The homepages I see shared most often in design circles right now are huge animated headlines, odd custom fonts and blocky neubrutalist layouts with thick black borders and loud colors. They're fun to look at. I've also opened a few of them on my phone, wanted to buy something, and given up before I found the button.
When a small business builds its site around a trend, the danger isn't that it looks dated in two years. The danger is that it quietly slows the one thing the site is for, whether that's a checkout, a booking or an inquiry. Here's how I sort trends when a client asks for one.
The ones that cost you
Kinetic type. Headlines that slide, morph or follow your scroll usually depend on an animation library and a big hero section. On a mid-range phone that means extra loading time, and the booking button ends up a few screens down. Speed matters more than it seems: Google found the chance of a bounce rises 32% as load time goes from one to three seconds.
Experimental fonts. A custom display font can be a large file. Until it loads, browsers often hide the text or show a fallback font and then swap it out, and web.dev notes that this can delay rendering and make the layout shift. On a checkout page, a shift like that can move the Pay button just as someone goes to tap it.
The ones that are safe to borrow
Neubrutalism, mostly. It's built on borders, flat colors and hard shadows, which are plain CSS and cost almost nothing to load. The catch is contrast. If every card has a heavy outline and a bright fill, the real button stops standing out. Pick one color that only ever means "click here."
You can keep some of the rest too:
- Use the experimental font for one headline, set it to swap in when it loads, and use a system font for body text and forms.
- Save motion for small moments after the page has loaded, and turn it off for visitors whose devices ask for reduced motion.
- Keep the checkout and booking pages plain. They should be the least interesting pages on the site.
Before launch, load the site on an ordinary phone over cellular data and time how long it takes to get from the homepage to a finished booking. If a design choice adds time to that, cut it.
Visitors notice the style in the first few seconds, but the business only gets paid if they can find the button and get through checkout.
