Aurora UI — new visual trend for 2021

Blurred, organic gradient backgrounds are going to be a thing this year.

UI design and especially its more artistic, visual side is constantly evolving. While most current products repeat the same, trusted and well-known IA patterns, UI and the Value Proposition are the biggest differentiators the product can have.

Nobody is going to try and redesign a registration process that works well in thousands of other apps — we’ll tweak it, for sure, and hopefully with some research, but in the end, it will just be a copy of what the users already know.

All the morphisms

Both Neumorphism and Glassmorphism were the response to the design trend pendulum swinging back from forced minimalism. The momentum here was just as big as when it was swinging the other way around — from Skeuomorphism all the way to functional minimalism of Material Design and Modern design trends.

Before Modern/Material inspirations took hold, we had a brief time of super minimalism, that didn’t really catch on as much. Now after 2014 the pendulum is swinging back.

I’d say it takes about 7 years for a design trend to start reversing (give or take). The wooden backgrounds and stitched leather of the first iPhone (2007) gave way to minimal designs of iOS 7 (2013), and 2020 started bringing the real world, organic inspirations right back.

Sure, the last one is 3d only in the Desktop OS, but it is testing the waters for a return of 3D.

With both the usage of the frosted glass aesthetic (both Microsoft and Apple), skeuomorphic icons (Mac OS Big Sur update) people have generally reacted positively to the change.

We wanted the products we use to be “crafted” and have a soul, instead of being a utilitarian white-label from a design system (like Material Design).

In this exaggerated example, you can see that forced minimalism with just color differentiation is not enough for a product to be loved.

There’s nothing wrong with minimalism, even in its extremes, but it does make everything blend together into a mass of sameness. The design diversity has been diminishing long…