I spend a lot of time looking at other people design work. It’s the nature of my job and something that helps to keep me current with design trends that are emerging. Over the last few months, something I’ve noticed with more frequency is the emergence of minimalist 3D animation paired with pastels that leans almost to abstraction. I have a feeling this is going to become a hot look over the next 18 months and will run the risk like so many other trends of jumping the shark as it gets picked up by every agency and marketing firm in the world. It looks cool now, and I’m really liking it, but that feeling may change if it becomes oversaturated the way the sketchbook look, the retro 80’s look, the ugly design look, the you name it you’ve seen to much of it looks did.
Design Trends
Hypnotic, Euphoric, Minimalistic.
Over the last year I have noticed an emerging visual trend that has started popping up in all sorts of videos, and will probably make it’s way to the rest of the creative world. It is a black and white, lo-fi, grainy, not quite 8-bit look. It reminds me of 1980’s video camera footage that has been mashed up with a sort of hand-drawn style. I say sort of, because like in the video below it is obviously digital. The lines and shapes have a hand-drawn quality to them, but they are to clean. Like the art brushes that come with Adobe illustrator. Then there is the background texture, in this case paper, but in a number of other videos I’ve seen it’s is fine digital noise. Fake signal noise that has been added to the clip to give it a dirty analog look. I’m curious how long it’ll be before this makes it’s way to mainstream advertising, at which point we can add it to the “jumped the shark” list like so many other trends of late. (sketchbook, stop motion, hyper color, 8-bit graphics and sound…)
By the way, this is quite hypnotic. Consider yourself warned.
Design Trends for 2015.
Wish you had a crystal ball to help you predict future design trends for 2015? So do I, but since I don’t I have turned to a number of sources on the web to help figure that out. While doing a little research last night I came across this infographic from Coastal Creative that does a pretty good job of attempting to predict what last years trends will evolve into. Coastal feels that larger photography, background video, better type, and semi flat design will lead the way, and I agree. Thanks to improved bandwidth, smartphones, and emerging technologies, I could see any of the predictions below holding fast or continuing to grow over the next 12 months.
Design Trends for 2014.
With more than 30 million images and 350 million image downloads, I think Shutterstock has a pretty solid handle on emerging trends in the design world. With that kind of data it’s pretty easy to see where things are going, and thankfully Shutterstock has created the handy infographic below. If you are wondering what the hot design trends are for 2014, this might give you some insight.
Modular 4 