What is Squarespace Fluid Engine?

As a design studio with a focus on brand strategy and design, we’re proud to have built beautifully compelling websites for our clients on both Squarespace and WordPress.

For the longest time, we’ve felt that for more unique builds and creative freedom (among other things), we’d scope out web projects on WordPress. However, in this past year alone, Squarespace has changed its game so much that we can’t ignore how game-changing it has been for our work.

So today, we’re taking a small dive into their newest design system: Squarespace Fluid Engine.

Squarespace 7.0: Curated Templates

I remember when we used Squarespace for the first time back in 2014. There wasn’t much else like it. Beautiful templates, stunning attention to design, and a seamless building experience with content widgets that would have a website built within a fraction of the time it’d take for a custom build.

The only problem? Well, it was kind of a big one: users were only restricted to templates! Without the ability to truly customize the templates outside of what was built into it, it made for a fairly restrictive building experience. As the years went on, it was pretty easy to identify a Squarespace site just by the template.

Squarespace 7.0 allowed for creatives and small business to choose from a wide set of pre-made templates to populate with their brand and content.

Template choices for Squarespace 7.0 were vast and wide-ranging, each with specific built-in functionality.

Squarespace 7.1: Driven By Blocks

In 2018, Squarespace released their 7.1 Design System, otherwise known as “Layout Engine.” While templates were still created, they were driven by reusable sections and blocks that allowed for even more customization than ever before. As website design trends were moving towards reusable blocks anyways, Layout Engine made it possible for users to build websites with custom layouts the way they wanted, with the same content widgets from before.

The only problem with this? Well again, it was kind of a big one: users were still somewhat restricted to the layouts provided! While there was certainly enough customization built in, users were restricted to the default grid system which sometimes made it difficult to make even some conventional UI layouts or interactions. This would then require a lot of code-snippets and developer time to get things the way you wanted.

All of this would last until July this past year, when Squarespace announced the biggest change-up to their design system in recent history: Fluid Engine.

WIth Layout Engine, users could build their web pages with pre-designed sections with flexible layouts. They could also start from scratch with a blank section and build their own layouts with content blocks.

Squarespace Fluid Engine: A New Era of Web Creativity

With the rise of more sophisticated, no-code web-building platforms allowing for more robust website layout customization, Squarespace’s new drag-and-drop design system allows for customization unlike anything before. Utilizing the power of CSS Grid, Fluid Engine users have the ability to overlap elements, size down imagery, and exercise responsive design control all at once. Users can also change up the grid structure as needed, utilizing the intuitive grid-building interface. Along with newer blocks that Squarespace released shortly after, like the Shape block and Scrolling Text block, Squarespace’s Fluid Engine empowers its creative community to build websites that can even rival more custom builds.

Squarespace Fluid Engine was released in July 2022, unleashing limitless possibilities for creative layouts and uses of their blocks.

A Creative Playground For The Web

From curated templates to unbridled creative freedom, we’ve seen Squarespace change in leaps and bounds over the past decade. It’s always been an amazing platform that has opened the door to beautiful, intuitive website design to creatives, entrepreneurs, and businesses of every size. Today, since the release of Fluid Engine, we see Squarespace as a creative digital playground that allows us to truly hone in on building unique experiences with efficiency in mind. We can build quickly while utilizing code and plugins for more unique interactions and transitions—things that we would otherwise leave for bigger WordPress projects.

So if you’re interested in trying Fluid Engine out after reading this, create a website and start playing around. And, of course, if you’re looking to launch a new website for your start-up company or small business, you know who to call.