2017 Design Trends You Can Actually Use
Any great designer will tell you that paying attention to current trends is vital to staying up-to-date with what’s popular in the design world.
As a designer, you want your designs always to be fresh and on the verge of the next hip thing. To ring in the new year with a sense of positivity, vitality, and freshness, Pantone officially announced “Greenery” as their Color of the Year. Much of the design work you see this year will no doubt incorporate Pantone’s “Greenery.” But what other design trends will we see this year?
Much of what we saw in 2016 design will still dominate brand websites and advertisements, but with more of an emphasis on beautiful, effective user interfaces and virtual reality. We are very likely to continue to see four trends in particular: vintage-modern logos, hand-drawn graphic elements, 90’s style photography, and clean, smooth motion graphics. Here’s how you can begin incorporating these trends into your designs:
Vintage-Modern Logos
These stamp-style graphics emphasize an importance on getting back to the basics of clear, honest design with a grungy feel. To get an idea of the core skeleton of one of these designs, go to Hipster Logo Generator to create a very basic stamp logo. To make one of these logos on your own, begin by opening Adobe Illustrator and creating a geometric shape, such as a circle or rectangle.
Now, go to Think Design Blog’s “15 Free High-Quality Subtle Grunge Vectors” post to download the free vector grunge texture pack. After you have it downloaded, go back to Illustrator and click File>Place to add in your texture. Change its color (if you wish) and place it over the shape you created.
Let’s add some type! Find an old-fashioned font that you like (you can find free fonts at DaFont and Font Squirrel) and add a brand name to your grungy shape.
Next, add some decorative elements such as dashed lines and an oval beneath the type.
To finish it off, add some type that specifies the type of your company and its establishment date.
Hand-Drawn Graphic Elements
As a graphic designer, incorporating hand-drawn elements into my work is one of my favorite ways to show creative expression. So many graphics look the same and creating something by hand and using it in your designs is a great way to make your graphics stand out and be unique.
You can quickly add a hand-drawn element to your design by scanning your drawing into the computer at a high resolution (at least 300 DPI) and pulling it into Photoshop to make adjustments to it before bringing it into Illustrator. (Tip: In Photoshop, convert your drawing to grayscale, adjust the threshold, convert it to bitmap and then save it as a bitmap before bringing it into AI. Doing this will allow you to change the drawing’s color easily in Illustrator!)
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I encourage you to attend “Digitizing Hand Drawings,” a UAB Digital Media Step It Up that I’ll be teaching on March 3.
90’s Style Photography
You’ve seen it at Urban Outfitters and American Apparel. The 90’s are making a comeback — particularly in photography trends. The defining characteristics of this style involve a feeling of rawness and emotion; the photos appear untouched and seem to capture an unprepared subject.
With today’s technology, it is relatively easy to create 90’s style photography. If you are dedicated, you can make an attempt with a traditional film camera or Polaroid. However, there is a $1.99 app called 8mm Vintage Camera that can add filters to your videos and give them that nostalgic, 90’s feel as well.
Motion Graphics
Clean, colorful animations are very attractive in today’s brand marketing and website functionality.
Smooth motion graphics can almost be mesmerizing when created well. Adobe After Effects is one of the most common programs used to create motion graphics and will allow you to import your graphics from Illustrator and bring them to life! To learn how to animate graphics, attend one of UAB Digital Media’s Animation Workshops, taught by Shibli Rahman.
