Bristol-based brand consultancy, Mr B & Friends, has unveiled a vibrant new look for cyber security and Cloud IT specialist Kocho, bringing the two established businesses together under one name.
Kocho is the company formed from managed services provider TIG, and identity and cyber security experts, ThirdSpace. Backed by the private equity house, BGF, they’ve come together to harness the benefits of their separate strengths, making them a leading provider specialist for Microsoft Security and Cloud Technology. The distinct combination of expertise will enable Kocho to help grow ambitious companies in a truly sustainable and secure manner.
The brand has been designed with transformation front of mind, and the name ‘Kocho’ comes from the Japanese word for butterfly. The logo features a crest-like butterfly symbol with a star symbolising the transformation and protection the new business provides its clients. The brand positioning is anchored by an organising thought of ‘Become greater’, demonstrating how Kocho enables every client, colleague, and partner to flourish.
The sector that Kocho operates is crowded, so it was vital to develop a brand that was distinctive and had clarity at its core. The entire branding system, including iconography, type, colour, photography and moving image, all ladder back to the strategy. The design system features a series of illustrated patterns and ever-changing shapes that suggest the fluid motion of wings. The tone of voice shows the humility and confidence in Kocho’s ability to deliver greatness and commercial impact at both enterprise and mid-market level businesses in the UK and beyond.
Steve Richardson, Executive Creative Director at Mr B & Friends says, “From our workshops with the client team ‘Becoming greater’ was our statement of intent. The identity and tone of the brand had to represent this, but also had to stand apart from its competitive set. What client doesn’t want to be greater today than yesterday? Huge thanks to the brave client team, who embraced this bold approach from the off.”
As part of the brand relaunch, Mr B & Friends worked on a light art launch film with Sola Lightbombing. This used Pixel stick light typography combined with real-time generation of light art both in a studio and in cityscapes. The light trails tell the story of transformation and innovation, creating a fresh way to build the Kocho narrative.
Gareth Rees Jones, Director of Marketing at Kocho says, “Mr B & Friends really captured the vision that we were trying to achieve. The new brand celebrates our people, our expertise and the outcomes that we achieve for our clients. We’re delighted to be launching our new combined business under the Kocho brand.”
As part of their ‘better business’ product launches, Six has released a CX Mapping product to help businesses focus on the people who matter most: their customers.
The product
Working together with Six, businesses are guided through the process of insight gathering (both internal and external), CX mapping distillation and visualisation, and playback workshops with key stakeholders to explore the map and to determine quick-wins to longer-term priorities. Businesses are given the chance to see what their customers see – the good and not-so-good – and supported by Six to turn this human-based insight into real-world action. This programme can be completed in as little as 6 weeks.
Why invest in CX?
The line between B2B and B2C customer experience (CX) is blurring. B2B customers are now looking for more than just a good product or service – they want to buy into businesses. And they expect consistent, personalised, and human experiences when they interact with organisations.
Getting CX right is about building insight across the customer lifecycle and creating the right business ecosystem to deliver against customers’ evolving needs. Once it is known what customers feel about a business and why, changes can be identified that will seriously improve their view of a business. And where customer satisfaction leads, business growth nearly always follows.
Better business
CX Mapping is the first in a series of offerings that Six are launching. Each one will answer a specific industry need to help brands and businesses connect with their customers on a more human level. After all, whether businesses are talking to an individual or communicating with an organisation, they have one thing in common: people sit at the heart. And this is just one of many ways Six is inspiring brands and businesses to be more human.
A strategic creative partner
Over the past 28 years, Six has partnered with local and global organisations to help grow and deliver value for their clients. And they’ve been doing it in three ways:
It’s this strategic, creative capability, coupled with their CX experience with the likes of bp, Lloyds Bank and St Modwen, which makes Six the go-to agency for customer and user-focused expertise.
Ready to start your CX Mapping project? Or want to find out how Six can partner with your business? Get in touch with [email protected]
Some of the most creative and inspiring projects we work on are with start-up brands. We love collaborating directly with founders whose passion for their brand and products is contagious.
Working with start-ups also offers a unique chance to measure the real impact that design has on consumers. When there is no, or very little other marketing activity going on, everything rides on the power of the packaging design.
Noto Gin is a perfect example.
The enigmatic founder, Yuki, is so passionate about his distinctive product that he wasn’t looking to sell it just in his home country of Japan, but simultaneously launch it 6,000 miles away, here in the UK, into an established and highly competitive Gin market.
Always ready for a challenge, we loved bringing Noto Gin to life with an authentic, provenance-led design that could appeal seamlessly to consumers in both countries.
And the power of the packaging design? More than 600 bottles sold in the first two weeks, with very few people having even tried the Gin!
This is just the beginning for Noto Gin. Follow their journey on Instagram @noto.gin
And find out more about this project here
This award winning, Bristol based creative agency have taken their own advice and gone for a full throttle rebrand.
Rikki Payne, Creative Strategist at Episode Two can often be heard saying to clients. “Nothing in this world stands still. In a world that moves faster every day, embracing change is the only way to thrive – and often the only way to survive.”
A little dramatic? This agency doesn’t think so. After 25yrs of creating and evolving other people’s brands, their latest project is…themselves.
This is Episode Two. A vibrant hive of passion, energy and creativity. Repositioned and redesigned from the ground up.
“Our purpose is helping to create and evolve brands” reflects Creative Director Mark Stubbington. “This is what we do with our clients all the time, and we knew it was time to turn the tables on ourselves and embark on that journey too.”
Rikki continues, “We’ve really embraced the full process, treating ourselves exactly as we would a client.”
From conducting market audits; brainstorming new names; developing brand values and creating an impactful brand identity as well as curating an intriguing and engaging launch campaign, Episode Two have truly practised what they preach.
“There really is no better way to fully experience what our clients go through” says Kate Clayton, Head of Marketing. “Through doing this for ourselves we’ve expanded our knowledge which will only have a positive effect on our clients’ projects. We’ve experienced all the challenges, all the excitement and showcased the impact of a full rebrand.”
The new brand is fully embracing the joy of design, their website and social channels create an overwhelming sense of positivity – you just can’t help but smile.
“This is our Episode Two” adds Mark “and we can’t wait to help other brands discover the next chapter in their brand story.”
#changestartshere
Fiasco welcomes new Associate Creative Director, Chris Tozer to the team. With ambitions to grow the agency this year, Chris brings a wealth of experience from working at some of London and Bristol’s top agencies.
“We’re really excited to welcome Chris into the Fiasco team. His wealth of experience in the industry, strong focus on ideas and leadership qualities were what convinced us that Chris would be a great fit for the agency.” – Ben Steers, Co-founder and Creative Director.
Chris adds: “Fiasco hasn’t hired at this level before, which is exciting because it means my role can be shaped quite organically. I’m looking forward to surrounding myself with the best talent out there and being part of an inspiring network of creative minds who collaborate to do great things. It’s that simple really. ” – Chris Tozer, Associate Creative Director.
Fiasco is a brand and digital agency that builds modern brands with heart and spirit. The 18-strong team of creative thinkers and doers work out of their Bristol studio, where they partner with businesses of all sizes, around the world. You can read more about Chris and his journey to Fiasco over on their site, here.
SPAR UK & NI has announced Mentor Digital’s appointment as their new digital agency partner. Following a competitive tender process Mentor was chosen as the winning bidder to design and develop the new SPAR UK & NI corporate websites, and to deliver ongoing creative, technical, and digital marketing solutions to help deliver on SPAR’s digital strategy.
SPAR is the world’s largest retail food chain and has around 2512 stores in the UK. Mentor Digital will partner with SPAR to: Build brand new websites for SPAR UK & Northern Ireland; to develop the digital application of the SPAR brand; and to provide SEO and digital marketing support.
Website technology is moving fast, and customers expect high quality, super-fast experiences across all devices. Keeping users engaged with retail brands online offerings and remaining cutting edge and relevant is an ongoing challenge. SPAR is in an excellent position having both ‘clicks and bricks’ through their stores and existing online presence, and Mentor Digital will work to provide modern web applications delivering on SPARs digital strategy that will focus on community and health and well-being.
Mentor’s MD Holland Risley said: “We are absolutely delighted to be adding SPAR to our client portfolio and it really feels like we are levelling up as an agency taking on clients of this calibre. I think this really reflects the high quality of the work that we have been producing in recent years. The design work is already looking really exciting, we are focusing on bringing depth and quality to the sites by using micro UX, emotive design and parallax effects and we are really looking forward to launching the new look SPAR websites later this year.”
SPAR shops are central to communities across the UK, and the new websites will support local communities by nurturing neighbourhoods, creating community hubs, and promoting health and wellbeing campaigns, as well as showcasing special offers and driving footfall to stores.
SPAR & Mentor Digital are carrying out an in-depth process of stakeholder engagement, design, and prototyping. Mentor Digital will create full mobile responsive prototypes as part of the project process to allow for the sites to be fully tested to ensure that all user journeys are intuitive and clear.
The new SPAR websites will be developed using the open-source Umbraco CMS platform, which provides highly secure, enterprise level, content management experiences with no ongoing licenses. Mentor Digital is an Umbraco Gold Partner and has implemented Umbraco CMS for many NHS Trusts and CCGs along with a wide range of B2B and B2C clients. The agency has won awards at the prestigious Umbraco awards in 2020 and 2021.
To see more examples of the work Mentor Digital produces you can visit the Mentor Digital website here. To find out more about SPAR click here.
The year-long exhibition of Mexican-American artist Octavio Medellin features a variety of works dotted across multiple sites in and around the city that inspired them.
To celebrate his life’s work Fiasco created a tactile, interactive map of Dallas, which allows visitors to explore and discover the key locations, landmarks and public artworks associated with Medellin’s career.
“We wanted to create a map of Dallas with a curious sensibility that avoids cliches of rodeos and cowboys, in favour of a playful, celebratory take on the artist’s life and legacy.” – Mike Frost, Digital Designer, Fiasco Design.
Illustrator Nicolas Burrows helped to bring the vision of Medellin’s Dallas to life by developing an abstract and figurative style of imperfect collage illustration. Playing with exaggerated mark-making techniques, the illustrations reflect the craftsmanship and philosophies that underpin Medellin’s work. The colour palette champions his use of raw materials – using pops of brighter hues to create a dream-like, more positive vision of Dallas. The overall feel echoes Medellin’s spirited, childlike love for craft.
A prominent figure in the Texan art scene, Medellin was passionate about sharing his wisdom and championing the next generation of artists. Adopting Medellin’s ethos, the website is designed to land with a broad demographic: an inclusive space for people from all walks of life to learn and be inspired.
The site is joyous for all to explore; a tactile digital experience that connects with the sculptural qualities of Medellin’s work through Burrows’ playful interpretive illustrations.
The navigation around the site helps to break up six decades of work in a digestible way for all to enjoy. Whilst the playful user interactions and bold colour palette connect this artist of huge cultural significance with a new, younger audience; keeping his work relevant to this day.
“It was a real joy to work with Dallas Museum of Art on the site for this unique exhibition of Medellin’s work. They were a fantastic partner, seeing our vision for the microsite and really getting behind it. We’re excited to see how the map is received.” – Ben Steers, Creative Director, Fiasco Design.
“Fiasco were amazing to collaborate with, and were truly innovative in their approach to our interactive map creation. They came up with amazing creative solutions, as well as providing real time brainstorming and troubleshooting along the way. We’re thrilled with the result— and the interactive museum engagement with both our members and the public!” – Lizz DeLera, Creative Director, Dallas Museum of Art.
You can view the full case study here.
In today’s climate, breaking out as a new brand in any industry is no easy feat – you’re often competing with hundreds or thousands of products already on the market.
And unless you’re doing something wildly innovative and out of this world – the difference between all those products (to the consumer at least) is often minimal.
Truth is, the best selling brands don’t often produce the best product, but they do usually have the best brand story.
Very quickly:
A brand story is a narrative that encompasses the history, purpose, values and vision of a brand.
Good brand stories are written with a target persona in mind and addresses all the things which matter to the customer.
By crafting a story that extends beyond the actual product, the colour of the packaging and the commercials – brands are able to build an emotional connection with customers, meaning they’re more likely to purchase from the brand and are more likely to become loyal brand advocates with a big lifetime customer values.
In fact, Harvard Business Review tells us that 64% of consumers cite shared values as the primary reason they have a relationship with a brand. And the reason they even know about these ‘shared values’ in the first place, is because of the brand’s story.
Hopefully, by now I’ve done a good job of defining a brand story and convincing you to have one both in equal measure – so here’s how to go about developing your own.
In this first step, think about what you believe in, what your big vision for the business is and how your brand might behave or make people feel if it were a person.
At this stage, you’re defining the philosophy of your brand. You obviously want to make a product that tastes great and makes people feel good, but (hopefully) there’s something running a little deeper than this, which in the branding world, we call your ‘why’.
Just like if you would pitch to an investor, allowing your customers to understand the long term value in your business and what makes your winery, distillery or brewery different, better and more special than the rest, means customers are more likely to support you for the long-term.
The most important thing to remember here is to be authentic. Consumers can sniff out a phony a mile away, so make sure you’re being realistic and accurate about what it is you’re about.
If you haven’t yet defined who your ideal customer is, then this is the obvious first step to take, before you can think about what matters to them.
There are a few ways to do this either through personas, archetypes or ideal customer avatars, and it doesn’t matter which avenue you take, as long as you answer these questions:
It all seems pretty basic, but understanding (and recording) this makes it easy to identify your customer’s pain points and the emotional factors influencing their buying behaviour.
It’s important to treat this step as a very brief and objective one. Try not to get bogged down or disheartened by what your competitors might be doing or how brilliant your aspirational brands might be.
Instead, try to pluck out common trends or themes between them. What is it about their messaging and positioning that makes them noticeable?
Do their Instagram posts make you laugh? Are their cocktail recipes perfectly non-fussy? Or do you wonder at their brilliant sustainability program every time you visit their website? These are all examples of a brand story in play and depending on your and your customer’s values can be a nice source of inspiration for step number four…
It can be helpful to start with an imaginary Venn diagram. Placing your answers from step one in one circle, and your answers from step two in the other – and the magic overlap between the two, is the backbone of your brand story – your shared values.
Cross-reference the answers between the two and piece together the commonalities between your business and your customers. Use your dot point answers to define the key elements of the brand story.
Documenting your brand story will help you, your employees and your business partners tell the story more effectively and successfully.
As a business owner, telling your brand story might be easy and come naturally to you, but as you expand and your team grows, it’s important that your employees are singing from the same hymn sheet.
By recording your brand story and encouraging your stakeholders to read it, you reduce the chance of the story being mistold and your brand misrepresented.
As every interaction with your business is an opportunity to tell your brand story, documented guidelines are a good way to make sure that this remains consistent. This is especially important if you outsource elements of your business operations to freelancers or contractors.
Now you’ve written your brand story, it’s time to tell it and how you deliver your message is just as important as the message itself, so make sure you consider which platforms/media you’re going to use. Or a better way of looking at it – which platforms and media do your ideal customers use.
In addition to advertising and digital marketing, remember to think outside the box. As mentioned earlier, every interaction a customer has with your brand is an opportunity to apply your brand story.
Think about the staff uniforms for your tasting room, the tone of voice in your returns policy on your website or the experience of your retail store. Keep this in mind for product development, too. Ensure your products align with your brand and assist each other, rather than fighting for attention or shelf space.
And while you may be the author of your story, it doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can tell it. Your employees and customers are the two most powerful advocates for your brand, so harness their storytelling power and encourage them to share your brand story.
Incorporate your brand guidelines into your employee onboarding and encourage them to understand the story, so they can share it with your customers.
Customers are often your biggest fans. Engage them by asking them to share their brand story: their experience with your brand and your drinks – this authentic user-generated content will attract like-minded customers who have seen you know how to address their pain points.
7 – Be Consistent
And finally, be consistent. If your message is inconsistent, it becomes diluted and less impactful.
That’s why the best and most effective brand stories are communicated consistently, across every channel in order to resonate with your target audience.
As a brand strategist + designer, crafting a client’s brand story is the very first step of my process. It ensures that any design or creative decision that follows is intentional, purposeful and connects with the target audience.
While building a brand story can take a little more time, it’s such an important part of the branding process and is often the difference between the success and failure of a brand design.
This article was written to give you all the guidelines, prompts and processes required to craft your brand story, but if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed or have any questions. Get in touch and I’d be delighted to help.
Jemma Adams
I’m a brand strategist, website designer and digital marketer serving unique and passionate businesses and entrepreneurs in the food, drink and design space tinybrand.co
Once upon a time, building complex animations for Android, iOS, and Web was a lengthy and challenging process. Designers created their animations and passed them over to software developers to implement them into websites and apps.
Developers then would have to add bulky image files for each screen size or try their best to reconstruct the animation design in thousands of lines of code from scratch. Needless to say, that often resulted in poor and limited implementations that looked far from the designer’s original animation.
And despite motion being a powerful tool to capture the user’s attention, communicate your message and create compelling user experiences, most websites and apps weren’t using animation.
That changed with the introduction of Lottie.
Developed by Airbnb, a Lottie is a JSON-based animation file format that enables designers to add animations to any website or mobile application as easily as static assets. Lottie allows developers to build richer animations without the painstaking process of re-writing them.
Animation by twigeodesigner
Lottie animations work on any device, can have a transparent background, and since they’re vector-based, they can scale up or down without pixelation. One of the key features of Lottie animations is that you can play sections of an animation at a time, both forward and backward, which gives them much more flexibility over alternative methods.
Also, Lottie animations’ super small file size means less disk space used and higher download speeds. And that’s one of the main reasons designers and developers prefer them over other formats like PNG and GIF.
Another great feature of Lottie is its customisation capabilities. With Lottie, the customisation opportunities are pretty much endless. You can change the background colour, animation speed, and more.
Image source: lottiefiles.com
And the best part? Lottie animations don’t require any knowledge of coding! You just need a Lottie player. Open-source and free Lottie players exist for the web, iOS, Android, Windows, QT, Tizen, and other platforms.
Lottie got its name from Charlotte’ Lotte’ Reiniger (2 June 1899 – 19 June 1981), a German film director and pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best-known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the first feature-length animated film, and Papageno (1935). She’s also known for devising the first form of a multiplane camera. The multiplane camera is a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process to create a sense of depth by moving a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and various distances from one another.
The file format was invented and introduced in 2015 by Hernan Torrisi via his open-source Bodymovin plugin for the Adobe After Effects video animation and effects software. The Bodymovin plugin uses the scripting capabilities of Adobe After Effects and its document APIs to discover and walk through the frames and assets of a composition in Adobe After Effects and transform the animation to a JSON structure. Hernan Torrisi also released the first browser-based renderer for the format with a Javascript-based player.
In 2017, Airbnb engineers Brandon Withrow, Gabriel Peal, and Leland Richardson and lead animator Salih Abdul-Karim developed and launched Lottie, an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders Adobe After Effects animations in real-time. Lottie uses animation data exported as JSON files from Hernan Torrisi’s Bodymovin plugin.
Animation by Jakob Winterholler
LottieFiles was launched soon after, and it is a platform for testing, collaborating, and discovering animations. The platform offers a range of tools, integrations, plugins, features, and a vast library of free Lottie animations ready to download and use (all of the animations featured in this article are from this library). LottieFiles is independent of Airbnb, but it runs on libraries created by the Airbnb developers mentioned above.
dotLottie was created in 2020 and is an open-source file format that aggregates one or more Lottie files and their associated resources into a single file.
As a marketer, you are always on the lookout for the most effective tools to enhance marketing for your brand and create the most exceptional user experience for your audience. If an image is worth a thousand words, then an animation is worth way more than that. By introducing motion to your content, you can grab attention quickly, enhance user engagement, simplify complex concepts, evoke emotions, create attractive user interfaces, strengthen your visual storytelling, and build a unique brand identity.
Animation by Kevin Domingo
Animation can work like magic to give more depth and perspective to your brand story and make static content more exciting and engaging. There’re many cases where animations can add to the user experience, not just from an aesthetic or brand perspective, but from feedback and functional point of view as well. The use of micro-animations in small elements like buttons, cursor movements, and loading graphics, for example, can improve the presentation of your website to your users drastically, keep them more engaged, and urge them to perform the desired actions.
Animation by Sanat Thakur
The use of animation isn’t only for your website and app. It can be an effective tool for all your marketing channels when precisely tailored to your target demographic. Take email marketing, for example. It’s a great way to connect with existing and prospective customers, showcase your products and services, and share updates about the company and future releases to keep the customers engaged and win their trust.
But email marketing can very easy turn spammy and make customers lose interest if it’s not done the right way. Adding motion to emails can help grab the customer’s attention, emphasise messaging and increase overall effectiveness. It can also make your emails more personalised. How about a custom animation for each audience segment, for example?
Animation by Smashing Stocks
Do you want to pitch a marketing strategy or campaign to a client successfully? Thorough market and competitor research are essential, but an eye-catching and engaging presentation is already as good as half the job done. And how can you achieve that? Simple. Add some motion to your marketing presentations and proposals. Animated infographics, for example, can pique your audience’s interest faster than static content, highlight vital information effectively and quickly by drawing the client’s attention to the most important elements, and help you convey complex ideas in a more relatable and engaging way.
Animation by Irfan Munawar
With 4.48 billion active users worldwide, social media is one of the most effective (if not THE most effective) digital advertising and branding tools in your brand’s marketing arsenal. A robust social media strategy can help you grow your audience and engage directly with them, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your site or app, and generate leads and sales. Unfortunately, in today’s highly competitive and over-saturated social landscape, even the best copy is difficult to stand out.
That’s why you must support your copy with engaging visual content that cuts through the noise, makes your social media message more memorable, and provides users with a reason to interact with your brand and not your competitors. First of all, conduct market research to understand what your target audience likes to see and craft your content around that. And what’s the best way to create scroll-stopping social media posts if not by adding motion to your content. If you don’t have the means or the time to create long-form videos for your posts, using animation instead will give you that short, sharp, and memorable burst of visual content that grabs users’ attention as they scroll through their feed.
Another reason why a short animation could work better than a full-length video is that people’s attention span gets shorter and shorter. Since you can control the rhythm and volume of information in an animation better than in a live-action video, you can get more information across in a shorter space of time. And what about sound? A large percentage of social media videos will be viewed on mobile devices and without sound, as the volume is usually turned off by default. With animation, you can use on-screen text that will help convey the most important information even without sound.
Animation by Lucas Stolz
We hope by now that you are convinced that animation is an excellent way of making static content way more exciting and engaging and grabbing customers’ attention in pretty much every digital marketing channel. But as we mentioned before, adding animation to your content that is flexible, works on any device and operating system, and loads fast can be a difficult and expensive task.
Choosing Lottie for your marketing animations can make animation implementation on any platform as easy and cost-effective as possible. Lottie can help you create user interfaces that are fast, dynamic and highly engaging and allow your marketing animations to have the biggest possible impact at the least possible cost.
A Lottie can play your animation on the Web or mobile devices while still maintaining a high level of quality and detail; it includes settings that allow for your animation to be interactive, it’s resolution independent and scalable at run-time, and its super small size allows for very fast loading times. You can use Lotties on basically any platform without modification, and they can even be used as stickers on messaging platforms.
Fanatic is a full-service creative agency based in Bristol, UK. We create engaging animations and videos that cut through the noise and get your message heard. Whether it’s communicating a complex message with an explainer video or infographic, or promoting your brand ideas with a bespoke designed animation, we got you covered!
The visualisation of your brand is the primary tool to express your message, and our graphic designers will weave your brand’s personality through each project with the understanding that every piece of material may be responsible for a user’s first enquiry.
It all starts with an idea. We research thoroughly, and then, armed with a clear understanding of the market, your target audience, and how your brand messages need to be communicated, our graphic designers bring them to life. We’ll throw concepts around and sketch things out until we are confident that the idea is fully formed and exactly right for each project’s objectives.
We love what we do and put the same passion and dedication into each animation project, no matter how big or small.
Trends often get a bad wrap for being time-bound, fleeting designs with no substance and a short shelf-life. And while often true, it’s not always the case.
I’ve researched six growing trends in website design that are backed by strategy, science and best practices.
These trends will help you connect with your users, increase conversions and create a lasting, memorable impression that will have them coming back for more.
Whether you’re launching a brand new site or thinking about an overhaul of your current website situation, consider these six popular trends and cross-reference them with the needs of your users to see if your site can deliver them even more value.
Multilayered content is an ideal way to achieve a visually complex and interesting design while still achieving coveted minimalist, clean and simple style.
While conversion goals may differ from site to site, there are always a few common ones; to generate leads, sell products or capture data. And, in order for a website to achieve these goals, it needs to keep the user engaged and interested long enough for that to happen.
An easy way to engage a user is to add complexity and interest to the visual components of the design. By layering images, text and graphic elements, you’re not only creating an engaging page design, but you’re also able to showcase more content within a smaller space (like a phone screen, for example.)
Delights are a staple of good user experience (UX) and they come in two forms; Surface & Deep. In essence, a ‘delight’ is an element or interaction which adds to the overall experience of a website.
Surface Delights could include animations, movements, gestures, sounds or even snippets of micro-copy to inject personality, humour and interactivity into the user experience to make it more memorable.
While Deep Delight is holistic. It’s the overall experience of the site and is only achieved once all the users’ needs are met. Think about the feeling of flowing through a website, finding exactly what you’re looking for and then checking out with a few simple clicks — that’s Deep Delight.
We’re all now such experienced website users, that we expect such delights without even realising it. And so, as designers and website owners, we’ve reached a point where delights (both surface and deep) are now necessary to meet users’ needs and habits.
Perhaps it’s wrong to call this one a trend. As a core element of good user experience, delights really will become integral to all and all good website design, in 2022 and evermore.
If your brand can handle it, then consider elevating your website design with bold, dominant typography.
Also known as brutalist typography, this statement trend can elevate a minimalist design to a feeling of prominence, strength and ruggedness. Coupled with a simple, but strong colour palette, bold typography can exude an urban-like, metropolitan or masculine vibe.
Users connect with visual design and are able to draw conclusions about a brand from how their website looks and feels (and ultimately, makes them feel). A trend or technique like this can be a great way for brands to assert confidence in their offering and connect with their users on an emotional level, without obnoxious copy or cringe-worthy brand statements.
Two years into the pandemic, life still feels uncertain and divisive. From fashion to interiors, wherever creativity is concerned, people are seeking comfortable and familiar experiences as an opportunity to escape the chaos. Website design that feels a little more analogue and more retro can feel comfortable, relatable and nostalgic — offering soft reminders of the good old days
A big trend for imagery and typography — designers are making their websites feel nostalgic and familiar with subtle elements like retro fonts, grainy or textural filters, soft lighting or imagery with a film aesthetic.
Be sure to approach this one with caution. There’s a fine line between the beauty of nostalgia and the dagginess of dated design.
For reasons similar to those used to unpack Trend №3 — websites with bold, contrasting colour palettes are in favour. When it comes to design, colour is arguably one of the most powerful elements used to create an emotional connection, so for brands and products with emotional baggage, this can be a great way to connect with your target customers.
Not for the faint-hearted, or faint-intended, this style typically packs neon colours, deep blacks, colourful gradients and grunge-acid shapes designed to connect with millennials and Gen Z users. A bold trend which certainly isn’t for everyone, consider whether strong contrasting colours is going to inspire or stress your users.
A design element as old as advertising itself, kinetic typography (or animated text) is now flaunted by some of the best websites across the globe. While this can be a relatively simple design inclusion, the impact kinetic typography has on the user experience is strong and long-lasting.
Historically relying on animations, graphics or video to tell brand stories, website designers can now use the power of animated text to engage users and convey meaningful messages in a variety of forms.
Not just an aesthetic, this trend is great for engaging users and increasing valuable site metrics like Read Time, Page Views and Scroll Length. Kinetic text can grab the users attention and guide them through the page while drawing attention to important details or creating a fun/playful tone.
Although we’ve just discovered a handful of shiny, exciting and attractive possibilities for your new website, remember to be mindful of your design choices.
Great design is intentional — whether you’re animating text or layering images, always remember to think about Deep Delight and the overall experience of using your website.
Be selective about which trends (if any) you introduce into your business and make sure you’re adding value, rather than creating friction or cluttering the user experience.