22 Web Design Trends for 2022

Caity Lavelle | April 6, 2022

A heightened feeling of playfulness in web design is an overall trend we see for the coming year.
Top web designer agencies have begun to create websites as works of art, interactive projects, and sites that exist solely to entertain and please. This dates back to the early days of the web, when designers created websites to showcase new skills.
We seem to be in an early web revival.
Web trends are adopting visual influences from that era. Designers are finding inspiration outside of the typical photograph-centric design. Instead, these designs make inventive use of typography, grids, and lines, as well as straightforward navigation. Modest colour schemes, elegant textures, and serif fonts keep webpages from feeling too outdated.
In addition to enhanced interactions and animations, web design now includes aesthetic elements like glassmorphism and grain. Designers are leveraging no-code technologies to make it all happen faster and more easily than ever before.

1. Mini websites
Animators were allowed time to generate a short film for each feature picture they produced in the early days of Pixar. These short films were a creative free-for-all, a chance for animators to let their hair down and have some fun. High quality web design can help you achieve the same thing with web designs. Guns 2 Swords is a mini-site/business in the style of 1980s Dungeons & Dragons, with a hint of Choose Your Own Adventure. Blue Check Homes went the other way and created a fully legitimate-looking “serious” website. If done correctly, an Easter-egg-style marketing site for a professional purpose can work.

2. Web-based scavenger hunts
Puzzles and scavenger hunts work exceptionally well on websites. You can link pages together and password-protect some sections, requiring visitors to provide answers or locate clues in order to access the next page in the series. A scavenger hunt can be used to announce a product launch, release a video, or reveal a piece of information that has been kept from the audience.

3. App-like experiences
A front-end-driven web experience that’s really overblown from a design standpoint is a whole new way of using the web that hasn’t existed before; it’s an app-like experience. It’s much easier to make dynamic, interactive designs with new site-building tools that don’t require you to write any code.

4. One-page websites
Sometimes the most effective site is the least complex one.
We have seen the increasing popularity with the best web designer agencies in terms of the one-page website that forgoes menus and navigation in favor of simple scroll navigation.
One-page sites work best when their subject matter is narrower, like a portfolio or the presentation of a single idea.

5. Sites with a strong sense of place
Maybe we are all just compensating for missing travel, but some websites seem to be gaining a sense of place. The web can be a detached place where you often have no connection to where the site you’re browsing is coming from. Adding a note like “made with love in…” or featuring an image of your favourite nearby spot prompts visitors to imagine where you are and creates a small real-world connection for them.

6. Art deco motifs
This year’s trend takes inspiration from the clean, curving lines and graphic shapes of art deco illustration and architecture. Art deco combined elements from the natural world with the modernity of the machine age. These elements can inspire beautiful logos, fonts, spacer motifs, borders, and illustrations.

7. Fewer images in hero section
This year, top web designer companies are opting to craft hero sections and landing pages that speak with design rather than relying on photographs or illustrations. Eliminating the distraction of an image puts the focus more on style and content. Forgoing images also adds a little mystery to the site, making it more interesting for people to see what’s beyond the hero section.

8. Oversized typography
The use of unusually large typography is a new and dramatic design trend for this year. Words become more of a graphic element than merely part of the prose at a particular size. This is a versatile method that works well in both minimalist and maximalist designs and can be adapted to a variety of styles.

9. Interactive fonts
Using a hover-state change, similar to a button, is a simple approach to making text interactive. Using new no-code platforms; it’s now easier to build more intricate effects. It’s crucial to keep legibility in mind when incorporating interactivity into fonts, as some people are easily distracted by moving characters.

10. Responsible motion design
Now that we’re talking about interactivity, we should talk about responsible motion design, which is becoming more common. While movement is an exciting aspect of web design, it can easily become excessive and create motion sickness. Motion sickness is common, so don’t use animations like mouse-triggered scaling, parallax effects, or scrolljacking (also called scrolljacking), because they can make you sick.

Motion can be employed in a responsible and subtle manner.

Also, just because it’s necessary doesn’t mean you should employ motion everywhere. Excessive motion confuses users, harms many, and is unnecessary.

11. Collage illustration
To give drawings a tactile sensation, collage graphics can be used to free up more white space in a design and add photos without making the design all about the photograph. Within a collage, be careful to mix forms, patterns, and colours. To make images fit in with the overall design, apply a monochromatic effect, tint, or filter.

12. Abstract illustrations
Images with a more organic texture and the sensation of being created by a human hand are becoming increasingly popular. This type of illustration can be done with pen and paper, then digitised or generated with illustration software. The idea is to use a variety of textures and natural irregularities, such as watercolour, ink, paint, and silkscreen effects.

13. Gradients with grain
A perfect gradient is sleek and contemporary, giving objects a futuristic sheen or a gleaming, mechanical appearance. Grain offers a design substance, texture, and a more natural feel. Fine multi-color grain can resemble analogue film, while monochromatic grain can look like a silk-screened poster.

14. Linework
Linework is a trend that is both modern and retro in some aspects. Designers can use lines to divide sections, headers, paragraphs, and product galleries, or they can construct a dynamic grid that spans the entire page. To take this look even farther, add linework illustrations (abstract or realistic). The line weight will have the greatest impact on the final result in this type of design.

15. Split-screen websites
A split-screen arrangement, which we’ve been seeing more and more recently, is an unusual way to divide up a design. The split layout adds contrast, visual intrigue, and natural content separation to your design. It’s also a terrific opportunity to experiment with colour.

16. More glassmorphism
Glassmorphism is a wonderful trend for this year. Transparency, blur, and movement can be used to make elements on pages appear to be made of glass. An optical illusion is created through diffusion, reflection, and shadow. The glass effect, when combined with movement, can give a website a 3D feel.

17. Less neumorphism
Neumorphism is a minimalist style that emerged in 2020 as a new interpretation of skeuomorphism in design. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 3.22 million Americans have vision problems. Accessibility is more than a fad; it’s a requirement that should always be taken into account by leading web developer companies.

18. Inclusive copy
Hopefully, this is a permanent shift towards a more universal awareness of the impact of language. More inclusive copy makes the web a place that is more welcoming and accessible to more people. Webflow has our own reference for inclusive language that we use to guide all our written output. Alt text, legible text, and avoiding text-as-image are all ways of making sure everyone can read your content. More inclusive copy makes the web a place that is more welcoming and more accessible to more people.

19. Gender-neutral design
It’s become standard to offer multiple gender options and pronouns in forms and drop-down menus. When writing copy, the new standard is to opt for ‘they’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ when a gender is not specified. As time goes on, more and more websites are becoming more inclusive. They don’t group clothes by gender or have different sizing systems.

20. Page speed prioritisation
Google’s 2021 algorithm update makes page speed a more important consideration for SEO. 53% of users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse are tools that can be used to assess your page speed. There are also a few simple steps developers can take to make sure pages load quickly.

21. Building with dynamic content
Dynamic content allows designers to build faster, build bigger, and include more complexity without increasing the amount of labour required to make adjustments. More available database tools and no-code platforms mean more people designing for the web can begin building this way. Dynamic content will still have some uses, but building with dynamic content is taking over the web.

22. No-code being used for more teams
No-code has grown into a movement, empowering citizen creators to build for the web without having to have coding experience. For businesses, this means more teams can create web assets for their company. HR departments can create training sites, resource repositories, or company directories. Design teams can make working prototypes or craft design systems. Marketing can contribute directly to the parts of the site they use to connect with customers.

How We Can Help?

Marketing Sweet is a premier web development agency based in Adelaide, Australia. When it comes to your own brand or product, professionalism and attention to detail is a must.

This is why at Marketing Sweet, we make sure that everything included in the website we design and build for you is done with the utmost professionalism and attention to detail. From the services that we offer to the designs that we suggest as well as the functionality of your website; everything will be done while keeping your own preferences at heart.

22 Web Design Trends for 2022

Caity Lavelle | April 6, 2022

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