Every year, we round up design trends that not only look good, but designers can learn from. Love it or hate it, there’s a recent trend toward smart, functional UI UX design services.
These features condense a lot of information into a small amount of space and also improve user engagement.
Let’s take a look at some trends!
Bento box ~ It’s not a lunch box for kids.
Bento boxes are part of Japanese bento culture. It is well known that Japanese people use their original ideas to store their lunches in boxes so that each item of food is neatly lined up.
I don’t know who told me this, but the food in the bento box is neatly lined up like a very digital screen.
“Bento” has become a trend, featured in media outlets and seen by millions of designers on sites like Dribble and Behance, but the concept has its roots in “modular” design, which started with website dashboards. there is. The same goes for things like PayPal’s sales and financial dashboards and Google Ads’ analytics screens.
Remember Windows Phone or Lumia? The UI they were using was a pioneering iteration of the Bento design. Later, Microsoft implemented this concept on desktop computers with Windows 8.
Meanwhile, in the industry as a whole, Bento design really caught on with Apple’s use of Bento Grid. They first introduced it to iPhone landing pages, but soon started using it for Apple event slides and presentations as well.
Apple is widely known as being at the forefront of megatrends, and Bento is definitely one of them. Every designer and their uncle? (← *I didn’t understand what you meant, lol) used Bento for presentations, websites, product announcements, etc.
The biggest difference between the old Bento-like designs and today’s new trends is that each section of the grid represents its own space, rather than being part of a group.
Unlike many other UI design trends, Bento’s design is more than just a pretty layout style. Bento designs are now recognized as a new visual design concept, combining them with product demos and other unique layouts.
Please see here.
The example above is from diagram.com. This is an expression of the kind of interactive experience that can be achieved through this tool using Bento Grid. This really communicates the appeal of this tool and makes it clear what value it can provide to users.
To help designers like us, several websites collect various Bento design examples from around the web. bentogrids.com showcases a wide range of Bento designs in UI UX design services and graphic design.
Spatial design trends and technological leaps
As soon as you wake up, you look at your phone and see “Important Emails” filled with information about Apple’s new Vision Pro. This is a fact that happened to technology and design enthusiasts worldwide on the morning of June 5th, 2023.
In the weeks that followed, this was a constant topic of discussion in the tech world, with every designer trying to gain spatial design skills. Apart from design trends, various AR/VR startups have been in the spotlight, and their technology has become a hot topic. This sparked a real-life AR and VR boom, and these were actually what the public wanted.
Great technology has unlocked huge design potential. From smartwatches to foldable smartphones, designers have always been willing to tap into these technologies in order to apply them themselves. Spatial design is no exception.
It’s a good thing that the UX industry as a whole is getting better as big competitors try to improve UX design on AR/VR. Deeply understanding the technology behind beautiful design, actually using a VR headset, and trying to immerse yourself in a space will become part of every job. When you try to learn the cutting edge of UX, there are always many new things to learn and challenges. However, if you can acquire at least one of these skills quickly, it will become a useful asset for you in the future.
Apart from Apple’s big money and big imagination, there are also some non-tech companies that are bringing new UX that can be gained by wearing VR glasses.
While Google’s project, Google Glass, was never produced on a large scale, sunglasses company Rayban has entered the smart wearable industry with Meta Wayfarer.
Don’t be fooled by the seemingly ordinary Rayban design. Built-in camera and smart features allow you to save videos and photos, and live stream social media. This brings a new dimension to UI UX design agency. This will probably be a trend in 2025. No one knows.
Impressions: The VR era that is finally coming and Bento design seems to be a good match!
In the previous article, I briefly touched on how Bento design differs from traditional dashboard UIs, but after reading this article, I was a little convinced.
However, I still feel that there is no big difference in the end, but as represented by Apple, the point of visually expressing the fun of compartmentalization of the Bento layout is a search for rationality. I roughly interpreted that it was a difference from the dashboard being designed.
Next, the AR/VR trend that was introduced has been talked about for many years, but it seems like it will finally bloom around next year. In this context, I felt that a design like the Bento design mentioned above, which neatly compartmentalizes and displays each element, is a design trend suitable for AR/VR because it allows the design to fill the entire field of view.
In addition to how to make the spatial design in virtual spaces beautiful and pleasant, how to appropriately provide information to users and guide them will become important topics in the future. Therefore, while working hard on traditional designs such as apps and websites, I felt that Antenna would like to be able to think about the design of interfaces in 3D space as well.
