If you’re wondering about the new trends in web design for 2022, look no further! We’ve compiled a list of 32 exciting trends that will shape websites this year.
Okay, you’re right, that is a lot of trends. Let’s make this a little easier to soak in. We’ll break them into five sections: layout, design, color, text, and interactive elements.
Page Structure
It all starts with your page layout. This sets up how your visitor experiences your website. Most sites will have a fairly standard structure, but other sites are opting for more unique experiences. New trends include:
- Non-vertical layouts.
- Having a single page for your website.
- Loading the webpage as your visitor scrolls.
Some out-of-the-box trends can help make the very structure of your website engaging.
If creating your website design from scratch seems like a daunting task, or you need a website update, Commerce Pundit’s expertise can create a beautiful, eye-catching website that both you and your customers will love.
One-Page Site
There’s beauty in simplicity. Visitors also appreciate a website that’s easy to use, and it doesn’t get much easier than a single page. With everything on that page, there’s no need to go through tabs and menus to find what you are looking for.
You can include jump links for increased simplicity, so visitors aren’t stuck scrolling through content to find what they are looking for. This simple, retro web design trend can make the visitor feel more comfortable and enjoy the experience of being on your site.
Websites like Hypnax show that you don’t need tabs and tabs and then some subtabs to go with them. They deliver all the critical information they want their audience to know right on the homepage, from what their mission is to frequently-asked questions, and the only links they have are for their Facebook page and placing an order. It’s all they need.
Split-Screen
Another returning web design trend for 2022 is the split-screen. It’s a simple design that is user-friendly, helping the website visitor differentiate between sections and easily find CTAs for different sections. A seamlessly flowing page has its place, but sometimes it’s good to have a strong split screen that divides two areas of your site or separates images from text and makes CTAs easy to find.
The website for Madame de shows calls to action on one side of the screen while listing out their services on one side, allowing space for the visitor to soak in the information and be more excited about clicking their CTA.
Visible Borders
Visible borders are no longer taboo. A seamless, flowing experience is excellent, but sometimes a little more structure helps the visitor organize what they are looking at. Utilizing this web design trend can help a website feel less crowded. The visitor sees each section as an individual unit, so it’s easier to put more text or media on a website without feeling crowded. Sometimes visitors appreciate visible structure.
Hanging Up the Moon has rigid barriers between photos to help organize their various projects so visitors can find what they are looking for. Each project has room to breathe, and the site doesn’t feel like it’s stuffed with content.
Multidirectional Layouts
Who says your website has to scroll down? If you have an idea for a website that scrolls sideways, try it! That’s one way to stick in the head of visitors. Thinking outside the box, or at least the scroll box, will allow you to create a truly unique web experience.
Oxymoron provides a different experience by starting with block text that, as you scroll, parts in the middle as the website scrolls sideways.
Page Design
Some interesting trends in filling out the structure of a website have cropped up in 2022. These web design trends feature fantastic, mind-bending images, while other websites don’t feature a single image, instead focusing on the text. No matter your style and taste, there’s a web design trend that will work for you and your website.
Collage Illustrations
Collage illustrations are an exciting way to give your site a creative look. It keeps the visitor from focusing on any specific image, allows you to utilize white space on the page, and gives you room to play with various shapes, tints, and colors without overwhelming the visitor.
The Humble Team’s hero image features a collage of different moving animations to give you a sense of their style. Each animation gives you an idea of what is important to them and is firmly on brand, but focusing on each one isn’t essential.
Gender-Neutral Design
One rising eCommerce web design trend is to remove gender entirely. With the rise of gender fluidity, more websites are focusing on becoming more gender-neutral. Fewer colors, images, gender-assuming terms, and fonts that traditionally suggest gender are being used.
Unless noting a customer’s gender is necessary, stores avoid making customers choose between he/she, Mr./Mrs., etc. Staying away from colors that assume gender like pink or blue and refraining from using terms such as “guys,” “gals,” or “him” to keep from turning these people away.
Snapchat is one company that said gender isn’t relevant when using their app, so they don’t even bother asking for it. E-commerce stores like Everybody focus on unisex products to avoid sorting their products by male and female sections and use yellow, a color that isn’t attached to either gender, to build their palette around.
Funky Shapes
No matter who you are, you’ve dealt with a rough few years, and we all need a dose of optimism. An emerging web design trend for 2022 is to use odd shapes and bright colors to create a more welcome website that makes visitors happy while visiting. Nothing wrong with a happy customer!
Philippeneveu.com shows how fun, ambiguous shapes can be used to create a peaceful, welcoming environment and use bright colors to boost their visitor’s mood. Using shapes that aren’t perfectly defined also shows a creative side, that they aren’t confined to specific shapes, that they are okay with coloring outside the lines. This innovative, free-spirited design gives visitors an easy, uplifted feeling.
Glassmorphism
Glassmorphism is a new web design trend to make design elements look like glass. Incorporating glassmorphic elements can add depth and texture to your website without taking too much attention away from your critical messaging. These elements create a professional, clean look that can benefit sites like e-commerce stores that want a welcoming, professional look but don’t want to distract from the products.
Glassmorphic elements are especially popular for banks when advertising credit cards and on pop-up windows to give visitors a sleek look, like they are tapping on a glass tablet by allowing them to see through the menu to the blurred background.
Gradient
Look who’s coming back, again! Gradient, the gradual transition from one color to another, has returned to the web design trends party! Gradient designs help fill out websites by providing depth and texture in the background or text to emphasize specific phrases. It feels like gradient has been coming and going for decades now, but who’s counting?
Haiku-Haiku beautifully uses a gradient background to pop off your screen, instigate creativity, and relax the visitor so they can think about what they want to write. Because white text is used on the site, this doesn’t interfere with being able to read the website’s text.
Imageless Homepage
Now here’s an example of true minimalism. Opting to use creative layouts and interesting fonts can make your website feel filled out even when you don’t have a single image on your site. Not including an image will help your website stand out in a competitive landscape and draw focus to your messaging while positioning you as sleek and innovative.
The homepage for The Post Family contains no images, instead letting the space breathe and focusing on the messaging in the text, which they keep brief. A simple site like this gets visitors more interested and excited than if the homage was jam-packed with graphics and excessive text.
Layered Effect
You want to talk depth; layering elements does that. Layering is a web design trend that creates a dynamic feeling that excites the visitor. If used subtly can create a more seamless experience. Connecting different parts of your page or layering can create exciting designs that draw the visitor’s attention.
State Creative makes their hero image pop by letting layers of their hero image fold over each other, even letting their photo be over graphics in one place and under the same graphic in another. Layering like this helps the site pop off the page, even feeling three-dimensional.
Extraordinary Images
People love escapism, or at least being allowed to experience something that elevates their everyday experience. Using images that portray extraordinary experiences can associate you and your products with an escape from the mundane, or at least capture their attention and imagination.
Having an out-of-this-world image as a hero image, like K+ Film, can quickly grab your visitor’s attention. The atypical experience and bright colors help convince visitors to stay longer by uplifting them and taking them out of their everyday world.
Line Art
Background line art is very simple, but this subtle design can significantly impact how the visitor experiences your website. This web design trend can act as a passive guide through your website, gently pushing the visitor’s eyes where you want them to go, whether it’s to highlight specific statistics or a CTA.
PushApp subtly uses line art to separate their text from their graphics and guide the reader down the page. The lines also highlight specific parts they want their visitors to notice.
Hand-Made Graphics
Maybe your website or online store needs a personal, homemade touch. This is primarily a growing trend among e-commerce sites that emphasize that their products are made personally and with care. Importing hand-made graphics into your website can make your site feel incredibly intimate, showing your creativity offline and personality.
Legwork Studio uses hand-drawn images to emphasize their creativity and originality. Moreover, it gives the site a look that can’t be replicated. Hand-drawn images can’t be perfectly recreated, so you’ll always have a unique, personal look.
Textured Backgrounds
A re-emerging trend for e-commerce websites is the use of textured backgrounds that look and feel more like the real world. This can be a way to help mentally bring the physical and virtual worlds closer together and help their brand feel more natural and more confident in making a purchase.
Empire Vintage uses a textured background, so their website looks more like the walls of a store. The slight stains give the background an aged look, so visitors don’t feel like they are looking at a website; they feel like they are in the store itself browsing around.
Product Cut-Outs
Why not have products right on the homepage if you have products worth featuring? Featuring products on your homepage is a top e-commerce web design trend of 2022. Product cut-outs can be used to create collages on your homepage, helping make your product more recognizable and desirable.
Product cut-outs are different from simply having a photo of your product on your web page. Product cut-outs completely integrate the product into your website while a photo allows the visitor to see where the image was taken, and you can see the difference between the photo and the website.
Apple is a master of product cut-outs. Their website always features cut-outs of the latest iPhone, Mac, AirPods, etc., looking sleek and seamlessly integrated into the website.
Vaporwave
Combine the old with the new. Vaporwave aesthetics combine the best retro looks with modern style for a unique web experience. A style not for the faint of heart, vaporwave boldly features neon tones, a palette of lighter pastel colors, glitchy 80s and 90s style visuals, surreal aesthetics, and Greek/ Roman statues. The callback of vintage looks with a modern style will keep your visitors’ attention.
This design by Igor Zvyagintsev shows how vaporwave images can be applied to an e-commerce site. Surreal images and a bold green and pink color palette suck the visitor into the website, getting them more excited about the products being offered.
Do any of these designs speak to you? Let us know and our team of e-commerce website design experts will help turn that vision into reality.
Color
Website colors have come a long way in a few decades, although some old trends are coming back. Many color palettes help your website stand out from the crowd, whether you are looking for stark, high-contrast colors or pleasant pastels.
Black and White
Contrary to using bright colors, other sites are turning to the web design trend of eliminating color and building around a black and white color scheme. The trend toward simplicity in web design is alive and strong, and visitors love not being overwhelmed by sites that are easy to look at and aesthetically pleasing. It can give the website a sleek, stylish look, or you can get creative to make unique designs that shine on their own without color.
Brandon Knaster Jewelry’s simple black and white color scheme gives the site a sophisticated aesthetic that boosts its branding and calms the visitor with its simple design. Keeping a simple website design also highlights their products, drawing the eyes to their beautiful products and allowing them to shine.
Positive Colors
Another web design trend that aims at boosting customer serotonin while on your website is subtly using cheerful colors to make them happier. Splashes of positive colors can make them feel more upbeat as they sift through your site and can help them feel good about your brand when they recall it in the future, especially when they are considering making a purchase.
Small splashes of yellow can make customers excited and cheerful, making them excited to be on your site and click through. Be Baby Shop uses small amounts of yellow to make their key phrases and buttons stand out, drawing attention to them and creating excitement around clicking them.
Memphis Style
Another returning web design trend! This one, Memphis style, is a return to bright colors in a blatant rejection of minimalism. This trend focuses on making your website stand out through an extraordinary amount of color and shapes to catch the visitor’s attention. Visitors won’t soon forget the way you pour your personality into colors in patterns on your website.
Teleset uses a fair amount of white space to keep from overloading the visitor but still uses bright colors and fun shapes to catch the visitor’s attention. Using bright orange, purple, blue, and green is meant to stimulate and excite their visitors.
Pastel Tones
Pastel tones are a clever and subtle e-commerce web design trend that guides your visitors through your website. Muted pastel colors can create interesting backgrounds that aren’t distracting, allowing visitors to focus on products, CTAs, and other content, even allowing them to pop off the page through more vibrant colors than the rest of the page.
Hande successfully uses pastel tones to make their website easy to digest and draw your attention where they want it. Their text, CTAs, and photos all have extra pop without being overwhelming.
Neutral Color Backgrounds
Bright, eye-catching colors are great to get visitors excited, but sometimes they can be overwhelming. Staring at too many bright colors can be tiring, and you may want to give your visitors a more relaxing experience.
Using neutral-colored backgrounds is easier on the eyes and soothes visitors rather than gets them excited. Even without vibrant tones, there are still many colors and shades to work with that are exciting but calming, even giving your site a sophisticated look. Muted grays, blues, and even yellows can give your website a soothing feel.
Elan Accessories gives visitors a soothing web experience, supporting their simple, elegant brand identity. Their website is pleasant to shop around on, and it allows their product images to stand out and speak for themselves.
Text
The design of your text can be just as crucial as your structure, design, and color palette. How you use your text also sends messages about your brand, everything from their placement to the font to their color and size. Having large, bold text says something, as does adding movement to your text.
Scrolling Text
No rule says text needs to be stationary; it just needs to be legible. This new web design trend emphasizes specific phrases you want to make clear on a site, as the visitor’s gaze is naturally drawn to the movement, and as long as it is short and moves slow, that phrase will pack a punch and stick with them easier. The dynamic text makes the site more exciting and can hold the visitor longer because they want to get the whole message.
NexBank’s homepage contains one-word scrolling vertically instead of horizontally in each section. It catches the visitor’s attention and emphasizes that customers can expect flexibility when using NexBank for mortgage banking.
Changing Typography
Nothing draws human attention quite like movement. It’s baked into our DNA. Having a rotation of images on your homepage can engagingly highlight various products without taking up too much space on your website. One e-commerce web design trend that’s gained lots of traction is using a countdown clock. It can get visitors motivated to purchase if they see the amount of time on a deal slipping away or they see a holiday like Christmas getting closer and closer.
Love Lost built their whole site around moving text, from letters being drawn out to phrases fading in and zooming out. The text also has shading and depth, helping to create an immersive experience. The text comes in and out of the screen, even zooming up to your face.
Text as a Hero Image
Who says a hero image has to be an image? In 2022 one way to make a strong statement is to replace an image with text. This could be your company’s tagline or a summarized mission statement. Either way, if it’s short, punchy, and attention-grabbing, it could draw in your audience stronger than any image you can conjure up.
Heyday uses a tagline for their hero image instead of, well, an image. Their text emphasizes how they help their customers more than a photo would, and the small hand images pointing to the “your” in the text further backs up that they are there to make your life easier.
Neo-Brutalism
Neo-brutalism takes brutalism’s stark, eye-catching aspects and dials them down a couple of notches. It takes the raw, minimal, and text in all-cap elements and polishes it up a bit to be eye-catching but not so jarring. Short, punchy text combined with only essential elements for the website make what matters, what you want them to take away, stand out.
Cargo utilizes the large text of brutalism to stand out and make an impact without overpowering the website visitor. Their messaging stands out, and it doesn’t come across as screaming at visitors.
Interactive Elements
It’s 2022! Your website doesn’t need to be static. There is room to add all sorts of unique, interactive elements to help your website and brand stand in the eyes of your visitors. This could come in the form of a remarkable scrolling experience or having a moving graphic that highlights different parts of your website.
Unique Interactive Elements
Creativity doesn’t have to go just toward layout and design. Building interactive elements in your website, whether that means turning the visitor’s cursor into a flashlight or showing the configuration of a home and clicking into different rooms for a more detailed view, dramatically increases the viewer’s engagement. It’s just more fun than clicking on links that take you to new pages! And if your visitor has fun, they’ll fondly remember you and your brand.
Apple’s landing page for International Women’s Day allows the visitor to scroll not just up and down but all over the place, to hover over different photos of incredible women and learn about their contributions to the world. It makes an educational experience more fun by being more interactive than a simple, stagnant page with all the same information.
Unique Scrolling Experiences
Like the interactive elements, designing your site to feel like you aren’t just moving down a page on a book can help visitors remember you. This could look like unique shoes spinning in between sections of text or even giving the visitor the feeling that they are going down a slide. As long as they aren’t given motion sickness, this web design trend gives you the freedom to step outside the box and uniquely showcase your website.
Instead of simply scrolling down their website, Renate Rechner gives visitors a spinning experience. As you go down the page, each section rotates into view. This unique scrolling experience helps define each section and will help them stand out compared to other companies and brands.
Front and Center Navigation
In some cases, keeping your navigation bar in its traditional spot, in the header, may not be best. Sometimes visitors want to jump right into what they are looking for. Having a navigation menu that’s right up front should have a little more creative design from incorporated brand elements, images, and even animations. This web design trend is beneficial for e-commerce stores with specific product categories. Navigation like this helps visitors find the sections they are looking for.
Wingmen’s website jumps right into it. You get four options to click on (plus an easy button to get back to the navigation page), so you can explore their company and see what they are about.
Fun Filters
Filters are one of the most essential features of an e-commerce store; filters help your customers quickly sort through your products to find what they are looking for, whether that’s a specific t-shirt color or vase made of a particular material. But who says they have to be stagnant? Using fun animations for filters can improve your website’s user experience.
This design for Simple Wine shows that instead of clicking drop-down menus for filtering like usual, visitors can combine bubbles of different elements to find the exact wine they are looking for. Fun features like this can make the shopping process more enjoyable for customers.
Smart Content Load
One of the most significant factors in user experience and your search engine ranking is page load time. Pages need to load quickly, but complex, media-filled pages can take a while to load.
One e-commerce web design trend to get around is having only the parts of the page showing on the screen load. Everything below the fold loads as the visitor scrolls down the page. Rather than one large load, the page loads in short bursts. This way, the browser doesn’t have to retrieve too much information all at once.
For the Love of Bread’s website contains lots of video and large media elements that would take a long time to load all at once. Instead they show one section at a time, allowing each city to shine while on the screen and give the visitor a more fun experience.
Parallax Animation
Adding depth to your website will undoubtedly keep visitors interested and engaged. Parallax animation is a style that makes the background scroll down slower than the content in the foreground. This makes the background feel far away as it slowly scrolls while the foreground, the content, images, etc., scroll by quickly. The visitor will feel more like they are reading a book outside facing a beautiful mountain range rather than staring at a computer screen.
Barco Sorriso’s homepage beautifully showcases this effect. While a home on a hill, boat, and sun in the background slowly scroll down, they are quickly covered by green vegetation in the foreground, which also holds an intro video for their brand and products. This effect offers an easier transition from their hero image to information about their company below the website fold.
If there’s one consistent theme in these trends, it’s personalization. There’s not one web design trend that everyone is turning to; it’s whatever works best for you. Using your website to be unique and stand out from the crowd is vital to designing a successful website. So take your personality, and run with it! And Commerce Pundit can help support you with any of your design needs.
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