Design · Technology · Future · Culture

UI Design Trends & Inspiration: January 2022 Edition

Post category:UX/UI Design
Post published:January 26, 2022

Here is a collection of current UI design trends and inspiration for the month of January 2022.

Disclaimer! The purpose of this article is to highlight and show-and-tell about the latest UI design trends. These designs are not mine, and credit to each original designer and owner is given below each image.

Rebelling against 2020’s minimalism: Funky font-choices

Do you remember how last year all of the big-name companies changed their UIs and logos to super minimalistic ones? It seems like at the beginning of 2022, parts of the UI design community is rebelling against the super minimalistic font choices of last year; bringing back funky and stylish fonts instead. It also seems that designers are bringing back old-school graphic design styles into UI design; and viewers are loving it.

This is most prominent theme I could find, and here are a couple examples of what I mean. Observe the titles and funky fonts!

NFT, Crypto, and metaverse

Non-surprisingly, the current tech hypes around NFTs, cryptos, and metaverse also stretches to what types of products designers are working with. When working with these types of ”hype” tech branches, designers often use elements such as:

Dark mode
Gradients
High-fidelity 3D illustrations (compare to flat style)
Futuristic looks

Metaverse Game Illustration by Syafrini Nabilla

Other themes

Some trends are staying from last year such as

Gradients in dark mode
Flat colorful UI illustrations, especially for local and ”hip” brands
Retro UI aesthetics (e.g. how the first websites and operative systems used to look)
Minimalistic looks for ”serious” companies
Usage of elevated cards (card elements with shadow)

My own thoughts

I suspect we’ll be seeing even more 3D elements, realism in illustrations, and interface designs for VR and AR products and systems in 2022. Simply because that’s where technology is going; 3D software is become much more accessible to the ordinary UI designer, and many up-and-coming tech companies are going towards the realm of VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality).

While it may take a while for the common designer to embrace skills in those areas, I’ve already noticed a trend where many of the most talented designers (and those with most resources) are entering those fields to get a head start.

Nevertheless, it’ll be exciting to see how software and interface design will move to next! I’ll aim to do at least one of those UI design inspiration posts per month going forward. I tried weekly ones for a while, but even if trends do come and go, they don’t move that fast. So, I think once a month will be more suiting!