Finding inspiration is not always easy but often design trends reflect the current cultural, social, and technological environment. By staying aware of these designers can create work that resonates with the audience. Even an audience across borders. Being aware of international, as well as local, trends allows designers and companies to appeal to a broader, more diverse audience, making their products and services more versatile and competitive.
It is also important to remain true to the brand. Visual identity is crucial to how a brand is perceived by the public. Incorporating current design trends can help a company appear innovative, trustworthy, and in touch with the times. Conversely, ignoring trends can make a brand seem outdated or out of touch.
Designs on your competition
In a competitive market, staying on top of design trends can provide a significant edge and adoption of current design trends can appear more modern, forward-thinking, and have greater appeal for the target audience. This is crucial for branding, marketing, and overall customer engagement.
It can even help influence purchasing decisions and directly impact a company’s bottom line. For example, a product with current packaging might attract more attention and sales compared to a similar product with outdated packaging.
By embracing current graphic design themes designers can ensure that the visual language used is understood by the audience. For example, a design using outdated elements might fail to connect with a modern audience, leading to miscommunication or a lack of engagement.
Pushing boundaries
Trends push the boundaries of creativity and innovation, too. They encourage designers to experiment with new techniques, tools, and ideas. For example, minimalism or dark mode in UI design are driven by the need to enhance usability and comfort. Keeping up with these trends ensures that products and services are user-friendly and meet current expectations.
Observing what’s popular or emerging, enables designers to find new ways to express ideas, solve problems, and create more impactful work.
Bringing these designs to life with high-quality, high-impact results are carefully developed hardware and software capabilities. From feature-rich fully-automated presses, with FograCert Validation Printing System (VPS) certification for colour accuracy and consistency, to intelligent and responsive supporting software, printers can be sure they can meet their client’s exacting expectations.
So, what do the design trends of the moment look like?
They are a heady mix of nostalgia, vibrant experimentation, and advanced technology. Here’s an overview of eight of the most graphic design prominent trends:
- Vibrant, Neon Colours: Bright, eye-catching hues like electric blues, neon greens, and hot pinks dominate, often in clashing combinations. These powerful shades can easily be reproduced by today’s digital printing technologies that include High Chroma extended colour gamut toners.
- Distorted Typography: Fonts are warped, stretched, and manipulated to create a sense of movement and chaos.
- Psychedelic Patterns: Trippy, swirling patterns that feel almost hypnotic.
- Grunge Aesthetic: Textures, glitches, and grainy overlays add a raw, unfinished look. Exciting finishes can be added with digital embellishments produced on the MGI JETVARNISH 3DS.
2. Photo Illustrations - photography and digital illustration are blended, resulting in a hybrid style that feels fresh and modern. Key elements include:
- Mixed Media: Combining real-life photography with hand-drawn or digitally created elements.
- Surreal Compositions: Imagery often takes on a dreamlike quality, with unexpected combinations of objects or scenes.
- Layering: Multiple layers of photos, textures, and illustrations create depth and complexity.
- Narrative Elements: Illustrations often add a story or emotion to the photograph, transforming it into something more conceptual.
3. Abstract Colour Gradients – these continue to be a favourite, offering a soft, fluid, and dynamic alternative to flat colours. Characteristics of this trend include:
- Soft Transitions: Colours blend seamlessly from one to another, often with subtle shifts in hue.
- Bold Colour Choices: While past gradients favoured pastels, current colour palettes are more daring, with deep purples, rich oranges, and intense blues.
- Organic Shapes: Gradients often follow organic, flowing shapes, giving a sense of movement and life.
- Minimalism: Often paired with minimalist layouts to let the gradients shine as the main visual element.
4. Retro Futurism – the optimism of mid-20th-century design is combined with futuristic elements. It’s characterized by:
- Bold, Geometric Shapes: Think of the clean lines and curves reminiscent of 60s and 70s sci-fi.
- Metallic and Neon: Colours and textures that evoke a sense of space-age excitement which can be replicated by the colour palletes on Konica Minolta’s digital toner systems and the Konica Minolta AccurioJet KM-1e.
- Nostalgic Tech Elements: Imagery that includes old-school computers, CRT monitors, and early digital devices, all with a modern twist.
5. 3D and Isometric Design - 3D elements continue to be popular, especially in digital interfaces and branding. This includes:
- Isometric Illustrations: Offering a unique, semi-3D perspective that’s both functional and visually appealing.
- Detailed 3D Models: Used in everything from product design to intricate website elements.
- Playful and Vibrant: Bright colours and whimsical designs make these 3D elements pop.
6. AI-Generated Art - AI continues to influence design, allowing for the creation of complex, algorithm-driven visuals that are impossible to achieve manually. Trends here include:
- Generative Art: Patterns and designs that are created through algorithms, often resulting in highly intricate and unique visuals.
- Surrealism: AI-generated art often leans towards the surreal, producing unexpected and dreamlike compositions.
- Customization: Designers can use AI tools to create bespoke visuals tailored to their specific needs.
7. Maximalism - while minimalism has dominated for years, maximalism is making a strong return, celebrating excess, boldness, and eclecticism:
- Rich Patterns: Layered patterns, textures, and prints that create a visually dense experience.
- Bold Colours and Contrasts: Strong, contrasting colours used together unapologetically.
- Ornamentation: Decorative details, from intricate borders to lavish typography, are key elements.
8. Sustainable Design - sustainability is more than a trend; it's becoming a standard. In terms of design:
- Eco-friendly Materials: In product and packaging design, there’s a push for biodegradable, recyclable, or reusable materials.
- Nature-inspired Aesthetics: Organic shapes, earth tones, and natural textures are prominent.
- Mindful Consumption: Designs that encourage reduced waste and conscious consumerism.
Researching relevance
These graphic design trends reflect a broader shift towards blending technology with creativity, pushing the boundaries of traditional design while embracing both nostalgia and innovation. Essential is identifying their relevance to the content being created to ensure the right messaging is conveyed and desired impact is achieved. Getting this wrong could disengage current customers and miss the mark with new ones. Important too, is ensuring high quality with IQ-501 the intelligent quality optimizer that delivers real-time advanced colour control and registration consistently and accurately.
Understanding the impact they can have on shaping meaningful and memorable communication that makes a lasting impression is vital, too. They help ensure that creative work remains relevant, competitive, and effective in communicating with and engaging its audience.
The medium of the communication can be a defining factor. Digitally printed mailers for example can be personalised and feature recipient focused content that makes the reader take notice as discussed in this
blog and this
log. So much so that it significantly outperforms other marketing collateral. In fact figures from Marketreach, the UK marketing authority on commercial mail, reports that most mail is interacted with between
3 and 5 times, and it’s not uncommon for consumers to retain mail for over a month.
Campaigns with mail in the mix are 52% more likely to report ROI benefits, 75% more likely to report profit uplifts and 65% more likely to report market share uplifts.
