In ecommerce, digital design shapes whether customers trust your store in seconds. The layout, color palette, and flow of your online store or mobile app do more than look pretty—they influence whether visitors become buyers.
When Weston Table founder Dianne O’Connor transformed her lifestyle blog into a home-goods retailer, she designed the site to reflect that new identity. Inspired by print magazines, she used line-drawn illustrations, richly styled product photography, and collage-like moodboards. The result feels more like an online publication than a store—a design choice that mirrors the brand’s focus on authenticity and artisanal quality.
When executed properly, digital design turns browsing into belonging. Learn the fundamentals of digital design, explore its various types, and discover how thoughtful visual communication can boost ecommerce sales.
What is digital design?
Digital design is the process of creating visual content for computer screens and mobile devices. It shapes the look, feel, and functionality of websites, apps, emails, social media channels, and other digital formats.
One recent study in the journal Sustainability found that consumers think ecommerce sites with superior visual, navigational, and information design are more usable and satisfying. Visual design alone accounted for 93% of user satisfaction and helped drive brand loyalty.
Digital designers combine technical skills with artistic principles such as color theory, balance, and white space to build new websites. They often partner with web developers to bring ideas to life, using design elements like fonts, shapes, and images, along with digital-specific features such as buttons, menus, carousels, and animations.
In ecommerce, digital design is an essential aspect of communicating your brand’s story while ensuring a seamless, enjoyable user experience. Because every digital interaction can be tracked, teams can analyze how specific digital elements and choices affect engagement and sales in real time.
Example: How Weston Table designs—and redesigns—its digital storefront
The Weston Table design process takes cues from magazine publishing, updating the site regularly, the way a magazine editor plans recurring issues, as Dianne recounts on the Shopify Masters podcast. Early on, she actually sketched on paper, outlining what each screen should show and how it should function. She then worked with her in-house team to translate her sketches into a digital product, including ensuring that her vision was technically feasible and search engine optimized.
To keep the look on brand, Diane’s team refreshes the experience every three months. It isn’t a light face-lift; modules, colors, and moods change to tell new seasonal storylines.
The benefit of designing for screens, she notes, is agility. She contrasts it with the process of designing a brick-and-mortar retail space. “The advantage we have working online in ecommerce is that we can change the carpet, we can change the wall color, we can change absolutely anything we want to,” she says. “In a physical brick-and-mortar space, you’re sort of stuck with the foundation and the walls, and you can’t move things around. We can move our walls around any way we want to, and they can morph into something super spectacular in minutes. It’s a digital-first mindset where brand, content, and UX evolve together.
Digital design vs. graphic design: What’s the difference?
Digital and graphic design share many of the same technical skills and design principles, but they diverge in focus and application.
Graphic design predates the internet and originated in print. Today, graphic designers may work on both print and digital products, but the emphasis typically remains on fixed visuals such as logos, illustrations, or infographics. In ecommerce, a graphic designer might produce the individual assets that form your brand identity.
A digital designer considers the broader ecosystem. That includes ensuring all visuals work together across pages, the layout facilitates interaction, and the experience adapts across screen sizes.
In short, graphic design shapes what users see; digital design shapes what they see and do.
Types of digital design
- Web design
- App design
- Social media design
- Email design
- UI and UX design
- Digital advertising design
- Animation design
- Digital publishing design
Digital design includes multiple areas of focus for different platforms and purposes. Here are some of the most common types of digital design:
Web design
Web design covers the look, layout, and usability of a website. Effective web design balances visual appeal and functionality through choices in fonts, color schemes, imagery, visual cues, and navigation—all consistent with brand identity.
Dianne cites Starface, with its signature bright yellow, bubbly fonts, and smiley-face graphics, as an ecommerce brand with an effective digital design that conveys its “happy-go-lucky” vibe.
App design
App design focuses on how a mobile or desktop app looks and functions, including everything from its icon to how it’s navigated. The interface should be streamlined for mobile devices while remaining visually consistent with your brand’s website.
Gymshark, the British athleticwear company, has an ecommerce app that includes many of the same sections and functionalities as its website, but with a pared-down layout and simple, tactile controls.
Social media design
Social media design covers the visual content and design assets (even your avatar) created for social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Designers tailor visuals for rapid-scroll behavior and platform-specific dimensions. Smart social design drives discovery and purchase intent, especially when paired with shoppable posts or product tags.
The direct-to-consumer furniture brand Thuma uses smart social media design in this Instagram post, combining photography with handwritten fonts and graph-paper sketches reminiscent of detailed concept drawings.
Email design
The goal of effective email design is to keep the look consistent with your brand’s visual identity while also strategizing for maximum engagement. This can be done with visual cues that guide the reader through the email or make the content easier to parse.
Dianne attributes Weston Table’s strong engagement—“one of the lowest unsubscribe rates in the industry,” in her words—to emails that echo the site’s editorial feel. Her team matches the look and feel of the website to its other marketing efforts. “Our emails are a reflection of this sort of inspirational lifestyle, beauty, and editorial content,” she says. This is digital design as a system: typography, imagery, and pacing carry over from site to inbox, making every interaction feel like part of the same publication.
UI and UX design
User Interface (UI) design focuses on the visual and interactive elements of a website or app, such as buttons, menus, and forms. A UI designer’s goal is to make those components clear, attractive, and consistent so users always know what to do next.
User experience (UX) design shapes the overall flow and feel of a digital journey. UX designers study user behavior and feedback to remove friction, improve navigation, and make every step—from product discovery to checkout—seamless and intuitive.
For example, the homepage of reusable travel bottle brand Ries displays various sets of the brand’s toiletry bottles with an option to easily toggle between colors; hovering over the image reveals an Add to Cart button, so shoppers can select a product without navigating to a different page.
Digital advertising design
The goal of digital advertising design is to capture attention quickly through banner ads or social ads to drive traffic and conversions to your online store. Effective ad design also reinforces brand identity—using consistent colors, fonts, and messaging so customers immediately recognize who’s speaking to them—and aligns visuals with the product or offer being promoted. Digital ad designers consider audience intent, placement, and performance, tailoring creative for each platform while ensuring the ad will display correctly across devices.
This example of an Instagram Stories ad from home-swap platform Kindred is simple, quick to absorb, and adheres to the dimensions of a mobile screen.
Animation design
Animation designers create motion-based visuals, such as a product image that zooms in when a shopper hovers. These elements can enhance engagement when used strategically. Interactive product animations can help shoppers visualize materials, textures, or how an item moves or functions (the swing of a dress, for example) before buying.
For example, on the website for the clothing brand Big Bud Press, hovering over an image of a piece triggers an animation that zooms into the fabric texture, highlighting details of the print.
Digital publishing design
Digital publishing design applies to text-based formats such as ebooks, blogs, and online catalogs or magazines. It combines typography, layout, and imagery to create experiences optimized for screens. Strong digital publishing design highlights hierarchy and readability—using color, spacing, and consistent branding to make long-form content visually engaging and easy to navigate across devices.
Art-and-food publisher Phaidon’s blog mirrors a digital magazine, featuring stories, author interviews, and new releases that extend its print aesthetic online.
Digital design FAQ
What is digital design?
Digital design refers to the process of creating a cohesive, user-friendly look for a digital product. A digital designer can work in a variety of mediums and categories, including websites, apps, and social media platforms.
Is digital design the same as graphic design?
No, but there are similarities. Graphic design focuses more on static images—either in print or online. Digital design involves the overall look and feel of websites and apps, as well as designing dynamic and interactive elements like animation.
What do digital designers do?
Digital designers create visuals and interactive content for online spaces, including websites, landing pages, mobile apps, email templates, digital ads, social media assets, graphics—even games and videos.
