One general trend we see for next year is a growing sense of fun in web design. Designers have begun to create sites like art, sites like interactive projects, and sites that simply exist for play and delight. This brings us back to the beginning of the web when designers found ways to show new techniques or create websites for their own sake.

It seems that we are in a period of rebirth of the early network. Makes sense. Fashion has borrowed heavily since the late 1990s and early 1990s. Many of us have spent time at home browsing the internet, looking for something entertaining or captivating, as we did when the web first appeared.

Visually, web trends are taking over from that era. Designers find creativity outside of more photography-focused mock-ups, which have become standard. Instead, these models find creative ways to use typography, grids and lines, and simple navigation. The updated style – with lots of muted colors, sophisticated textures, and serif fonts – keeps sites from looking too retro.

Web design is also looking to the future with interesting contemporary techniques such as advanced interactions and animations and visual effects such as glass and granulation. And designers use code-free tools to make them faster and easier than ever.

Web design trends 2022

Here are some web design trends that we anticipate will have an impact next year.

1. Delight mini-sites

Humor can take many forms, and a website that provokes laughter is always fun to build. Why not have some fun with your construction?

In the early days of Pixar, the studio began to give animators time to make a short film with each feature film they produced. These short films were a creative one for everyone, a time for animators to be freer and more playful without the pressure of their feature films. They also came to generate a lot of new techniques that pushed the field of animation forward. Web developers find that they can do the same with websites.

Creating a fun mini-site gives designers time to just be creative, practice and experiment with techniques, and give up all design stops without worrying that they won’t get over a professional concert. Sometimes, creation for the sake of creation is a great way to get out of a routine.

You can experiment in several ways: by setting a deliberately playful UX design or by deliberately undermining expectations (but make sure you keep building affordable!). Bring humor not only in copy and images, but also in site navigation, menus, and interactions. Be subtle. Make it look like it’s a serious site until it is. This is an opportunity to create a site that works in unexpected ways. A professional Easter egg-style marketing site can work if it is well-executed.

2. Web-based treasure hunts

Website structures are, in fact, well suited to incredibly good puzzles and treasure hunts. You can link pages and password-protect certain parts by getting visitors to answer or find clues to unlock the next page in the series.

There are all sorts of creative ways to hide and reveal suggestions, hints, and answers. This is a case where you can use your web design skills to create a captivating puzzle.

Some ideas for clues:

• Provide a word based on a riddle or a hint
• Find a hidden word on your main site or hunting site
• Find a hidden item that can be clicked on the page
• Draw a shape
• Decode a cipher

Don’t forget to give your audience some kind of clue or solution if you really want everyone to be able to get to the end. A scavenger hunt can be used to reveal the launch of a product, to launch a new video, or to provide the viewer with hidden information.

The marketing agency ThreeSixtyEight did a scavenger hunt to reveal to his team the location of his company’s retreat. Created a mysterious atmosphere with music and an opacity adjustment around the cursor that a visitor can use to reveal selective parts of the page while searching for clues.

3. Application-like experiences

Jeremy Beyt, the co-founder of ThreeSixtyEight, strongly believes that these smaller, experience-oriented types of websites are the future of web design. He explains: “A front-end web experience, which is really exaggerated in terms of design, is a whole new way to use the web that didn’t exist before; it’s an application-like experience. That, for me, is the opportunity right now. ” People have become accustomed to applications, where interaction, animation, and dynamic experiences are the norms. The next logical step is to bring that energy to websites and create unique experiences there.

Some imagine that we are going back to the days when sites were autonomous, esoteric, and curious. But new site-building tools, such as no-code, make dynamic, interaction-oriented projects much easier to build. ThreeSixtyEight even added a complete step focused on designing the interaction of its development process.

        4. Sites with a strong sense of place

Maybe we all makeup for missed trips, but some websites seem to make more sense. We see photos with locations shown on the homepages and sections that draw attention to the cities, towns, and natural places around which creators live.

The web can be a detached place where you often have nothing to do with where your site is coming from. Adding a note like “made with love in …” or presenting an image with your favorite place nearby makes it easier for visitors to imagine where you are and creates a small real-world connection for them. If we’ve traveled less, we can at least remember making online connections around the world.

5. Art deco motifs

After all, we are back in the ’20s! The art deco motifs fit well with the geometric patterns that have been in trend in recent years. Although the first association of people with the art deco style could be speakeasy ornate sites and Gatsby-themed wedding invitations, it can make beautiful minimalist designs.

This year’s trend is inspired by clean and curved lines and repetitive graphic forms of art deco illustration and architecture. These elements can inspire beautiful logos, fonts, spacers, borders, and illustrations. To design effectively in this style, it helps to understand the philosophy behind the original art deco movement.

      6. Fewer images of heroes

This year, many designers choose to create hero sections and design-friendly landing pages, rather than relying on photos or illustrations. Heroic images have a great visual impact from the start, but sometimes eliminating the distraction of a splashing image puts more emphasis on style and content.

These four websites from Humain, SVZ, Heyday and RADAR are incredibly different, but each uses appearance, typography, color and shape to communicate a strong and unique brand identity. Giving up images also creates a bit of a mystery, enticing visitors to find out what else is beyond the heroes section.

    7. Oversized printing

Unusually large print is a fresh and bold design trend for this year. At a certain size, words become more of a graphic element than just a part of the copy. This is a versatile technique that can be used in minimalist or maximalist designs just as effectively and can suit many different styles.

This film portfolio website for Eva Habermann (by Daniel Spatzek) overlays large text on a moving film portfolio reel. The text partially blocks the image, making the viewer curious to see more, and a two-color sans-serif font provides exactly the right amount of contrast, without being illegible or overwhelming.

8. Interactive fonts

Taking the use of text even further, some designers have found creative ways to make their text move and play with the user’s mouse. An easy way to make the text interactive is to apply a hover status change, just as you would with a button. It helps that it’s now easier to create more elaborate effects using modern code-free platforms than before you tried to write these interactions manually. When using font interactivity, it’s important to keep legibility in mind, as some people are distracted by moving characters.

The Dillinger website uses a font that changes weight when the cursor hovers over the text. Note that the shrinking text on the black background makes the selected text more readable, a great addition to use. The exaggerated size of the cursor also makes the site feel more captivating. Designer Tim Ricks was kind enough to create a clonable version of this site for anyone who wants to see how the effect was created.

9. Design responsible for movement

Now that we are talking about interactivity, it is time to talk about responsible movement design, which we see is beginning to become standard practice. While the movement is an intriguing facet of web design, it is easy not to overdo it, but also to harm people by causing them to move. Motion sickness is quite common, and animations such as mouse-triggered scaling, parallax effects, or scrolling in the plane (also known as scroll jacking) should be avoided.

Movement can be used in subtle and responsible ways. Corey Moen, the senior brand designer at Webflow, went into detail on how to build, taking into account the “Reduce Motion” setting in macOS.

   10. Collage illustration

Collage-style graphics can provide site illustrations or tactile sensation, open up more white space in a design, and allow you to embed images without centering the entire design around a photo. Make sure you mix shapes, patterns, and colors in a collage. add a monochrome effect, hue, or photo filter to help them blend in with the overall design.

Vanta’s site uses collage-style illustrations on the landing page and across the site. Editing his photos for a collage-like look allows him to place irregular graphics off-axis, breaking the site grid.

   11. Collage illustration

Collage-style graphics can provide site illustrations or tactile sensation, open up more white space in a design, and allow you to embed images without centering the entire design around a photo. Make sure you mix shapes, patterns and colors in a collage. add a monochrome effect, hue, or photo filter to help them blend in with the overall design.

Vanta’s site uses collage-style illustrations on the landing page and across the site. Editing his photos for a collage-like look allows him to place irregular graphics off-axis, breaking the site grid.

12. Work inline

A trend that is felt in some respects both modern and retroactive is online work. Designers can use lines to delimit sections, headers, paragraphs, and product galleries, or they can create a dynamic grid for the entire webpage. Add inline illustrations (abstract or representative) to bring this style even further. With this type of design, the weight of the line will have the greatest impact on the final effect.

The Appart Agency website uses ultra-thin lines. The effect is technical, clear, and minimalist. The graphic design and selection of colors orange, black, and taupe are reminiscent of the minimalist art movement of the 1960s. The movement of horizontal lines on the scroll is also a pleasant touch.

  13. More stichromorphism

A great trend for this year is stichromorphism. A combination of transparency, blur, and movement can make page elements look like glass. You can use this technique in logos, illustrations, or even complete sections. There is a fantastic tutorial by Tim Ricks on how to create a class morphism effect here.

The key to this style is diffusion, reflection, and shadow, which create the optical illusion. Combined with the subtle movement, the glass effect can make a site look 3D. The diffusion of “matte glass” in the image allows you to incorporate transparency into your design without feeling too messy visually.

14. Prioritize page speed

Technically, page speed has become a priority for web developers this year. Updating Google’s algorithm in 2021 makes speed more important than before for SEO. This also reflects users’ higher expectations for site speed performance, as 53% of users will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. The days of patients waiting on the loading screens are gone.

   15. Dynamic content

Dynamic content allows designers to build faster, build bigger, and include more complexity without increasing the amount of work required to make adjustments. More available database tools and code-free platforms mean that more people designing for the web can start building this way, regardless of their level of experience. This is a significantly more efficient way to build for the web and is becoming much more widely adopted.

We are excited to see how they will be implemented in 2022

We loved browsing the sites that inspired this list so much. We look forward to a year of fun and creative review as designers move away from some of the trends that have become so ubiquitous in recent years. We look forward to seeing what you all create for the web in 2022

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