12 Web Design Trends for 2019

During the last year I was at TMX, I spent quite a bit of time learning some new web design skills. I redesigned my internal documentation web site using the W3.CSS framework and rebuilt my online documentation and web-based help using the latest version of WebWorks ePublisher's Reverb skin, which is now based on SASS. It's a long way from the hand crafted HTML and CSS that I used to build my personal web site. And what I was doing was much less sophisticated than what a profession web designer would be doing, but it did give me an appreciation of how complex web design tools have gotten.

Shopify's Partners blog interviewed twelve web designers and content strategists to look at what trends they expected to see in 2019. It's an interesting and varied list, and I have to admit that I haven't heard of much of the items discussed; for example, ambient design and intrinsic design.

The term "Intrinsic Web Design" was coined by Mozilla designer advocate Jen Simmons last year, and it’s something we will hear a lot more about in 2019.

Self-taught designer and developer Chen Hui Jing thinks it’s a very apt term.

“The word ‘intrinsic’ is defined as ‘belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing,’” she explains. “When we talk about the web as a visual medium, the canvas is the browser. Browser capabilities have reached a point where we can do a lot of creative things, using the tools and properties the way they were meant to be used—instead of hacks and workarounds to overcome the limitations of the browsers.”

Most of the article is focused on design trends, but there are a couple of sections that should be of interest to technical writers and those focused more on content development.