trends can help you achieve both. 

Importance of staying up to date with the latest web development trends in 2021

There are approximately 700 programming languages out there, which include esoteric coding languages that only a few specialized developers use for specific commands. Out of these 700, 245 are notable coding languages, which still is an impressive number. The number is still growing as new languages and technologies are developed. Given that it is very hard for us developers to remember each and every coding language and at times it is easier and faster to simply turn to the internet to find answers than to test out our own solutions. For those who have just started, or are thinking of starting a career in web development, coding may seem very tricky, and in a way it is, because at times some solutions work and some don’t. Starting out every developer wants to get their code right in their first try, some are lucky enough to actually accomplish that but at times some aren’t.  Even experienced developers working in teams at times need to look up certain commands and languages, especially when editing others' code. So it is important to know that as a programmer you’re going to be relying on different resources and guides to help you find solutions to common glitches and it is okay to take help from that, we all do it. 

Below is a list of cheat sheets that you can use for different programming categories, i.e, front-end, back-end and data centric. These cheat sheets will help you code faster and code better, with few mistakes ahead. 

Front-end programming basically includes the development of all the features that the client or user interacts with. This includes buttons, fonts, switches, images and every other element of a website or application the user can see, tap or click. The most popular front-end coding languages that most developers use are HTML,CSS and JavaScript. Front-end languages help you achieve the right look and feel of your website or application. Because the front-end is basically concerned with the client side of the website or app, developers need to integrate the latest trends that clients want and at times come up with new coding methods to introduce innovative features for clients. Here are some of the most useful cheat sheets and reference guides for new and experienced developers: 

Back-end programming basically controls how a website or application actually operates. Developers use back-end programming to figure out the best way an application or website communicates back to the server and decides how the user data is collected and stored. This is also called server side programming and includes languages like, Python, PHP, Ruby and C++. In our experience we have noticed that it is easier to begin with front-end development and then move to the back-end because in the back end, programmers have to generate the logic that controls the way the whole site functions and to do that efficiently one must first understand how the front-end works. In teams, developers from the front-end and the back-end usually interact with one another and work to solve problems and find solutions collectively. Here is a list of some of the more common back-end programming languages cheat sheets that you can use to easily and quickly troubleshoot issues and help you hone your back-end programming skills:

For a website or application to function, it needs to have a server that helps it operate. This server, also called a database, stores all the information and data of a website or application. Other than that, programming languages aren’t only used to make websites and applications or softwares, they are also used to create data warehouses for companies that are looking to capture customer data. Most websites capture customer data and further analyze that data to better understand the customer. In today's world, knowledge is power and information is valuable. Knowing what individuals want and what their specific requirements are, helps companies better market their products to the right customer, hence the need to collect and store data. Some of the most popular data centric programming languages are SQL, R and MATLAB. The following is a list of cheat sheets you can use if you are working or are thinking of working with tables and probabilities:

The web development world is an ever changing field, where new technological innovations lead to the creation of new languages and procedures, for that it is essential that one keeps up with the latest trends. One way of doing so is to keep on learning from some expert developers on social media. As a developer you’ll never get bored, because you'll constantly have to learn new tools and apply innovative techniques along the way. It is important to keep an open mind and remember that it is never a bad thing to take shortcuts, because in the web development world, their are a number of possible ways to solve a problem and achieve a solution, so if you get the chance to take a shortcut and speed up your work then do that and don’t look back. 

Importance of the all-mighty cheat sheets and why most developers use them

Usually when web developers set strategies to design a product based on what their clients/users want they often stumble. Either they collect a lot of backward-looking data, which doesn’t tell them what future customers really want. Or they make risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. Design thinking is a strategy-making process that avoids these mistakes by applying the use of certain tools from the world of design and shifting the focus to human behaviour and analyzing how certain things will affect different individuals. It was popularized by David M. Kelly and Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin of the Rotman School. Design thinking has three major stages:

Following are the three major stages of the design thinking process that can assure that your design will meet your future customer’s wants. 

Form a few theories about what your users might want, by immersing yourself in their lives. Instead of polling them about specific design features, observe and ask questions about their behavior. And after you know what they might want but don’t have, you can go for the next step. 

Use iterative prototyping on the designs you’ve created and conduct a few quick experiments to see how users respond. Iterative prototyping is basically a repeating cycle of designing, prototyping, testing, and refining multiple “versions” of a product (in this case a web design). After you’re done with the iterative prototyping process, you can make the necessary changes and move on to the final stage of the design thinking process.  

The last stage of the design thinking process involves bringing the new design to life. After you’re done with the iterative prototyping process and you’ve got a winner, you can now start developing the final product based on all the points collected in the previous two stages. 

Organizing your work makes way for improvement and innovation. The same was the case for the manufacturing industry when Total Quality Management was introduced in the 1980s by Toyota. Design thinking has the potential to do for innovation in web development exactly what TQM did for manufacturing. By strategically structuring your whole design process, you can not only improve the process as is but also make room for innovation. Because in the first stage instead of asking the user/client for what they want, what you do is you observe their behaviors and analyze them based on what they would want but not know yet. What this does is that it makes room for innovation because you usually end up making a design the client didn’t actually ask for but wanted and didn't know that they wanted that design. 

By using imaginative, human-centered problem solving, design thinking can help you unlock new markets and identify new strategies for designing your product and effectively target your customer wants.

Importance of developing your design thinking and why it works

A responsive web design or RWD is a modern web solution that allows websites and pages to render across all types of devices and screen sizes. It automatically adapts to the device’s screen whether it’s a smartphone, desktop, or tablet. The way it works is that we use various settings to serve different style properties depending on the specification of the device on which the website will be displayed. 

Since the mobile revolution started about almost a decade ago, a lot has changed in the way we interact with products and how we design them. The first smart device, the iPhone when it launched was basically a pocket sized computer that combined three things, phone, music player, and an internet browser and since then, designers have had to adapt their websites for small-size screens. Nowadays almost every client we get asks for one thing, a mobile version of their website. Now designing a separate version of a website just to fit a different screen is impractical and time consuming, so instead the design industry came up with a web design that would be flexible enough to support various types of screens resolutions, hence the approach called responsive web design or RWD was born. 

Designing a responsive website requires three main ingredients, a flexible layout, media queries and flexible images and videos. 

By flexible layouts we mean building the layout of a website with a flexible grid which is created using CSS. Flexible layouts consist of columns which rearrange themselves automatically in order to fit the size of the screen on which they are loaded. 

Flexible layouts themselves aren’t enough to make a website fully responsive. When the layout gets too small it’s likely to break into columns resulting in a not so pleasing content display. So in order to optimize the design of the website to fit different screens it is necessary to make use of media queries. Media queries allow us to inspect the physical characteristics of the device rendering our work according to that specific device. They also allow us to customize different styles for different screen sizes.

As the layout changes, it is essential for the content of the website to scale with the change in viewport. Using flexible layout and media queries won’t be enough to do so effectively so for that matter it is important to use images and videos that can adjust their size as the viewports change. All elements of a responsive design are distributed in a flexible container which resize themselves as the user switches to another device. A simple solution to making the content of the website scalable is to use the max-width property with a value of 100%.

Is Adaptive Design the same as Responsive?

Adaptive and responsive designs are closely related, however they are not exactly the same. Where responsive designs use media queries to dynamically change the page layout based on the target device’s resolution, an adaptive design, on the other hand, uses static layouts that are based on breakpoints which don’t respond once they’re loaded, making adaptive designs a not so flexible solution for design optimization on various screens. 

Due to the speed at which technological innovations are being made, it is more important now than ever that we start designing websites that are flexible enough to effectively fit into any screen type. And to be clear, understanding how to make a design responsive to the user’s device doesn’t require much learning, rather it is a lot less stressful and more productive than learning how to design a different version of a website for every single device available. Responsive web designs help maintain consistency of the website’s design across various devices, improving the user’s experience altogether. 

Importance of a responsive web design and the ingredients for making one

The problem with the internet is that people generally have the perception that it is clean and environmentally friendly. This is a problem with most immaterial things as people usually don't consider them to contribute much to the carbon footprint. However, statistics show that the internet contributes 3.7% to the annual carbon footprint which is increasing annually. Let alone 3.7% doesn’t look like a lot but when compared to the aviation industry which contributes 2% towards the annual carbon footprint, one can just imagine the extent of the pollution that the internet produces. We’ve covered how the internet contributes to the carbon footprint and how websites have a part to play in that in a previous blog on (Insert Link to How Faster Webs can Lead to Sustainability of the Planet once uploaded). The blog basically mentioned how reducing the weight of a website can contribute to the sustainability of our planet. Now reducing the weight of your website is not a simple thing, it involves taking into consideration a lot of things. For that matter this blog will be focusing on how you can design a website that has little to no contribution towards the carbon footprint and what things you should consider when doing so.

It is very hard to fix something that you cannot see. However, the internet has a very real environmental impact even if we cannot see it, but luckily you can now measure your website’s CO2 emission with the help of this free online tool Website Carbon Calculator. Before you start designing for a carbon neutral website you need to know how much CO2 emissions your website currently produces, after which it is easier for designers and developers to estimate how much they need to reduce the weight of their website in order to reduce as much CO2 emissions their website produces. This tool provides you with data about how much CO2 emissions are produced per page view, the annual CO2 emissions (based on a specified amount of page views), the annual energy consumption and whether or not your website is hosted in a data center that is powered by renewable energy. Using this tool you can also create a benchmark for your website against competitors and set targets for reducing your website's CO2 emissions. 

One sure way of reducing your website’s CO2 emissions is to reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred between servers. Reducing the weight of your website in KBs is not only sure to help you reduce your website’s CO2 emissions but it also has some additional benefits which include faster load times, which improves user experience as well as SEO, and it also reduces data usage for users with limited internet connections. This can be particularly important for developing countries where internet data is very expensive relative to local wages.

One more way of reducing the amount of data transfer is to adopt a minimalistic design for a website. Another way to do so is to not preload your multimedia content, that way the user has full autonomy to choose the thing they want to see, for example if you have an e-commerce website where your sell clothes, what you do is rather than preloading the images of the clothes you sell, you give the user the option to actively choose the picture your user wants to see. This will not only reduce the amount of data transfer but also give the user a more personalized and engaging experience. 


We understand that not all websites can have a minimalistic design. Saying that in order to ensure the sustainability of our planet we need to make the internet minimalistic would be a lost cause because not every website can have a minimalistic design. So for those websites that cannot reduce the weight of their website, who rely on heavy multimedia content like Netflix or Instagram, a secondary solution is available, switch to renewable energy. The root cause of the problem is how electricity is produced which is needed to power the internet. If you remove the root cause then you don't need to focus on designing a website that has a lighter weight or has a minimalistic design. One easy way of making this switch is through CO2 Neutral Website. This website allows you to pay a standard fee for the carbon emissions of your websites - including the traffic of your users. What this organization does is that if you cannot switch your website to renewable energy sources like solar or wind then what you can do is invest in renewable energy and neutralize your website’s carbon emissions. 

In conclusion, it is important to note that all these above solutions do not guarantee that your website would become a 100% carbon neutral, chances are that even after adopting all these tips your website still ends up producing some carbon emission but still lower than it used to. Striving for a carbon neutral internet is not a one man’s game, it requires us all to be a part of it, even the user because it doesn’t matter weather you live in Australia and the website your using is in hosted in USA because at the end of the day we all live on the same planet, under the same roof so it affects us all irrespective of where the problem originates. 

Importance of designing carbon neutral websites and how they benefit everyone

The hardest part of working as a junior UX or UI designer isn’t its tiring design process, it's the wait you do before starting your work. This is that time when you have no clue what to do or how to begin the project. You’re stuck at a stalemate, where you can’t move forward because you have no idea what to do and you can’t go back because you’ve promised your client that you’ll make them a product. However, even if you manage to get your ideas straight about what type of design you want to go for, you are now stuck in actually designing the product and you can’t seem to design a product that the customer wants because you might not have the skill-set to do or the tools to make it happen. However, it is easy to manage the design once you know what to do, how to do it and most importantly if you’re able to do it. 

To make your design process easier you should follow an organized structure for your design process that can serve as a guide to help you when you get stuck in the design process. Below is an image of the process explaining in steps how you should go about your design process:

The first most crucial step towards designing a product be it for anything it is important to actively listen to the client, this is not only important to maintain a healthy client relationship but it is also important in your design process. We believe that the reason why most designs don’t turn out the way our clients expected them to is due to designers not fully understanding what the client actually wants. It’s not that the designers don’t listen to the client, it’s just that the way each client explains something is different because we all have our own way of understanding things and this affects our design process. The only way to solve this problem is to really understand what the client wants from you and what they expect for you to provide them with. Get to know your clients, ask a lot of questions, build a strong relationship with them and understand them flawlessly. 

The second most crucial step in the whole design process is to evaluate whether or not the project at hand is possible or not. One of the most important things to note in this step is that this should always be done and in sequential order to the listening to the client part because as the designer it is our job to identify any implausible ideas that might not be possible within the client’s budget or due to any reason and suggest an alternating solutions. It is also important to note all the problems that may arise during the later phases of the project and inform your client about them in due time. If when analyzing the project you feel like something won’t be possible or you find a problem you should immediately consult with the client and explain the problem and clear your queries. 

Now finally comes the main part, the one we’ve all been waiting for, actually designing the product. To put it abruptly, there is no shortcut to designing how your website will look. It’s not like we can tell you this is how you need to design this and you start working. Designing is a combination of art and science, and with every art it depends on the artist on how he/she goes about their artwork and presents an end product to the client. However, the main variables required by the client are still there, what we’re talking about is the actual creativity that is involved in the design process that will define the project and give it life, your life. The essence of this part is that you know how to design the product and now's the time to use those skills to make that product for your client. If designing the product seems difficult go back to the 2nds step and analyze the project again. 

Lastly, before you complete your project and submit the design to your client it is important to first test the product to see if all the elements in the design are interacting with one another successfully. The last thing you want is to deliver a product that keeps on crashing and keeps disturbing your client. If the test proves your design to be correct then well and good however if it proves that the design is flawed and the product will eventually crash then you can evaluate your project on either of the previous three steps based on the severity of the problem. 

An important thing to note after all this is that this process is not final. Like we said earlier this model will only serve as a guide to organize your work so that you don’t get stuck at any stage and easily compartmentalize your work and rather than letting it drive you, you drive it. One more thing to add here is that these stages mentioned may not necessarily work for you because every project has its own challenge. These challenges will work for the majority of your projects, however the essence of this is to show you that when you organize your tasks you make your work easier for yourself and ultimately end up improving your design process which will ultimately improve our design itself. 

Importance of organizing your design process in order to improve your design

According to Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University, internet usage contributes towards global greenhouse gas emissions, approximately 3.7%. This is the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions that the entire aviation industry produces, and it is estimated that by 2025 this will double. This is due to carbon emissions that are produced due to generation of electricity that is needed to power the energy intensive infrastructures on which the web relies upon, like data warehouses, servers, WiFi, user displays, and terminals. Before a user can view their required data, the data has to go through an entire chain of electrical equipment. As an example, sending a simple email contributes to around 4g of carbon emissions and sending an email with some form of multimedia content like a video or even a simple picture can produce up to 50g of carbon emissions. Once these carbon emissions reach the atmosphere they cause an effect called the greenhouse effect which contributes to the depletion of the ozone layer which causes global warming, which further leads to climate change. A List Apart estimates that as web makers, our contribution towards the carbon footprint is around 40%, be that directly or indirectly and as a part of our planet it is our duty to help our planet survive especially when our work has a considerable contribution towards global warming.

Faster websites require less time to load and are smaller in size. In order to make faster websites we need to make the website lighter, and one way of doing so is to reduce the size of a website. By removing non essential details and focusing on a minimalistic design, we can reduce the size of a website. Doing so will inevitably reduce the amount of carbon emissions produced by reducing the amount of data needed to be transferred between servers and ultimately reduce the need for more energy for doing so. According to a report by HTTP Archives, In 2021 the average weight of a webpage on a desktop is 2123.6KB and the average weight of a webpage on a mobile is 1917.5KB. Comparing this to 2017 there is a huge difference. In 2017 the average weight of a desktop webpage was 1479.6KB and that of a mobile webpage was 1334.3KB. This means that today's websites are a lot heavier and hence require more energy to load. 

Trust us, when it comes to website pages, size matters. In order for a website to be faster it’s not necessary that it only has less multimedia content to have a lighter weight, it can have better organized code. 

A website with organized code is lighter and contributes to the sustainability of our planet in the sense that it takes less time to test it, which means that the time a developer would spend on a computer coding and then testing the website would reduce, which would reduce the amount of energy consumed, hence reducing carbon emissions. Another way you can reduce the size of a website and make it load faster is to make your website accessible. Accessible websites are designed in a way to help users with disabilities access all the information on the web easily.  Accessibility provides users with less distractions and focuses more on the content, hence reducing the need for unnecessary bits of data like multimedia content ultimately reducing the need for more data transfer. 

Apart from the reason that a faster web ultimately helps our planet survive, providing a faster website that has a faster loading time is also important from a user perspective because according to data from Pingdom, if a website takes more than 4 seconds to load then 24% of the users will abandon it and if it takes more than 5 seconds to load the 38% of the users would abandon it. So in order to ensure that you retain as many users as you can, you need to make sure that your website loads faster and one way of doing so is to reduce the size of your website. 


Even though reducing the size of a website or making them faster or providing accessibility won’t save the planet. However, every small contribution when added together can humbly contribute towards this planet’s sustainability. It’s not about the intensity of our help but our mindset. If we think that websites don’t contribute much to carbon emissions then a time will come that they do and when that happens it will be too late so it’s our responsibility as inhabitants of this planet to take care of it and help it in any way possible, be it in the slightest contribution. It all starts with the first step, it all starts with you, be responsible. 

Importance of making the web faster in order to improve the sustainability of our planet 

A Faster Web can Lead to Sustainability of our Planet

Frankensteining is a rather new concept in the UI design world. It has gained immense popularity and some designers even suggest that this might be a plausible solution to some design problems. When we say Frankensteining we mean exactly what you’re thinking, bringing life to your design by merging several parts of different designs into one design. Basically what you do is you take the good elements from different concepts and combine them into a super concept which ultimately ends up in creating a unique stitch like design. 

Another aspect to focus on is bringing life to your design, by frankensteining you can turn even the most inanimate UIs into fun and interesting experiences for your users. We know that in the design world it is sometimes hard to decide which element to choose in order to present a specific function. With the number of possible solutions available on the web and the number of UI component libraries it is easy to get lost and decide which direction you want your design to take. Sometimes it is easy to just make sense of something when you know where you want to go but when you’re completely lost and don’t know what direction you want your design to take it is a good idea to consider frankensteining your design.

Frankensteining can be very helpful in some situations however it is important to note that at times it might not fit into your design specifications. Sometimes it can result in a poor design with no real identity. Because you are using different component elements, it is easy to make a design that looks like it has no direction. It is essential to cater towards the whole look of your design in general, because at times it is easy to mistake a unique design with an over-creative one which doesn’t give the user a sense of what the website or the application is all about. 

Sometimes when our aim is to create a unique out of the box UI what’s likely to happen is that we create a design that looks pretty unique but it is hard for the user to navigate through our website or application. It is important to note that at times the client understands what you’re going for and what route you want them to take but there is a high probability that sometimes they don’t. We’ve had clients who’ve asked us to pick elements from each route and asked us to combine them together. At times we’ve even had to pick buttons, colors, typography etc from different designs just because our client wanted his design that way and the underlying reason for this is that they want their design to be a bit more creative and unique. Even though the customer’s demands are so, it is still our job to make the final design work out because it is not necessary that the customer gets the desired product which they had in mind at the time they explained it to you and that is why most frankensteined designs turn out to be failures but those that do come out on the top are one of the most unique and creative designs that we’ve seen. 

The most important thing to note here is that with frankensteining you need to be careful and watch for any inconsistencies in the visual language of your design. As a designer it is our job to identify which patterns would fit well and which of the UX patterns we need to tweak for every element of the design to work well with the overall design. Another thing to point out is that client concerns need to be addressed in the sense that if they're asking for something that you know won’t provide their users with a good user experience, or maybe it won’t be accessible then these concerns should be laid out to them instead of just doing what the client tells you. Because as a specialist it is our job to tell them what will work and what won’t. Frankensteining can provide creative and unique user experiences however, it needs to be done with care and the patterns as well as the visual language should be coherent and consistent throughout the design. A good way of doing so is by using animations but then again not everything in the design world is a one stop solution, and sometimes we need to come up with new and creative ideas for making the design work. But an important thing to mention here is that frankensteining is much easier for less complex products and for more complex products one should handle it with care or avoid it altogether if the client hasn't specified it’s use. 

At times it is hard to design a product according to the design requirements of your client because the image they have of the end product in their mind might be different from the end product itself when frankensteining a design. That is why it is not only necessary to understand what the client wants but also to understand what they expect the final design to look like and the only way to do that is to first get on board with the client and explain to them the details of the design. Even if you use animations to bring life to your design and create context for the user to understand the navigation of the website, you might end up not satisfying both their needs, so it is important to be careful when designing a frankensteined UI and keep in mind the above mentioned points when doing so and you’ll be good to go. 

How to effectively Frankenstein your design and the cautions to cater for when doing so. 

There are about 1.7 billion active websites on the web, our goal as a designer is to not only provide our customers with a functionally sound website but rather we need to provide them with an aesthetically pleasing one, and with that the customer requires you to make a website that will make their business stand out on the web. In order to provide such a website which is altogether functional, aesthetic and unique, you need to follow the latest design trends. The reason we need to do so is because design trends set the standard of what is currently the new hype in the market, they let us know what users want, what gets their attention and what peaks their interests. A research on user impressions suggests that the top driver for a user to have a positive impression about your website is the design. 

The overall design of the website is the first thing a user sees, and research shows that it is the first 10 seconds in which the user decides whether or not to stay on that website and if you present an outdated website from the stone age or something then no matter how relevant your content is to their needs, they won’t even give it a chance. First impressions stick and it is necessary to capture your user and make them a customer in the first 10 seconds of their visit and the only way to do so is to provide them with a website that gives them the feeling of familiarity, something their used to but still unique, and the only way to do so is to follow the latest design trends. 

Now that we’ve explained the reason why you should follow the latest design trends, let’s cut to the chase and look at some of the latest design trends this year. Some of these design trends mentioned here are continuations of last year’s design trends and the rest have recently just emerged and have the tendencies to become the next big thing in the coming years.

Minimalism was the design trend in 2020 and a year later it still stands proudly among the latest design trends and looks like it won’t be going anywhere for a long time. In a minimalistic design what you do is basically abandon the traditional approach of placing focus on important content at the middle of the page and replace that with a full screen experience. What this does is provide you with more screen space to create visual and emotional appeal and clearly express the goal of your webpage. However it is important to note that minimalistic design is not meant for everyone, it is usually favoured by premium or luxury brands that want to convey elegance and integrity of their company through their website. 

There's nothing worse than a static page that doesn’t convey meaning and give life to your content. Animations also enhance the UX of your customer by guiding the flow of your website, it brings life to your design and makes it easy for users to understand the core concepts and functionality of your website, which ordinary static websites cannot do at times. 

Dark mode was the design trend last year, but once you’ve turned to the dark side it’s hard to go back. Dark mode is a cool trend that has taken over the internet with two of the greatest tech giants, Apple and Google having implemented it throughout all their systems. The reason for its popularity is hardly debatable, to put it simply it looks awesome, elegant, stylish and modern and who wouldn’t love it. But apart from the aesthetics, dark mode has a lot of cool functionality as well, like it saves more screen energy, can provide users more screen time and at times provides better readability. To learn more about dark mode and what to do and what not do, check out our blog on Dark Mode. 

This is the era of simple and minimal designs, and people like to keep things straightforward and to the point. However, designing a simple UX may look easy but trust us it requires more work than you think, and with that said it is important to note that with simple and minimalist design it is hard to uplift the design and present the core concept of the website. One of the common trends that we’ve seen most designers adopt in this matter is to use pastel colors. By doing so they highlight the lightness and unobtrusiveness of the design and set the right tone and atmosphere for their website. 

Last year in 2020, neomorphism was the latest design trend. It combined two common approaches to creating UIs, skeuomorphism and flat design. Even though this trend was popular among many UI designers, these common approaches differ significantly from each other and often considered the exact opposites which is why most UX experts stopped implementing it in their design. 

This leads us to the last design trend on our list, called glassmorphism and it seems somehow related to neomorphism. This trend comes with the blur effect or so-called blurred background. When people look at such an element, it makes them feel like they’re looking through a glass, which gives users a feeling of something from the future and gives the design a modern touch. 

At TUK we firmly believe that the main goal of UI design is to help users achieve their goals and meet their needs. For this very reason, we keep an eye on the latest UI design trends when building our products and we’ve learned that in order to succeed in creating a unique and engaging UI, you need to try to choose and combine several tendencies of these design trends.

Importance of following the latest design trends, and some of the latest design trends in 2021

We’ve all been there, when you open up your mobile phone at night and the brightness is full, it hurts like hell. Feels like looking directly at the sun in broad daylight. The dark mode we see nowadays was first introduced by designer Sylvain Boyer in early 2018, when he introduced it as the core interface for smartphones with OLED screens to save power consumption. Since its conception, dark mode has gained immense popularity among developer communities and is probably the most desired feature in modern use interfaces. With tech giants such as Apple and Google having adopted system-wide dark mode, it is not a mere trend but something that will be around in the long run.

Dark mode doesn’t only save your eyes from strain but it also saves your device’s energy consumption. Nowadays mobile phones and laptops which come with OLED screens, when put in dark mode they can save upto 60% battery as compared to when they are put in light mode, with a flat white background. But that’s not it, dark mode has as much aesthetic importance as it does with health and battery life, if not more. Let’s be honest, dark mode does look pretty amazing. It offers new and different ways of presenting graphic content such as graphs, pictures, photos and dashboards. It feels almost mysterious and innovative. 

Dark mode makes colors pop and provides good contrast , other than that, studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between the user retention and dark mode, in the sense that applying dark mode puts less strain on the eyes at night and allows users to consume more content for longer periods of time. 

Due to the benefits of dark mode it does get a lot of positive popularity, which means that it is easy for one to be criticized for creating something that doesn’t actually require a dark mode. It should not be used in every application or website, for example when you are viewing a website in a well lit room or in broad daylight it is difficult to read text positioned on dark backgrounds. Some products such as Google maps has a feature that automatically switches between dark and light mode based on the lighting in a room, or based on sunset to sunrise. 

Given that dark mode is still a new concept and even though a lot of companies including Apple and Google have adopted dark mode in almost all their user interfaces, it is still under development and it is very easy to mess things up if one doesn’t cater towards the nitty gritty details.

When faced with a variety of options it sometimes seems difficult to decide what to adopt and what not to, and to make things easier for you when designing for dark mode here are some of the things we’ve observed that you should avoid when designing for dark mode and what to do in these situations.

Remember when we said dark mode reduces the strain on the eyes? Yeah well if you use pure white text on a pure black background then that high contrast will be very painful to look at, hence not reducing strain on the eyes. In this situation it is safe to use dark grey rather than true black (#000000) as the primary background because light text on dark grey has less contrast than light text on pure black. The design should not be pure black and white but in shades of grey as well. 

Vivid colors may look amazing on a white background but on a dark background they visually vibrate against the dark surface which makes them harder to read. You should use lighter shades of primary colors in the 50-200 range because they provide better readability on dark surfaces. It is important to ensure an appropriate contrast ratio between the content and the background (ideally 15.8:1) in order to avoid causing eye strain. 

Shadows are a great way of presenting visual hierarchy in your design but only in light mode. When used in dark mode, even if the background isn't pure black, the shadow will look odd. Rather what you should use are elevation colors to present visual hierarchy on dark backgrounds and because of the brightness of elevation it builds a sense of depth, hence achieving the requirement of visual hierarchy in your design. 

The worst thing you can do while designing a product is to take away control from your users, irrespective of whether you’re designing for dark mode or not. So for that matter it is important to provide a switch that allows users to switch between light and dark mode to ensure a good user experience. The user should always feel in control and should be able to opt for which mode they want to choose. 

As a side note it would be extremely beneficial for you to give a look at the principles adopted by two of the 5 tech giants, Apple and Google. All major platforms from these companies include guidelines for dark mode, which, if you follow them, these principles will ensure that your design fits well in the ecosystem. You can find Apple and Google guidelines from the links below:

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