Looking for inspiration for your next website design project? Here are our top website design trends for 2022.
Just like today’s various fashion scenes, you might look at website design and be forgiven for thinking that ‘anything goes’. But web design evolves all the time and is constantly changing as new software gets developed and new techniques become popular. Some businesses may be able to update their website design once every few years, because keeping up with current trends isn’t too important to their market, and the website just needs to be attractive, functional and easy to navigate. But other businesses definitely need to be on-trend. So what’s new in website design? Here we have picked out some of the hottest design techniques for 2022, so that you can hit your market with the wow factor.
Playfulness
Many people are comparing this to the very early days of the internet in the late 1990s, where web designers held the keys to the kingdom and were able to be extravagant in displaying these amazing new skills. If this is a retro hat tip to the birth of the internet, then let this be the first website renaissance. But essentially, web designers have gone full circle and thrown off their stuffy shackles and are showing off their skills to introduce art, interactive functionality and animations. Visual effects such as glassmorphism – a type of user interface design which emphasises bright pastel colours but through a prism which looks like frosted glass – are very popular, and designers are also introducing short films to bring a website alive and create a fun element.
Puzzles
Perhaps this ties in with the ‘playfulness’ technique, but someone somewhere realised that a website’s structure lends itself perfectly to the concept of puzzles, ie. you can solve something to get to the next page or reveal some information or imagery. You can have hidden clues, clickable reveals, interactive drawing tools or decoding clues like in an escape room game. Of course this kind of design can’t be too hard to navigate and has to fit with your market, and you may need to refresh it more regularly, but it is ideal for things like product launches or a big reveal of a new fashion line, film or album.
One-page websites
The scrollable navigation of one-page websites, rather than having multiple pages, has been a big design trend for a number of years, as people have grown tired of having to click between pages to find information. These are perfect for portfolios or image galleries so that you can maintain attention on something that has a one subject focus. But the hot trend for 2022 is to strip this back to be more minimalist, and just have key information on one singular page. It might feel like ‘everything’ has to be minimalist in design at the moment, so why not websites? The idea that less is more can certainly work for some businesses, and if people find something easy to read, almost like holding a flyer, then that still remains a really effective marketing tool.
20s revival
We are back in the twenties after all, and certainly this is a retro trend that is big in 2022. Think art deco, geometric designs, the Chrysler Building in New York, and think about clean, curving lines and repetitive graphics. Being bold and symmetrical is definitely big this year, and that can also be beautiful.
Bold typography
There is often an area of design which appears to commit every sin you were taught not to do, and in many ways this is one of those. Here we are talking about oversized, almost brutalist, fonts which are effectively using words as a graphic rather than as an element of copy. This trend is unapologetic in its boldness, but it can work really effectively in the digital or cultural sectors for arts, films and music and is a very arresting design technique if done well and combined with the right imagery.
Already we are implementing some of these design techniques in our design work at Rebus, but the key is knowing what works for the right market. If you need expert help with your new website design, contact Rebus today and we can give your website a professional makeover that is right for your market and right for 2022.