Looking back and moving forward in design 🎨
In touch with the times
My team and I always keep our eye on upcoming trends in web design, sharing them with each other through Slack. For the past year, we’ve been publishing SotW (“Sites of the Week”) on Medium and in our newsletters. And for the past few years, I’ve been curating my @Advertisements_in_NYC Instagram account, focusing on outdoor ad design around the city. Through these channels, I’ve gained a sense of how design trends are evolving. With more people sharing videos every year, there’s been a clear shift toward visuals that are upbeat, lively, and fun.
Psychedelic styles for 2019
Many of these changes recall the hippie vibe of the ’70s — especially with the growth of the cannabis industry. Think rainbows, bright color gradients, and an overall groovy mood. I noticed these changes especially in early 2019, with designers aiming for unique and experience-oriented visuals.
Pixels with a punch
More recently, I’ve been noticing tech features from the early ’80s — pixelated graphic styles, ticker tape animations, repeated graphic elements, and so on. As video editing becomes easier and more accessible, people are using more effect filters, emoji, stickers, and GIF animations than ever before. These features, it turns out, are nicely compatible with styles from the early ’80s to ’90s. Design trends are always firmly connected with what people see around them — and what they’ll be seeing soon.
Making it modern
Whichever decade you draw inspiration from, these three features will help keep your designs current:
1. Vivid, transformative colors
As the quality of device screens improves, vibrant colors are becoming increasingly appealing. Everyday culture is already videocentric, so adding a “sense of time” is a smart idea.
2. Organic motion and 3D animation
Creating a sense of the “Z-axis” is important, even if the design itself looks like a 2D animation. Motion should be organic rather than linear.
3. Captivating photography
Photos directly reflect modern culture and infuse designs with a sense of life. Keep in mind that everything about photos, from fashions to color tones, is always changing.
History repeats itself
Over the course of design history, trends have always come and gone. Think of the battle between artificial and organic (Art Nouveau vs. Art Deco, Modernism vs. Postmodernism, etc.). When you’re thinking about what’s coming next, a good exercise is to wonder what would be the opposite of where we are now. What comes to your mind?
