As the new year begins, we take a look at some of the most popular web design trends in 2022. Does following trends make sense at all?
As the new year starts, YouTube, blogs, and magazines bombard designers with the same headlines time and time again. Biggest Design Trends 2022. You need to know these 2022 design trends! Take advantage of the 2022 Design Trends or die an agonizing death! But what’s the truth behind these trends? Should you listen to them – or are they complete nonsense?
Talking to creatives
Every Thursday our creatives meet for their “Creative Morning”. This time we want to talk about the design trends 2022. Boom, immediately one of the designers is triggered. Trends? They’re the same ones every year! It’s all just clickbait for designers! So let’s take a closer look at a few of these trends – and put them in perspective.
The 90s comeback
Did you hear? The 80s and 90s are coming back. At least that’s what this trend says. The future (or past?) will be colorful, bold and loud. Just looking at these examples makes us feel 20 years younger. The question is: How well can this “retro revolution” be applied in real life? We can vividly imagine the faces of our clients when we present them with a draft of their new website in a retro tamagotchi look.
Move!
It’s true – the fitness hype has arrived in interface design. More visual interaction, moving typography, and impressive animation. But is this news to our creative team? Not really. We’ve used these effects often and happily. So are they really all the rage? Or did the editors inflate their design trend count just a liiiittle bit?
What’s next is an excursion into art history. According to the article, we will encounter “Memphis design” and “neo-brutalism” in the coming months. Both are very hard styles. We find it hard to imagine that these looks go mainstream.
Do we need trendy clientele to use trends? Or is it our job to establish these trends? If so, who determines which style is currently en vogue? A blog article?
What does the team say?
Our team of five is divided. Are design trends total nonsense or really important? One party claims not to take trends into account. But they admit their own designs have already made use of design elements that could be counted as trends.
The other faction sees itself hand in hand with the zeitgeist. But they have to admit that they often fall back on familiar patterns in web design. After all, the most important thing is a user-friendly design. Everyone gladly agrees on that.
The dose makes the poison
Trends in design are easy to identify but difficult to put a time limit on. A good example is the advance of flat design. We first noticed it in 2013 with the update to iOS 7. Today, even the Mercedes star is flat and can be stamped without any problems. So we are talking about an evolution that took years – and not a one-hit-wonder from 2013.
How are we going to deal with trends in future? We see the suggestions of the blog editors as a further source of inspiration and decide on a case-by-case basis what we want/could/should use from them. We’ll work some approaches into our designs. But to make an entire page “trendy,” the trend would have to fit the brand and target group reaaally well.
Going with so-called trends does not automatically make a design good. Creative minds that carefully marry different styles, on the other hand, are timeless classics.
