Web Design Trends for 2022
At AWD Digital, we like to be ahead of the design curve when it comes to digital marketing for our clients. While the future is inherently unpredictable, we keep an eye on emerging trends and extrapolate from past designs to see what will benefit our clients’ websites, branding and marketing moving forward. Application and Web design is a very fluid area with trends emerging and disappearing rapidly as the technologies and capabilities develop, but today we will have a look at some sustained and emerging trends for web design in 2022.
Simplified landing pages and emphasised typography
Keeping design minimal has been a staple trend for the better part of a century in most contexts. However, there are several sub-tropes that seem to be emerging amongst web design trends in 2022. The last decade has seen consumers overloaded with information, advertising, and mental stimulation on digital platforms. Therefore, keeping web designs minimal, efficient and with user psychology in mind will play a pivotal role in making your website or application feel decluttered, engaging, and trendy.
Some ways this has been expressed is through the removal of imagery on landing pages, replaced by expressive, oversized typography for headings and key points. Cropping can be uniquely utilised in this context; having large title text cut off halfway at the fold makes the user more likely to scroll down and engage with the website. Strong tonal contrast is usually adopted with this technique – neutral tone background with white typography or vice versa, and negative space is heavily employed to make the text as eye-catching as possible.
These stylistic choices do have potential drawbacks, oversized text can feel confronting if poorly executed. It may not feel professional in a lot of contexts, and a lack of imagery means it can be difficult to convey ideas with text that would otherwise be easy.
Techniques for increased engagements
In an environment of rapidly decreasing attention spans, social media sites such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are optimising for more short-form and fast-paced content. This means businesses have limited time to capture users and sell products, whilst simultaneously having to compete harder to get attention. Designing websites and applications for user engagement will be more important than ever in 2022. Many large businesses and design firms will be increasingly looking at the field of behavioural psychology to find ways of keeping customers actively engaged.
An example of this thinking manifested as a web design trend includes the increased use of widgets and mini-games: ways to make a website fun and interesting, or behaviourally rewarding for navigating.
Another method to increase engagement is with motion, whether it is scrolling text, subtle hover animations, moving backgrounds, changing colours or more video and animated content. Human brains are biologically wired to sense and engage with motion, even subtle animations and parallax effects can help bring life to a website.
Once again, businesses and designers do have to be careful not to take it too far with this trend – too much movement to try and engage web users, or too much content on the page can feel overwhelming, chaotic, and disengaging.
Mobile apps can utilise and integrate behavioural design to keep users returning. Depending on the context of the application, designers can emphasise the scarcity of products to make them appear more lucrative, limited edition and valuable. Or employ the QAR method – queue, action, and reward, potentially for daily check-ins or completing tasks.
Complex Gradients
A seemingly overdone trope from the early 2000s and late 1990s, gradients may have synonymous connotations with word-art, windows XP, ugly colour clashes and excessive rainbows, fitting in every colour where possible.
But they seem to be making a comeback. Cautiously.
This trend seems to be commonly intertwined with minimalist landing pages, mentioned as trend one; with imagery being replaced by gradients for backgrounds or emphasised areas of text.
New updates to design technologies such as Adobe’s 2022 edition of Photoshop have made dramatic improvements to gradient transitions and soft transitions between multiple colours positioned close to each other.
An example of a trendy use of a gradient could be
- A parallax background: changing colour as the user scrolls down the page.
- A liquid gradient that changes colour/ position/ shape in the background using a simple AI.
As always, use gradients with caution. If applied poorly, it can make your design feel tacky, dated and over the top. On the contrary, when used effectively, gradients can be an interesting splash of colour and exciting touch to your website.
Mega-footers
In 2022, it is becoming a web design trend to increase the size of the footer dramatically and utilise it as a secondary navigational menu. This allows websites with a lot of important pages and information to display on every page, without cluttering the main menu.
Of course, the footer still has social media links, privacy policy and basic contact information; however, it is now common to integrate an entire contact form into your footer. Although increasing negative space can be great to provide some breathing room for your user, it’s important not to overfill your footer just to follow the trend. If your website only has a few pages, keep your footer simple.
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