Month: January 2022

1. Parallax Animation: Parallax animation gives websites a sophisticated look and is popular in new website designs.Parallax animation works by separating background and foreground elements. The images closer to the viewer, the foreground, move faster than those further away in the background. This effect occurs when users start scrolling down a page, and the background images change at a slower rate. It makes the foreground images appear as if they’re floating on top of the background, providing a sense of depth.

Parallax animation is a great option when trying to figure out how to create a homepage. The visual interest engages the viewer and entices them into scrolling deeper into your website.

2. Neumorphism: Neumorphism is a trend in modern web design that moves away from the popular flat design of the last few years. Neumorphism focuses on minimalist but realistic design of user interfaces. In flat design, UI elements float in space, casting shadows on the things below them. In designs using the Neumorphism trend, the UI elements extrude from the background images. The look is similar to paper embossing or debossing.

Subtle shadows and gradients combine to create a trendy look. Neumorphism offers a fresh and sharp look for websites in 2022.

3. Comfortable Colors: For the last several years, trends in web design have focused on bright, high-contrast designs. In 2022, designers will shift to more of the middle ground between extreme light and dark. Softer color pallets offer a break to the eyes from the bright white of typical website designs. Comfortable color schemes utilize warm and natural greens and brown or light pinks and pastel blues.

4. Dark Mode and Low Light UX: Another modern web design trend is dark mode and low light UX. This trend gravitates away from the traditional white and bright designs of the past few years.

Many mobile and desktop operating systems added dark mode options, so users could optimize their screens for viewing in low-light environments. The trend is moving into website designs, especially for web-based products like streaming services that people will most likely view in low-light environments. For example, Netflix has a black background because a white and bright interface would be blinding in a dark room.

5. 3D Colors: A slight gradient and shading can go a long way. Using shades to create depth on backgrounds and images helps these elements jump off the page. If you were trying to paint a picture of an apple, you wouldn’t use only one shade of red. The apple would look flat and unrealistic. You’d mix different shades of red to give the illusion of the curves of the apple.

6. Minimalism: Minimalism is a classic yet trendy approach to web design that remains popular.

The minimalist design aesthetic combines beauty and function. Every design choice from images and fonts serves a purpose. The goal is to trim out any extraneous design flourishes until you’re left with the essentials.

Common characteristics of minimalism in modern web design include:

• User-friendly and intuitive navigation.
• Simplified color schemes of three or fewer colors.
• Creative and bold use of typography as a design element.
• Avoiding the use of overly animated transitions.
• Simple, flat backgrounds instead of heavily textured backgrounds.

Minimalism is a common design choice for a one-page website because the clean aesthetic matches the brevity of the content.

7. Hand-Drawn Elements: Hand-drawn elements add visual interest to web design while also making them more unique. Stock photography is often too generic. People can tell the photos are not authentic. Introducing hand-drawn elements to your web designs helps distinguish your site and brand. Hand-drawing is a skill utilized by graphic artists and designers, evoking creativity and inspiration. Drawings are often used by creative professionals or agencies, but you might even see them on top eCommerce sites.

Drawings and sketches can explain complex concepts and processes, such as how to make a product.

8. Illustrations: Similar to hand-drawn sketches, illustrations are another popular web design trend. Illustrations have a more modern and crisp look than imagery in the hand-drawn style. In both cases, the goal is to avoid the use of stock photography. Stock images can easily make your website look exactly like your competitors or any other website. It’s hard to stand out when the imagery of your site isn’t unique. Using illustrations in place of photos allows you to customize your imagery to fit your brand better. Even if you use stock illustrations instead of paying to have custom images made, you can recolor the images to match your brand’s color palette.

9. Merging Illustrations and Photos: Another imagery trend is to create hybrid images featuring illustration elements with actual photos. This technique is perfect for homepage hero sections as it offers a unique perspective and is incredibly eye-catching. The method is excellent for pointing out specific product features because you can use the illustration elements to highlight features and benefits.

10. Accessibility: Accessibility in web design is about making sure everyone can access and use your website. While accessibility makes the list of trends for 2022, it’s been around and is here to stay. It’s simply something web designers discuss more now than they have in the past.

Disabilities affecting access to websites include:

• auditory
• cognitive
• neurological
• physical
• speech
• visual

About one-third of the world’s population has one or more of these disabilities, making it crucial for web designs to think about accessibility when creating a website.

In addition to making websites more accessible to the public, many accessibility features have the added benefit of improving a site’s search engine optimization. For example, adding functional alt tags for images allows visually impaired visitors to get a description of the images while also helping search engines process the content of your image.

Other ways to incorporate accessibility into modern web design include:

• Using suitable color contrast between backgrounds and text to improve readability.
• Adding labels with instructions to form fields instead of placeholder text.
• Focus indicators for when people are using keyboard navigation.

11. Virtual Reality: Virtual reality is one of the hottest new eCommerce trends. More people are shopping online than ever before, but for some items, especially furniture, it’s hard to tell what the thing will look like in person. Will it fit in my room? Will it match my other furniture? Virtual reality solves this problem by giving people a virtual preview of what an item would look like in their space.

The virtual reality trend isn’t limited to furniture. Clothing and accessories retailers are even incorporating virtual try-on experiences into their web designs. For example, Warby Parker has a virtual try-on feature for people to try different glasses frames.

12. White Space: White space continues to be a top web design trend. White space is a bit of a misnomer because the space doesn’t have to be white. The design concept refers to leaving blank space around design elements. So the “whitespace” is typically the background color of your site.

White space is beneficial in design because it helps the website feel less cluttered and overwhelming. White space can also help draw viewers’ attention to a particular element.

13. Chatbots: Chatbots are increasingly common in web designs. Chatbots increase website conversions by offering a quick answer to visitors’ questions and adding a way to collect information.

The conversational nature of chatbots makes it easy for visitors to ask questions about finding products or making returns, for example. You can program your chatbot to answer your most frequently asked questions. If a visitor asks a question the bot can’t answer, it will connect them with a live agent or collect the visitor’s contact information so someone can follow up to answer the question. Anything that makes sites easier to navigate and visitors more likely to convert is a design trend worth considering.

Benefits of using a chatbot include:

• Increased customer engagement
• Better customer service
• High conversion rates
• More channels for lead generation
• Decreased support costs

14. Video as a Design Element: Video is exploding in popularity in 2022. Video plays a central role in all social media, especially on newer platforms like TikTok. As people watch more videos in their social feeds, the trend bleeds into web design. Video backgrounds give websites a modern, cutting-edge feel. Explanatory videos help people understand a company or product better. Quality content is the backbone of good design. Your web designs should plan for text, image, and video content to create the best experience.

The most important of our web design tips is to keep it simple. Don’t try to incorporate every trend on this list. You’ll end up with a busy and cluttered website. For visual examples click here.

Source: Nexcess

A quality website design is crucial for a business to thrive. Your company’s website should give an exceptional first impression to accurately represent your business and credibility. Are you interested in optimizing your company’s online presence? Let’s connect and see what Crescere Digital can do for you!

Congratulations to two members of the Crescere Digital team, Ryan and Chris, for completing their Google Ads Certification and earning their Google Partner badge for the third year in a row!

This certification demonstrates their latest Google Ads expertise. ​​Google gives this badge to agencies that have employees certified in AdWords, who manage large ad spends, and continuously meet Google’s standards to maintain partner status.

Do you know the benefits of being in the Google Partnership program? By joining the Google Partners program, you get access to the training, support, and resources to set your clients up to succeed and help your company grow and stand out in the industry.

At Crescere Digital, we know how to create engaging and dynamic ads to attract the right buyers. Most importantly, we provide regular and transparent reporting to show you exactly how your digital marketing budget is working.

Are you interested in using Google Ads for your business? Contact us to find out how Crescere Digital can help.

Source: Google Partners

Have you thought about your company’s digital marketing strategy for 2022? Although a marketing strategy can be inclusive to your industry and target audience, there are external factors to consider when planning ahead. 

Temperature check on the consumer: Gone are the days of solely addressing pandemic realities, but building a message around practical solutions could resonate. A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found four times as many consumers prefer efficiency in ads versus those who value campaigns that are “fun.” In turn, brands that are able to emphasize tangible value may win out versus those that can’t make a connection between their products and creative. Campaigns at the same time must be adaptive to swings in the public mood, including through a more diverse media playbook.

Reality crashes down on the metaverse: The metaverse became inescapable in 2021, with lofty promises and platform reinventions around wedding the real world with the virtual. In 2022, brand applications will be clunky but could produce learnings for if and when the tech frontier realizes its potential.

The cookieless future is coming, but don’t expect a magic bullet: With Google delaying the phaseout of third-party cookies to 2023, the next 12 months are expected to be crucial for the industry as advertisers, ad tech providers and publishers implement new tactics that allow for tracking consumers and targeting ads.

Consumer appetite drives a wave of short-form video: Consumer appetite is pushing snappy, entertaining video as an increasingly core component of brands’ social strategy. Although Facebook continues to dominate as the world’s No. 1 social network with 2.9 billion monthly active users, marketers are shifting away from the big blue app to focus on buzzy short-form platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Small-time stars make inroads with brand deals: Like in the latter half of 2020, a convergence of pandemic-related effects shifted the role celebrities and influencers played in their 2021 brand partnerships. Influencer marketing continued to swell last year as brands tapped both big- and small-name stars, but micro-influencers are forecast to pull ahead and drive industry growth in 2022, Kantar and eMarketer predict.

As a top choice for brand collaboration due to their focused, yet small, audiences drumming up strong ROI, micro-influencers comprised 91% of engagement across all sponsored posts last year, Kantar found. That trend is set to continue into 2022 despite big name brands like McDonald’s and Burger King drawing attention to celebrity-studded collaborations.

Creative campaigns will convey brands’ soul-searching: With marketers preparing for a cookieless future, some are taking the opportunity to revisit the basics in both a tactical and creative sense. In an increasingly noisy landscape, one creative strategy is to forgo overpromising in advertisements and instead do some soul-searching to establish a marketing message that communicates a brand’s core value. “Being aggressively targeted won’t give the best response. No one wants to feel like they’re being sold to, even though realistically, we know we are,” Michael Kalli, managing director at Ello Media, said in emailed comments.

Investments in retail media, livestreaming could have different payoffs: In 2022, marketers will continue to face a new ecosystem of brand development and brand choice, as brick-and-mortar sales decline and new brands and products emerge, according to Randall Rothenberg, executive chair of the IAB. 

A benefactor of this changing landscape could be Livestream shopping. However, despite sunny forecasts and investments from major players like Walmart, livestreaming may not yield results for brands, per Phillip Jackson, chief commerce officer at customer experience agency Rightpoint.

“Brands communicating to a mass audience via a live shopping stream is not a thing that will happen in 2022,” he said, noting that the associated cost and how platforms like Instagram compensate creators for livestreams is skewing perceptions of the format.

To perhaps drive more meaningful engagement, brands are expected to embrace retail media ads in 2022, but not all investments are created equal: 47% of big brands said they’re partnering with retail media networks because they’re required to due to retailer partnerships, with only 29% of DTCs having the same requirement, per the IAB 2022 Brand Disruption Report.

Brands will continue drinking from the fountain of youth culture: In 2022, brands and agencies could continue to look at culture as a source for leadership, integration and possible M&A opportunities as marketers seek to engage consumers — especially younger generations that are increasingly difficult to reach through traditional channels.

“We’re going through a pretty significant demographic and technological shift that people have been talking about as an abstract for a long time,” said Rob Holland, CEO of consumer research platform Feedback Loop. “We’ve seen it coming like a glacier… now it’s moving into more of a tidal wave, where we’re hitting a bunch of inflection points.”

Agencies reckon with talent crisis: Talent is the biggest issue our industry is facing,” Fig’s Figliulo said. “It is forcing agencies to be more distinctive.” Attrition could be addressed in several ways. “Acqui-hiring” might become more common as the dealmaking market maintains its hot streak. Radically reimagining perks could also be necessary. Publicis Groupe is introducing a program that lets staff work from any region where the network has a footprint for up to six weeks.

Failing to promote such flexibility, including around geography, could affect recent hard-won account gains and a leg up on management consultancy disrupters that have more historical specialties in talent integration. It’s easy for agency leadership to consider talent as a large numbers game, but the health of client ties sometimes rests on the individual.

Source: Marketing Dive

The digital marketing world is constantly evolving and thrives on adaptability. Crescere Digital is here to help you navigate the industry by delivering integrated solutions based on your company’s needs and business objectives. Let’s connect and see what we can do for you!