Expressing Style, Personality, and Technique with the Creative Process Trend
As digital ecosystems become more pristine—with sans-serif fonts, grid-aligned images, and perfectly rounded corners—today’s visitors increasingly seek sites that reflect the uniqueness and wonderfully scattershot processes of human creativity. It’s a shift that’s pushing designers to look beyond polish and embrace the beautiful messiness of making.
We partnered with ilovecreatives founder and ilovecreatives Studio executive creative director Puno to uncover the top trends taking over web design in 2026. The desire for human touch on online spaces takes form in Creative Process, a trend that celebrates humanity and all of its imperfections. Read on to learn how Creative Process is showing up online and how to apply the aesthetic to your own Squarespace web design projects.
The beauty of the creative journey
Rejecting digital polish, Creative Process favors human, personable visuals. It’s an aesthetic that embraces the work-in-progress through sketches, drafts, and experiments. In a landscape where most experiences feel automated and hyper-refined, seeing the marks of real creation feels refreshing and honest. Creative Process reminds visitors that behind every brand is a mind at work; one that’s making choices, testing ideas, and shaping them into something meaningful. It’s this return to the creative journey that makes the work-in-progress trend so compelling.
Creative Process is a natural evolution of 2025’s Sketchbook trend. It builds on hand-scrawled, analog elements and answers the modern desire for personable designs. As visitors tire of sites that scream “more of the same,” designing sites that reveal your client’s Creative Process can help you breathe new life into their digital footprint. Through Creative Process, each website becomes a snapshot of a time and place that can evolve with your client’s shifting goals.
Visual hallmarks of the Creative Process trend
The way you bring Creative Process to life will differ based on each client’s technique and perspective. Here’s how to incorporate this trend:
Add hand-drawn marks and scribbles from pencils, pens, and paint brushes across a variety of canvases—computer paper, notebooks, easels, chalkboards, you name it
Include imperfect patterns of shapes and imagery that extend beyond conventional square grids
Use texture (think concrete, tree bark, gravel roads, and brick walls) for backgrounds
Layer elements like a collage, stacking objects atop one another in a non-uniform way
Feature phone snaps and process videos, where subject matter might be blurry, off-center, or unconventionally lit
Applying Creative Process on Squarespace
With its focus on the intentionally imperfect, Creative Process is an ideal aesthetic for brands that want to peel back the curtain on creation. Businesses that prioritize craftsmanship, like visual artists, fashion lines, bakeries, bands, and furniture makers, naturally align with this trend, offering customers a bespoke, artisanal experience and distinctive finish only they can provide. As a web designer, you can build your own Creative Process site to showcase your web design expertise and hands-on proficiency.
The following are ways to create websites that embody Creative Process on Squarespace.
Add process imagery
Rough-hewn visuals are a Creative Process cornerstone. Place lo-fi imagery like smartphone footage, scans of physical materials like fabric, early design sketches, and candid behind-the-scenes moments throughout the site as backgrounds and ambient sections. These give visitors an impression of what the brand is and represents.
Use handwritten typography
Handwritten typography and elements signify personality and style. Use it to annotate imagery, highlight specific parts of the site, or make a call to action stand out. You can upload your preferred handwritten font directly to Squarespace.
Another way to bring hand-drawn elements online is by including photos or scans of sketches and doodles. Pair your uploaded fonts with images of handwriting to customize site elements and reflect your client’s brand. Depending on their aesthetic, this can be anything from pencil on paper to chalk on asphalt to marked-up whiteboards.
Watch Squarespace Senior Staff Product Designer Peter Rodriguez demonstrate how to upload fonts to Squarespace.
Place blocks creatively
Block arrangement and page layout can help express your client’s personality. When embodying Creative Process, avoid symmetrical principles like right angles and evenly spaced blocks in favor of arrangements that feel handmade, like a scrapbook or corkboard.
With block transforms, Circle Gold and Platinum partners can rotate, scale, dim, skew, and offset a block without any custom code. Use these Circle-exclusive controls to offset or rotate your process images and handwritten graphics, as well as other site elements like text, to deliver an intentionally imperfect look and feel. Not a Circle partner? Join today.
Pro tip: Shape blocks also benefit from block transforms, empowering you to create and customize compelling visual experiences from existing shapes on Squarespace. Watch Squarespace Senior Product Designer Vanasa Liu demonstrate the design potential that’s possible with block transforms.
Layer site elements
Site elements stacked atop each other thoughtfully can yield pages that exude personality and charm, helping visitors feel immersed in visual moments you’ve created with simple, intentionally arranged materials. Add photos and scans of different materials, paper, and patterns. Arrange these images like a collage, beckoning visitors to reach into their screens.
Imbue individuality into your 2026 site builds
Today’s brands strive to create closer connections with their existing supporters while building new relationships with prospects. Personality-fueled site design is one key way to accomplish this goal. Use snapshots, fonts, and photos of handwriting to highlight the endearing imperfections that distinguish your client from the rest. Rotate, skew, and scale these assets with block transforms, then layer them over each other to create sites with dimension from a few static pixels.
Above all, experiment. There’s no better way to embody Creative Process in your designs than by acting on the creative whims and hunches that make you you.
Dive into 2026’s other top design trends for more inspiration:
Want more?
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