- Shelly Peleg
- May 27
- 10 min read
“Newness is at the heart of creativity”: this statement shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of our readers. No matter what it is on our desk this very second—a project proposal, an existing idea in the making, or an attempt to express an old thought—we are endlessly searching for fresh ways of doing so. That is the baseline we work from - creation will always stem from newness.
However, this doesn’t mean we need to invent the wheel every time we approach a brief or come across a new project; this shouldn’t send us spiraling in anxiety into sleepless nights, thinking we ought to deliver the thing which no one has yet to see. Quite the contrary - sometimes it’s the minor details or personal touch we add on to something that makes the biggest impact, making whatever it is we tackle feel as new as ever.
As we explore the theme of Creative Newness this month, it couldn’t be more fitting to celebrate the completion of the first official WebLab program that we held in NYC throughout the last 3 months and which resulted in the most beautiful and innovative websites that were created by its talented participants. WebLab was an experimental web-design program where 15 designers took on the challenge of creating feature-based websites, from concept to launch, all on our Wix Studio platform. The first iteration of the program was held internally with our very own Wix designers, and you can explore all the creations of both programs in the WebLab website, using the filters for Design Community or Wix Designers.
With the help of expert mentors who guided and inspired them throughout the process, the WebLab designers created websites which reflect the most current web-design trends of today. Using imagemaking, typography, grid systems and more, these unique websites use a specific feature or product capability to tell a captivating story.
Let’s have a closer look at the results of WebLab 1.0!
Tell us about your concept When I started thinking about the Sticky & Pin feature, I didn’t just want to show it visually — I wanted to feel it - conceptually. What’s something that sticks, universally?A thought that won’t leave your head. It made sense. Everyone knows that feeling — a thought appears in your mind, starting to shift to be something else, while fading suddenly loops back in, then swirling again, and again. What starts as a spark becomes an obsession. Afterwards comes the chaos.
I reflected on how I personally experience this stickiness of mind. One small idea can spiral — changing shapes, in different angles - until it’s no longer a thought, but a loop. That led me to think of animation, and specifically William Kentridge and his horses.
Horses are loaded with cultural weight: they’re movement, memory, control, loss of control. The flicker in Kentridge’s animation inspired me to pixelate elements, making them glitchy and chaotic. I wanted to bring the horse from the world of fine art into the digital world of a website, and that is where the idea was born: “Don’t think about the white horse.” (Of course you’re going to think about white horse.)
What was your biggest inspiration?
I started looking at Brutalism-inspired websites, revealing the infrastructure and grids they rely on, along with jittery, restless visuals: slot machines, old-school animations, and vintage home videos shot on dusty camcorders.
The biggest inspiration came from the restrictions I decided on: three colors; two typefaces; minimalism vs. chaos; and a horse. These limitations actually expanded the idea. The more I stripped things down, the louder the tension between control and collapse became. Everything revolves around the loop of pushing and pulling.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with I'm really into creative coding these days. I feel like combining rough illustrations and 90s-style pixelation with coding can create a really cool visual world.
The concept behind the website
The website examines love across different life stages. Using cinematic techniques, the website constructs a sensory, nostalgic space that captures the layered emotionality of love and its formation over time.
Tell us about your concept
I wanted to share a brief history of techno music's roots in Detroit and how it provided a refuge for marginalized communities. The visual direction is heavily influenced by the energy of techno and rave flyers, incorporating bold colors and brutalist typefaces.
What was your biggest inspiration?
Rave flyers and the sounds of classic Detroit techno.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
The use of AI tools to create imagery that adds more context to the narrative of the project.
Tell us about your concept
I wanted to explore colour perception and how we see colours as a language to communicate. Colours are words associated with objects and texts.
What was your biggest inspiration?
The fact that we see or perceive colours differently every time we see it.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
A hover and split screen scroll interaction.
Tell us about your concept
Scrolling is naturally directional, and I wanted to push the idea beyond the usual up-and-down flow and let the page move in multiple directions. Around that time I stumbled on research showing how the language we speak shapes how we picture time. As someone fluent in both Mandarin and English, that hit home: I grew up in Taiwan reading Mandarin top-to-bottom, right-to-left, while English runs left-to-right. Those opposing reading paths—and the web’s own top-to-bottom convention—sparked the concept. The result is a site that lets text travel in the very direction each language “thinks,” so visitors experience—literally and visually—how language bends our sense of time instead of just reading about it.
What was your biggest inspiration?
How languages shape our perception of time and further influence our approach in science!
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
One trend that keeps grabbing my attention is the “infinite canvas” layout—pages that let you pan or zoom through content in any direction, rather than scrolling on a single vertical track. I think its rise is a direct spill-over from the way we now work in tools like Figma and Miro, where huge, free-form workspaces feel second nature. It’s a fresh antidote to scroll-tunnel, and I’m excited to see how far we can push the idea.
Tell us about your concept
The concept behind the website came from the basic essence of the feature, which is about drawing attention—and the site is the stage. I felt there was something playful in the idea of using a transparent video, and that's why, after several ideas, I thought about creating something that handles stage presence, attention-seeking, and also playfulness and humor.
The circus showcases in several diverse ways the basic essence this feature represents: seeking attention, playfulness, what to hide, what to reveal, etc. In the circus, there’s a charm and spectacle that sometimes parallels our own lives, what we choose to show and what we don’t, what characters we play. I felt this fit the feature really well and was the best way to celebrate its story.
What was your biggest inspiration?
I saw the Alexander Calder circus show in the Whitney Museum collection, all the items and the video of him performing with the miniature. There was something to it, so basic materials, and yet so much happiness, fun, and impressive performance. I loved it! At the beginning, I even thought about creating an homage to him.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
One web design trend that caught my attention is the use of 3D objects that interact with the mouse, creating a blur between the site and almost a game-like experience.
Tell us about your concept
My concept is centered around enjoying the visual experience of gradients and the full spectrum of colors used throughout the website. Beyond aesthetics, I was inspired by how modern music genres—like gradients—are often blends of multiple styles. This sense of harmony and fusion in music felt like the perfect metaphor for gradients, where colors mix to form something new and unexpected.
I selected visual shapes and colors to represent five key music genres—pop, rock, punk, electronic, and hip-hop—and used them to develop visual components across the site. As users scroll, the transitions in color and form represent a continuous blending, both visually and conceptually. It all ties back to the theme of the site: Breaking down Barriers.
What was your biggest inspiration?
Layout inspiration from Swiss design, while the color and graphic direction were influenced by Julia’s work at Don’t Try Anything New design studio. Their riso pieces are absolutely amazing.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
Grid systems seem to be making a comeback in web design—and I’m here for it. I had a lot of fun exploring WebGL, a new feature in Wix Studio. One of the WebGL effects is incorporated into my own project as well!
Tell us about your concept
This website is an exploration of the intimate, evolving relationship between humans and machines. It poses a fundamental question: as the boundaries between flesh and code blur, how might we radically reimagine the machines of the future?
The idea was to move beyond the conventional perception of machines as rigid, utilitarian objects and instead open up a space for speculation—what if machines could be soft, emotional, adaptable? What if they could mimic the elasticity of skin, the fluidity of thought, or the unpredictability of human behavior? Through this site, I invite visitors to not only engage with these questions but to contribute to the discourse around machine design, embodiment, and empathy.
The website features a hybrid aesthetic that mirrors the fusion of human and machine. I use custom illustrations—early ones are more literal, showing floating bodies merging with machines, while later visuals become abstract, blending synthetic elements like wires and chips with organic forms like flesh and bones. The color palette is mostly greys, with blue representing the synthetic and orange the organic, creating a space that feels both speculative and grounded.
What was your biggest inspiration?
The biggest inspiration for this project was the tension and intimacy between the human body and technology. I’ve always been fascinated by how machines are evolving to not just serve us, but mirror us—our behaviors, our vulnerabilities, even our physical forms. I wanted to explore this overlap, especially the idea that future machines might be soft, emotional, and organic—more like extensions of ourselves than separate tools. This project became a space to imagine that speculative future.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
A trend that’s caught my attention recently is kinetic typography. The idea of text dynamically shifting or morphing as users scroll really resonates with the theme of my site. I'm excited about using JavaScript to implement custom interactions like this, as it allows me to create more fluid, engaging experiences.
Tell us about your concept
The website is designed to recreate the experience of dreaming. It guides users through the three stages of sleep, offering both an immersive journey and informative insights into what occurs during each phase. The visuals reflect common elements people often see in dreams and intentionally embrace a sense of chaos, mirroring the unpredictable, surreal nature of real dreams.
What was your biggest inspiration?
The biggest inspiration for the project came from the glass effect and blur. During my concept research, I was drawn to how these visual elements could represent the surreal quality of dreams. They helped me create an atmosphere that feels immersive, slightly disorienting, and reflective of how unclear, fluid, and shifting dreams often feel.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
One web design trend that recently caught my attention is the use of immersive scrolling experiences, where the user’s scroll triggers animations, transitions, or even changes in perspective. I found it really compelling because it turns a simple interaction into a narrative tool, making the website feel more like an experience. It’s something I’d love to experiment with more in future projects!
Tell us about your concept
I started by analysing the feature’s main characteristics and ended up with: Interactive, engaging, predictable vs surprising. From this analysis I continued to the concept thinking and the main points of thought were: Ideas > Getting ideas > Where do ideas come from > Inspiration > from confusion to clarity > each click revealing a new step. From here I shifted my attention to where ideas come from and how sometimes solutions to complex challenges can be found or draw inspiration from Nature itself. My final concept was Biomimicry - the practice of learning from nature's designs to solve human challenges by applying biological strategies. Visually I wanted to represent nature's diversity and in this way the website shows a colorful palette, photo imagery as well as digital illustration and handmade oil pastel paintings.
What was your biggest inspiration?
Nature itself was my biggest inspiration. Observing how organisms adapt, survive, and thrive helped me realize that nature isn’t just beautiful, but also profoundly intelligent and inventive. This perspective guided not only the content but also the interactive structure of the site, where each scroll and click mimics the process of discovery—much like peeling back layers in the natural world to find insight and meaning. I was especially inspired by the forms, colors, and systems found in plants, animals, and ecosystems.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
Adding WebGL effects to media backgrounds is a particularly promising feature that caught my attention.
Tell us about your concept
I explored the concept of a mask and traced it back to its original purpose: to hide or disguise. This naturally led me to reflect on our current political climate and the rampant use of censorship as of late. Rather than avoiding our reality, I chose to examine it through a lens I know well—design.
What was your biggest inspiration?
Archival imagery, specifically the color palette and treatment of protest posters and footage.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
The new practice of creative coding! This summer I'm challenging myself to learn p5.
12 / Lucas Chagas | Grid
Tell us about your concept
NXXA is a conceptual website that simulates a futuristic shopping experience, where self-improvement blurs into self-exploitation. Presented as a sleek digital storefront, the site offers seductive wellness products that promise clarity, beauty, and control—while subtly revealing that these solutions are part of a deeper system of manipulation. Drawing from theorists like Paul B. Preciado and Jean Baudrillard, the project explores how hypercapitalism, pharmaceuticals, and digital culture co-opt identity and autonomy under the guise of empowerment. Visually, the site uses CSS Grid both functionally and metaphorically—its clean, symmetrical structure mirrors the rigid yet addictive interfaces of social media and e-commerce. The aesthetic references sterile biotech environments, surveillance minimalism, and neo-futuristic atmospheres, while each product is packaged in an egg, symbolizing synthetic rebirth. Guided by an unsettlingly cheerful AI named Model002, users move deeper into a system that appears helpful but ultimately traps them in loops of curated desire and algorithmic control.
What was your biggest inspiration?
Grid as a visual and structural metaphor for control systems in society—shaping behavior, enforcing patterns, and reflecting how capitalism organizes desire and consumption.
Share a web-design trend you’re fascinated with
Interactive 3D elements that let users navigate within a digital space—almost like stepping inside the site. It turns the experience into something immersive and gamified.
The concept and inspiration behind the website
Parallax Bloom draws inspiration from nature’s rhythms. The website uses motion, typography, and layered interaction to evoke the blooming cycles of nature—offering a quiet, meditative digital landscape.
