7 Modern Graphic Design Trends for Designers
Reading Time: 5 minutes The field of graphic design, also called communication design, is vast. It’s the art of expressing visions and ideas through visual and textual ways. Websites, logos, business cards, advertisements, and brochures are the end product of today’s modern graphic design.
All graphic designs should have one common objective, to direct the attention of the public towards a business or product. In order to-do-so, it is vitally important for designers to follow current trends. Often the flat design trend is followed ardently by current designers, but we have reached what the industry is now calling ‘The Flat 2.0’.
Trends come and go and then come back again, for example in 2018 we have seen the use of bright colors coupled with bold fonts back in favor. In today’s world trends in the graphic designing business come and go quickly, so a designer needs to keep his or her fingers on the pulse.
However, there are some trends that graphic designers will keep going back to. This is primarily because they find a particular theme highly useful and rate ease-of-use over what’s currently trending.
Graphic designers can carry great influence over rapid changes happening in the cultural and social world. Due to web accessibility, designers have access to different cultures and visual experiences to get creative. As a consequence, we notice new graphic design trends emerging every year.
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While some of these can disappear fast, others endure due to their familiarity with designers. Some of this year’s latest graphic design trends are responsive designing, speed & users, typography, and material designing.
Here Are 7 Trends Designers are Following Today
Table of Contents
#1. Letterspace
Letter spacing has been trending for over two years now, used in designing magazine covers and brochures. Letter spacing lends itself to scope for experimenting (a designer’s trait). Designers arrange the letters randomly and divide words into individual letters or syllables.
#2. Exposed Content
Graphic designers look to highlight the importance of content to the user by exposing it. This allows the content to dominate the images and other elements of the design. Making it one of the latest and most popular design trends.
Characterised by its style of using a combination of smaller images, but larger content gives a unique and modern look to the design.
Currently, it is primarily used for magazine and book designers. The secret behind this is placing the images far apart on the cover and filling the blank space with words relevant to the topic, creating an impressive look.
#3. Card Design
As SEO ranking plays a significant role in nearly all business today, creating a responsive website is crucial. Card design is ideal for allowing easy distribution of images on a web page to create responsive websites. Designers cut the images in cards shape and rearrange them in columns.
Due to the organization of the images, it makes general data browsing an easy exercise.
Although card design is nothing new to the industry, many websites are designed around this trend.
Many cards are displayed on the right of the homepage, enabling users to pick their choice of the information they require directly from the homepage, then the user goes inside the card to collect further relevant information.
#4. Colour Transitions (Gradients)
Gradients are found in the website buttons to page headers and also to the footer. These days your corporate PDF, not just your webpage is not smart looking without a gradient flaunt on the cover, this has also become a norm in current website design, and for example, you can see websites like Stripe uses the most appealing, vibrant gradient backgrounds that come over semi-flat illustrations.
As the flat design concept evolves, gradients are now in full flow making a strong comeback as an enhancement to the latest design strategies. This design update is coming is often referred to in the industry as “the flat 2.0” design, also known as “semi-flat” design.
#5. Typography
Graphic designers need to take heed of the latest trends in typography to keep ahead of the competition. This year hand-drawn fonts have never been so popular.
Every month we see hundreds of new releases. Brush fonts with bold lines and grungy edges are especially in demand, as they are easily overlaid with watercolor and foil textures, and are extremely popular on Fiverr, Etsy, and online design marketplaces at the moment.
Whichever graphic design trend you intend to follow, you generally start with a logo, make sure that you keep the design simple. Use limited colors and fonts. Do not overdo the design concept, bring to mind some of the most successful older firms like Nike for example, and the Apple logo.
#6. Pixel Play
Graphic designers use pixel Play as its ideal to experiment and play around to create design patterns leading to blurry lined images instead of keeping pictures clean.
The latest trend exploding on the App Store is a twist on the coloring book apps that have been popular recently. Now, instead of having users pick and choose their colors as before, this new group of coloring book apps is color-by-number books featuring retro-looking, pixel art designs.
Also, unlike the previous line-up of coloring book apps, often marketed as “coloring books for adults,” the trend on the App Store appears to be being driven by children.
#7. Authentic and Candid Images
Real people images have been a shift in the design norm recently. Previously designers preferred to craft artificial backgrounds, but now are favoring real-life pictures. It brings a more cutting-edge emotion to design, incorporating real-life situations and the setting becomes authentic rather than artificial.
With increasing numbers of graphic designers searching the web for such imagery of people reacting to real events, demand and download of images from Shutterstock have skyrocketed in recent times.
Conclusion
Professional graphic designers understand the bigger picture is conveying the brand message regardless of what trend you may be following. You look to ensure it is capable of delivering the message effectively. To do that, you first need an understanding of the client’s business and target audience. A new trend in 2018 is designers embedding with businesses to get an intimate knowledge of the client’s marketplace and customer base to enhance any explicit brand message, then pick design elements as well as trends accordingly, to express these.
Author bio: James Row is a passionate blogger and professional software developer who started his career in graphic design Melbourne, has a love for informative writing and looks to keep you up to date with the latest information about the industry.
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