Design 2024

Design elements for experiential sites

As we saw in the examples above, experiential sites employ a variety of design elements to achieve their intended effect in large and small ways. Some designers will lean towards bold, immersive elements such as striking visuals and multi-sensory features that capture user attention as soon as they land on the page. Other designers favor subtlety and integrate considered touches that enrich the user experience without dominating it.

The decision to go bold, stay subtle, or find a harmonious balance between the two largely depends on the brand's personality and the story it wants to tell. Regardless of the approach, we expect designers to gravitate towards these design elements when crafting these online experiences:  

• Rich graphics: Textured and layered graphics that add depth and visual complexity to sites. As we noted in our 2024 trends post, we expect sites to move away from the clean and minimalist design aesthetic to sites full of color, texture, and richness.
  
• Micro-interactions: Small animations and visual cues that thoughtfully enhance a user's experience on a website. This can be something as small as the way a button behaves on hover. A good example of this being how Mural’s buttons “fill in” with an animation.
  
• Parallax scrolling: A visual technique where the foreground and background content move at different speeds, adding a layered, three dimensional feel to the experience.
  
• Kinetic typography: A design style that uses moving text to set a tone, capture attention, and entertain users. We saw an example on Jasper’s site, where text is animated on the product preview.

Crafting an experiential site has never been simpler

Static transactional websites were once the norm, but those days are past. With GPUs and processors that can load intricate animations quickly, and modern browsers that can run heavy workloads — not to mention the ability to use generative AI to jumpstart your designs — 2024 is shaping up to be a year where if you can dream it, you can do it.

Static transactional websites were once the norm, but those days are past. With GPUs and processors that can load intricate animations quickly, and modern browsers that can run heavy workloads — not to mention the ability to use generative AI to jumpstart your designs — 2024 is shaping up to be a year where if you can dream it, you can do it.

Crafting an experiential site has never been simpler

Crafting an experiential site has never been simpler