New Designs for the New Year: Web Design Trends for 2022

The past few years have seen people spending more time at home and on their devices.  In the battle for your customer’s attention, dazzling web design that artfully expresses your company’s offerings is more important than ever.  Let’s take a look at how technology, typography, and talented graphic designers are setting the stage for a truly captivating internet in 2022.

Typography Trends in 2022: To Serif or Sans Serif

Last year saw the rise of distorted, quirky, typography-play.  Subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle twists and non-conformity caught the eye.  The use of geometric shapes and symbols (as seen in the title of the popular show “Squid Game”)  were utilizing serif motion in sans serif fonts.  

Meanwhile, businesses were improving the use of san serif fonts for their bold, hero messages.  These all-important branding scripts are ideal in a world gone mobile.  Clear, unfussy fonts that can convey a value or offer at a glance are perfect for the smaller screen sizes of phones and tablets.  By the end of 2021, 47.74 % of all website visits originated on a mobile device.  We expect the mobile revolution to continue into 2022 making clear, resizable typography a growing necessity, especially with longer hero text.  

While mobile screens inherently put a cap on just how crazy we can get with font styling, several innovative designers have found ways to make clean, legible fonts more interesting without sacrificing readability on a cellphone.  Expect to see creative uses of expressive but legible typography moving into the new year. 

The Rise of 3D and Depth of Field

Sometimes sticking out involves, well, sticking out.  After years of a relatively large stable of 2-dimensional photographs, vector images, and illustrations, a new move toward the third dimension has begun to take shape.  Making use of subtle depth of field in 3-dimensional elements such as combining 3D and 2D together can make animated illustrations pop.  

Here are some creative 2D/3D combos that brighten the story:

Bringing originality and a sense of motion to our images can grab the attention of our visitors and while conveying a fresh perspective.  3D animations are also taking a turn.  The slow but steady technological trend towards augmented reality is yet to hit its stride in full.  However, animations are making their way back into our digital atmosphere.  The changing nature of facebook’s parent company, now called Meta, has made extensive use of this altered reality landscape in their marketing efforts as well. 

Symbols, Icons, and Information

As you may have noticed, symbols and icons that convey information have continued to innovate and dominate websites over the last several years.  The increased reliance on emojis to convey information to one another in texts and emails has definitely had a transfer effect on web design.  

The simple icons of the past decade have given rise to endless libraries to punctuate and annotate your text content so that viewers can tell at a glance what message you are conveying.  A return to geometric shapes and clean lines have tried to maximize the simplistic conveyance of the informational icon.

Slide Decks and the Social Consumer

The newish trend of organizing slide decks for consumers to share on social media has seen its star rising into the new year as well.  A slide deck is essentially a series of graphical slides (instructions, steps in a sequence, product stories) that are designed perfectly for mobile consumption on social media sites such as Instagram or LinkedIn.  

Slide decks can be an effective tool for reaching mobile customers and ‘telling’ them with images.  They also benefit from being natural calls to action and are one click away from taking your customer to you at any step of their journey.  

Brighter Colors, Brighter New Year 

Brighter, lively colors are also on the up and up.  This adds to the pop of 2D and 3D images and illustrations as well as overall web themes.  Perhaps after the last 2 long years of social distancing, we are looking forward to a brighter, more festive future.  The overall trend for web design in 2022 is one of vibrance. Here’s hoping that these trends become our reality.  

Cheers and Happy New Year from all of us at Apis Productions!