From a Design perspective
By Elena Ceriani Sebregondi - Visual Designer
In 2022, digital designers embraced bright colors and created unique experiences to accommodate our increasingly hybrid lifestyles. Currently, there are several popular design trends dominating the digital landscape.
The design trends for 2022 are focused on creating more immersive digital experiences for a hybrid living. Metaverse, digital fashion, web kitsch, 3D interactive elements, dopamine color palettes, and 3D lettering are all popular trends in digital and graphic design right now. These trends are driven by the need for more expressive design, Y2K nostalgia, and an effort to bring the feeling of physical products to 2D screens.
So, what’s next to come? With all the above being said, it’s expected that the enhancement of immersive digital experiences will continue to dominate design trends in 2023.
From a Growth perspective
By Anne de Vries - Growth Marketeer
There’s never a dull moment in the world of Growth Marketing. From Performance Max which took over the Shopping campaigns in Google Ads to new regulations around data gathering. Within all these constant changes there was a recurring topic we saw this year: user-centric marketing and the privacy of these users.
Always have your consumer, client, or user as the main focus when creating, building, and measuring. A good example of this is the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) of Google. There have been a lot of content and interface optimizations to help users search more quickly and efficiently. Such as ‘multi-search’ which allows users to search by using images and ‘people also ask’, which displays related questions to a search query. As well as the importance of easy shopping within the SERP. In 2022 Google also introduced the Helpful Content Update which forces websites to focus more on creating content for the users instead of search engines.
It’s not just about the information users consume, but also what information and data companies collect of users. With the changes in governmental laws and regulations regarding the collection of data, it is becoming more important to take control of your own collected data before it is shared with third parties such as Google and Facebook. Read more about the collection of user data via Server Side tracking.
From our perspective, the importance of these topics will still play a big part in 2023. As platforms such as Google will continue to optimize their services with the user in mind. Being a marketeer, you need to keep the wealth and goal of your customer-centric in the way you play the fields. Tip: Print your persona on a cardboard board to never lose him/her out of sight. ;)
From a Development perspective
By Jaap Dicker - Developer
Besides working with technologies that DotControl hasn't used before in large-scale projects like Vue Storefront and Hygraph, our developers have broadened their skills and knowledge. They have done so by creating a couple of very well-performing and scalable projects. All set up with the MACH (Microservices-based API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) Architecture principles in mind.
Due to our projects becoming bigger and bigger alongside the results of our Growth team who make our clients and their platforms grow, the need for scaling platforms increases. This is needed because of more traffic but also for adding new features. This is where setting up new projects with those MACH principles in mind really pays off.
A topic that plays well into the previously mentioned MACH architecture is "infrastructure as code". This is something that we have been doing more of this last year. With more projects sharing a similar hosting infrastructure, it makes sense to make those setups reusable. We can achieve this in a way that we, as developers, know how to do best; by programming it.
In the upcoming year, we will continue to build larger and better platforms. The need for more scalable solutions will increase in 2023. So, we will keep learning and expanding our knowledge to make the dreams of our clients come true.