Web designs with surrealist themes are hard to come by. However, this does not mean that we don’t see it everywhere. In some way or another, web designers are bold enough to incorporate a little bit of surrealism in their design.
Surrealist art is made by a lot of symbolism, collage-like images combined to create a coherent theme or idea. Realistically, surrealist art may be difficult to interpret and is hard to relate to commercial or industrial designs. However, there are some web designers that can incorporate all these dream-like art into adverts and even web design.
How do we know if a designer is using surrealism in their design? Think of your subconscious creating design concepts for your website – that is what a website with a surrealist theme is. There may be a lot of photo editing, cartoons, and doodles. Some designs use images that are pretty much out of the usual.
Here are some of the best examples of web design with surrealist themes:
This is probably one of the most “dream-like” website themes on the internet. It has a biblical theme but it presents a food product. There’s an “Adam” with three eyes, an “Eve”, and a snake. They seem to be living in space or the middle of the universe. It’s really cool if you think about it.
This is one of the simple takes on surrealism. Take a very popular piece of art and doodle on it to create an edgy design. Overall, the website is minimalist and the concept is quite unique.
Floating stones and floating mail on a vast nothingness of a wilderness. If that ain’t dreamlike to you, we don’t know what else is. The website maximizes movable 3 D imagery presented in a dark colour palette filled with a range of greys.
This portfolio is also a very simple take on surrealism. The doodle background also moves when the cursor is panned to it.
One of the things about surrealism is we take things we have in our daily lives and re-create them in unrealistic proportions. The design here is we have an office set up with phones, a cup of coffee, and a computer (complete with an office plant too) but in finger-like sizes.
The Toggl website is also a good play between 3D art and surrealism. We could see a golden rubber duckie in the middle of dark and grey three-dimensional duckies. The entire website has little surrealistic elements like this.
The animation on the welcome page of the website is a good example of surrealism in web design that we barely notice. We just think that it is simple doodle art, but it really is surrealism.
We must also remember that taking photographs or images, not in the “usual way” is also considered surrealism. Say we have a pixelated image like this. Or we have an image where the human heads are replaced by their animated versions or by animal heads. There are many ways to incorporate surrealism in images.
Also read: 21 Men’s Health Websites With Good Design