Back to the Roots: How Nature-Inspired Design Blossoms Across the Internet
The saying goes that the grass is always greener on the other side. After so much time seated in front of our computers and phone screens, it can make many of us fantasize about a greener, less-pixelated reality.
As most of us spend increasingly more time online, many understandably yearn for rich, vibrant natural surroundings. This longing for nature hasn’t just manifested in an increase in activities like hiking, birdwatching, bouldering, and open-water swimming. It’s started to influence digital design, as highlighted by illustrator and artist Tom Bingham. The UK-based designer lives and breathes the burgeoning trend, “Organic Matter,” in his work. Tom helped define the aesthetic as part of Squarespace’s partnership with It’s Nice That and collaborated with us on a new Organic Matter template inspired by the trend.
Understanding Organic Matter
Nature-inspired textures, shapes, materials, and palettes have all introduced elements of organic harmony to website design. While you can’t literally make your websites from leather, leaves, and wood, it is possible to achieve the rich but subtle variation of the material world by pulling inspiration from nature.
Nature has always influenced elements of art and design, so designers going for a more organic feel can draw on natural materials and other designers for ideas, including historical movements like Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts. Those movements were responses to rapid industrialization, similar to how our current embrace of organic materials is a response to a rapidly digitizing environment.
Incorporating Organic Matter in client websites
The natural world is multi-sensory. While you can’t replicate the true range of sensations that it generates, you can take cues from it. Nature, for instance, rarely picks a single, uniform color. Instead, the natural world is a feast of textures, colors, and subtle variations.
Materials like bark, wood grain, leather, and clay all have distinct tactile surfaces. Textured background graphics can create a similar earthy feel. These textures can either reference natural materials or the more abstract quality of organic variation. You can style buttons and other site elements to sustain this tactile experience.
The Organic Matter template, available in the template store
Certain colors immediately recall elements of the natural world. Ochres, siennas, and other warm colors evoke clay-rich soil. Mossy greens reference verdant plant life. Bright flourishes of yellow can nod to sunlight. While bright colors are abundant in the landscape, brightness and vibrance can also create associations with industrially produced pigments. More subdued tones reminiscent of organic materials like wood, leather, and clay, by contrast, can create a more reliably serene feel.
One of the more playful design options is to employ trompe l'oeil, or tricks of the eye, in service of evoking nature and organic materiality. A fallen leaf or two can sit gracefully on the page, or a dried flower can be “taped” to the site’s background. See how it's done with real-life examples of how to create floating images on the Squarespace Forum.
Organic materials are imbued with physical properties: they cast shadows, take up space, they grow, and they age or deteriorate. Digital renderings can emulate these material properties, even if they can’t replicate them outright.
When to look to nature for inspiration
Organic Matter has strong associations with health, beauty, and luxury. For many, the desire to spend more time in nature and less time indoors adds an aspirational quality to Organic Matter. Fitness, leisure, and active lifestyles all tie strongly to this trend. There are a wide range of clients that fit in these categories, from yoga studios and cosmetics brands to artists and non-profits. As a designer, you can tap into these qualities as the situation demands.
Embrace your own natural creativity
One way to introduce something truly organic is to create your own custom, hand-drawn elements. Hand-drawn illustrations intentionally lack mechanical precision and impart a soft, organic quality to your site. Add doodles influenced by your surroundings and hand-written arrows to emphasize key points.
Your illustrations don’t have to be perfect. Remember, that’s the point! Even if you don’t draw your own elements, you can still reference the aesthetic with the elements you choose. Organic, biomorphic shapes have curves rather than right angles. They’re often asymmetrical and idiosyncratic. Place shapes that emulate plant forms and layer them with asymmetrically placed text blocks. Shaped section dividers introduce flowing, organic lines that mimic the contours of nature. In addition to creating a sense of movement and harmony, section dividers enhance the natural, tactile aesthetic of the design.
Choose fonts like Freight, which combine refined curves and subtle serifs that evoke a grounded feel. Its versatility and organic flow make it ideal for pairing with earthy aesthetics and design elements, as seen in the official Organic Matter template.
Bringing Organic Matter online
In a world inundated with digitized aesthetics, the artificial design of online experiences can make nature feel distant. Web design offers an opportunity to counterbalance this experience by integrating elements of the natural world—embracing warm and serene palettes and evoking the rich textures and tactile experiences of organic materials.
Nature and its materials are imperfect and playful. Take a cue from your surroundings and bring welcoming, human designs to the digital landscape.
Read up on other emerging trends:
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