Some trends in web design and the use of CSS for presentation come and go. However, worthy trends stick around and get improved over time until they provide excellent usability and other enhancements that site visitors appreciate. Here are four CSS trends in 2021 that shouldn’t be ignored.
Neumorphism
For the uninitiated, neumorphism, aka neomorphism, is a design idea that came out of early restrictive designs a few years ago and a subsequent move to minimalistic design cues later. The follow-up is now neomorphism, which includes the use of flat background colours combined with visuals that jump out of the screen. Through the careful use of drop shadows, it’s possible to create an embossed appearance to graphical elements. The drop-shadow property in CSS is the main go-to for creating this effect within presentational CSS code.
Reducing the Weight of Menus
Navigational menus have always been a bit of a bugbear for site designers. While nav menus are often implemented using both CSS and JavaScript, this falls apart when a visitor has JS turned off. At which point, they cannot navigate the site almost at all. In a move to avoid overwhelming the visitor with graphical-heavy designs, navigation is often now simplified to just the essentials. Also, navigational elements may be styled through CSS to avoid a potential issue with JavaScript too.
While mobile sites commonly use the ‘burger menu’ for navigation, some sites are also implementing simplified secondary navigational elements inside the body of the page. These elements let visitors delve deeper into sub-categories and relevant pages. They also replace the missing sidebar for mobile visitors. The additional sub-menu navigation doesn’t need to use scripting either; CSS and XHTML will get it done.
Parallax Scrolling
The idea with fancy scrolling was initially done via graphical sliders near the top of the page. Due to the delayed loading times for these and the need for faster websites, they’re increasingly being replaced by parallax scrolling. The idea with parallax scrolling is that the background image moves at a distinctively different speed to the foreground. The technique that makes use of some fancy footwork beginning with the background-attachment property in CSS can make ordinary-looking sites really ‘pop’.
Gradient Colours
Using gradient colours has been popular with the team at Vudu Digital to bring a new dimension to what otherwise might have been solid colour visual elements. There are various gradient CSS coding options including radial-gradient and linear-gradient functions to create this useful effect without the page become code-heavy.
Gradients using CSS avoids the need to load a graphical image and wait for it to appear. It also allows the use of the background-image property to fill a space with a gradient colour shading that adjusts to the viewscreen size too. This avoids wastefully loading a larger image and compressing the size to fit the space, which is wasteful on bandwidth and page loading times too.
By the clever use of CSS within the design, it’s possible to produce impressive visuals without overloading a page with either code bloat or too many slow-loading static images. For site owners wanting attractive, functional sites that load quickly, CSS has some advantageous credentials.