3 Essential Design Trends, December 2024

And just like that, we are closing in on the end of 2024. The trends keep on coming, though, as we round out the year. From holiday feels to cool scroll effects to more stark aesthetics, there’s still plenty to work with as you finish projects this month.

Here’s what’s trending in design this month:

1. Holiday Themes

There’s nothing like festive holiday themes to help you feel happy and spirited in the final part of the year. The same applies to website design.

Fun themes are becoming more common, with sites swapping their looks for the biggest sales season of the year to sites that pop up just for the holiday season. What’s great about these designs is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Every site can do something different to highlight a festive mood.

Each of these examples takes a different approach to the holiday and shows that even sites that aren’t dedicated to e-commerce can participate in some seasonal fun.

Santa Tote goes all in with a holiday-themed site. Rather than add seasonal elements to their primary website, Tote created a secondary holiday site. The gamified and artistic theme is fun and makes you want to click around and interact. The whimsical illustrations are an added bonus.

Holiday Spheres is another gamified holiday site example, where you can build an animated snow globe digitally. Get your digital gift just right, and then send it to someone to spread a little holiday cheer!

Finally, the Macy’s website design is what you would expect from a retailer for the holiday season. The site uses an elegant red and gold textured theme with plenty of sales and deals highlighted. While it screams holiday, the theme is also in line with the brand.

One thing to keep in mind with these holiday concepts is that you can take the ideas used for the holidays and apply them to other seasonal designs or even use them in daily practice. The interactions, animations, and ways to entice users aren’t any different than what you might normally do, there’s just a Santa or two included.

2. Interesting Scroll Interactions

A fun or interesting scroll can take a boring design to the next level. It can also add a lot of interest to something that might seem overly simple, driving conversions or engagements.

But there’s a trick to using some of these interesting scroll interactions as a design trend – they must have purpose. What does the scroll help the user do or understand? If you can answer that question, you are well on your way to creating a purposeful and interesting interaction that will make users want to stay on your website.

Lcycic mixes interesting shapes, background video, and scrolls to keep the design interesting. The best part of this scroll is that there’s nothing fancy, just a collection of “pages” that work together easily with varying content types to tell a solid story.

Gentlerain takes a wholly different approach with plenty of animation and effects, with an equally appealing result. From the liquid effect on the homepage to great scrolling slides, everything is designed to keep you moving through and reading all of the content. There are also some nifty hover effects, too.

The design for Bike Portugal falls somewhere in between. The hero area seems pretty simple but the images across the screen include photos and video and change shape and size with the interaction. The waterfall effect of the shapes is interesting and engaging as well.

3. Black and White Motifs

Every time black and white themes gain popularity, a designer smiles somewhere. This is one of those things that never really falls out of fashion and designers, in particular, love when clients allow them to have fun with these mono color schemes.

Each of these examples uses some sort of “trick” element with black and white to add as much interest as possible.

Onto uses a white background with black text and a video reel. While it is primarily black and white, the video incorporates splashes of color when you seem to least expect it.

Good & Common sticks with a start and brutalist feeling design with white, and bold, letters on a black background. This design is created specifically to make you read. The stark nature really gives users little else to do. Even the one image on the homepage is without color.

Shane Collier Design also uses a stark white on black concept, but uses language – and misspelled and unexpected – word choices to catch and keep attention. After you see the first few words, you are driven to learn more. Why are the words “wrong?” What is this design trying to tell you? Once you get a way into the scroll and these questions are answered, the design opens up into a little more color with some portfolio items.