Here are some of the latest design trends in the graphic design industry (backed by a little research and my own biased opinions).
Dark grey is the new brown (which was, until recently, the new black).
For a while, black was the dirty, grungy, cutting-edge color to use—and I'm not just talking about black text. Black backgrounds usually meant "cool site" (or at least, "I'm trying to look like a cool site"). As the market got saturated with cool sites with black backgrounds, brown and earthy, natural tones started taking over as the edgy, grungy colors. They were dirtier, more organic.
Now, dark grey (and, by proxy, a little bit of black) is creeping into the market, with some of the more trendy sites choosing a less-harsh-than-black shade of grey as their main design element. The result is a background that makes colors and white pop as much as black did, but isn't as harsh to look at.
Orange is out. Pink is in.
Orange used to be the quintessential high-tech color. (I think before that, it was bright green.) It's been that way since the turn of the millennium. Orange is finally on its way out, after years of market saturation. That isn't to say that it's completely gone, though—it's still being used sparingly, but not to denote forward-thinking philosophies.
Pink began to take on a less-feminine denotation a few years back, with some t-shirts half-jokingly suggesting that pink is actually the new black. Well, the t-shirts were wrong—pink is the new orange. Bold shades of pink, magenta, and fuchsia are showing up in newer designs more and more, and usually in a cutting-edge, artistic context.
Primaries are in, too.
Bold, primary colors—specifically, blue and red—have been getting a lot of use lately too, and not for patriotic reasons. Red has been used in combination with black for some time, but it's now seeing widespread use with all sorts of other colors.
Yellow is sneaking onto the scene too, but has yet to see widespread use. Yellow has been shown to be the most eye-catching color, but also the most agitating color and the hardest for the eye to take in. So I don't think we'll see very many overwhelmingly-yellow designs (or, at least, I hope we don't); but I think we'll start seeing more of it in logos and ads, at the very least.
Whitespace is good.
This is more prevalent in Web design than traditional graphic design (where white space has always been more prevalent), but we're seeing more and more whitespace surrounding elements. Gaps between elements are getting bigger, and more and more sites are adopting the very eye-catching concept of surrounding a bold element with a lot of whitespace.
In the last couple of years, even the space between lines of text has been slowly increasing, going up from the standard 1.25 em to somewhere around 1.5 em to aid in readability. (This is equivalent to the 1.5 line-spacing in Microsoft Word, for reference.)
Part of this could have to do with the realization that online users will now scroll down a page, whereas twelve years ago, they wouldn't. The freedom to take up more space has allowed for greater readability and aesthetic design than previously thought possible.
The swoosh needs to go.
Seriously, someone needs to shoot that swoosh. The market is saturated. The once dynamic shape has lost its flair. And yet, corporations still choose to make it a part of their logos. Word on the street is that a
major credit card company will soon be changing their logo to incorporate the swoosh . That's the equivalent of playing the Macarena in your car commercial in the year 2008.
I can't say that the swoosh is out; only that it needs to be. Don't worry if a logo you've had for years has a swoosh—brand recognition trumps swoosh saturation any day—but please don't request to have your logo re-designed to incorporate the swoosh.
Serif logos are dying off.
More and more logos are being updated to sans-serif fonts, and I'm not talking about the tech- and art-related companies—brands like Excedrin, the LPGA, Business Week magazine, and Reader's Digest are making the plunge. Now, this is by no means a new phenomenon—sans-serif fonts have been more modern-looking ever since they came about—but older, more traditional companies are starting to give in to the trend.
Serif fonts will never disappear—they've proven to be more readable in print, and even on screen at larger sizes—but they just don't have the modern look that sans-serif fonts provide. Brands or companies wishing to update the look of their companies' logos usually start there.
