Have you ever looked at a website and wondered why they did it? Website design times and trends, that’s the precise idea that can be remembered. What about an element that works (or does not work) and why did it become so popular so fast? That’s the theme of this month’s round.
Here’s a design habit this month.
1. Lightweight and Whimsical Design
Even for important or bold material, lighter designs are more whimsical trending. It’s a bit of a weird approximation between design and content, and one we don’t see that often.
Designs that have “heavy content” and information that have a light aesthetic tend to have the following elements:
- Lighter color palettes
- Potential atypical font options
- Movement and animation
- Cartoon shapes or characters
- Almost a baby feels like the whole design
- No photos or videos showing people
- Serious content as soon as you start reading
That last paragraph is the most surprising part of this design trend. From the design alone, you would expect light or informative design for the kids. But in these examples, it is not at all.
OTR South is for youth mental health resources. Note that the design has a youthful feel, but the content and topic is rather bold.
Wild Fox Squad is a pre-launch site that will ask you to purchase NFTs.
Chia Studios is a website design agency.
The question that leaves this trend is whether the visual tone is enough mesh with the content to create the right vibe or credibility to engage the website, do business with the company, or even something buy some online?
2. Long Scroll with Animation
At first glance, you might not think there is much going on with any of these website design examples. But as you start to navigate the sites, there’s a clear trend – they all have long scrolls with bottom – top animations for homepages.
Long scrolling is one of the topics of website design – and trends – that people often feel strongly about. Some people love it. It is hated by others.
Here’s the challenge with long scrolling. If something seems to scroll a long way on the desktop, it takes forever to scroll on smaller screens unless you delete a lot of content. That’s the question: will users see and read everything you need on the homepage if it’s extremely long?
Here’s how each of these examples uses long scrolling and animation together.
Match Artists opens with an animation as the site loads and then goes to a static home screen. As you scroll, photos in the frame expand with subtle animation. The faster you scroll, the more animated this site will be. There is little to read, making the image-scrolling-animation combination easier to digest.
Myla Yeomans has an almost empty home scroll, which moves into a bold text scroll (shown below) and each scrollbar changes color with animation. The effects are not hard but they can give you a bit of a movement sickness if you do not scroll slowly due to the size and volume of the text in the design.
Reyes Holdings may have the busiest animation scroll of this series of examples. There is a sliding animation that moves from left to right for content in the hero field as well as parallax and scrolling animations loading down the page as elements seem to come in from almost every direction.
3. Pink
Pink is a color trend that is accompanied by many strong emotions. One color can create assumptions about the design or content of the website before a user even starts dealing with the site.
When designing a color like this, you need to think about the luggage that may come with it, whether you agree with it or not.
Pink is often associated with femininity, the pale pink in some of these examples is associated with children, and is not often seen as a strong pigment. Common meanings and combinations with the color pink include sweetness, health, romance, and innocence. All of these concepts should be taken into account when coloring this part of your design plan. With that in mind, each of these websites uses the pink color trend in very different ways.
Thursday is a singles website / app. It has a modern vibe and the pink here is dumb in a way that has an almost beige tone. The question for users is, does it have enough vibe to appeal to all kinds of people? Which would be important for a dating app.
All-in-one Skin Clinics go with pink tones on the website and, it seems, in their offices. Here’s a situation where it’s hard to figure out how I feel about color. It’s nice that it doesn’t feel as clinical as white, but this color is not on all skin either. It can create a weird tug on how you feel about the design and the facility as a whole.
Pixel Bakery uses a few shades of pink for its design that many baby feel. Maybe it’s the yin and yang contrast and the almost baby blue. Then there’s this – nothing seems “compatible” in terms of design. Pale pink background, deeper pink logo and text, almost red pink calls to action. There is a lot to visualize here.
Conclusion
How do you feel about all the trending designs featured this month? Do they look like things you could try? Web design trends are interesting that way because they seem to go through fire – one tries something new and then others continue to use the design idea and iterate on it. Sometimes these ideas work great and sometimes they fall flat.
It’s good practice to think of trends without jumping to the conclusion that you need to use them; sometimes that can be a lesson in what you might not try with your own design.
