Each year, the graphic design business comes with new opportunities for creatives in the industry to explore, hone their skills, and make money.
Although certain website design trends are here to stay including seamless navigation, better security, quick loading, etc., certain graphic design trends do complement in this regard without compromising the users’ appeal.
Top graphic design trends in 2021
Even if you run a simple digital marketing blog or a design agency, you need to work on the below trends in order to produce visual masterpieces.
3D designs all the way
Although the trend has been in action for quite some time now, it’s catching more eyes than ever. 3D design has made the most improvement and evolvement than others in the business.
With the rise of augmented and virtual reality, the massive shift has been towards hyper-realistic visuals covering the entire page, and not just a single element.
Designers are using static photos or flat illustrations and adding outstanding movements and animations to create stunning 3D designs.
Emoji more than ever
Emojis have greatly aided the designers to add emotions in websites, print media, or any other form of digital content.
Plenty of emojis on social media platform are already on high demand, the best designs not only create a reaction and response, but also softens the mood.
The trend is now focusing on added creativity and imaginative use of emojis. Remember, communication go anywhere, and there still is massive room of growth.
Nature focused designs
The idea of mimicking natural lights, earthly colors and pallets, natural gradients in color schemes, were somewhat sidelined over the last decade or so, but since than the trend is coming on strong and becoming a top favorite.
Even more so, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shoved people closer to nature closer than ever, and people are finding reasons to go out and interact with nature.
Professional designers need to understand that not everyone can go for a walk on the beach, view a clear subset, or spend time with exotic greeneries. Hence, the nature induced, green designs could definitely do so.
Optical illusion continues to fascinate
Who doesn’t love mindboggling optical illusions? The idea of optical illusion designs is to hold the viewer’s attention like never before, apparently, designers have the liberty to play as much with the approach as possible.
Still, don’t try to overcomplicate the design just to catch that awe. Consider the example of The Crazy Sommelier, the logo for a wine business.
The logo is based on optical illusion and created smartly by mixing design with negative space.
Cartoon illustrations
Cartoon illustrations offers a simple, yet powerful way to compete your design with the heavily graphic, minimalist sleek designs we see in website.
Using a character like Fido Dido for 7up is still memorable, that shows how illustrations aren’t going to go out of fashion anytime soon, especially when it comes to interesting, relatable cartoon characters that we all love to see.
The gold and metallic ones
The metallic designs are already popular in the tech business, especially the smartphone makers. But the trend is shifting them more towards sleek, minimalist design to get even the tiniest details noticed.
Confident designers regularly experiment with silver, brass, and lead, but gold is still the boss. Gold has the capacity to show off plenty of variations in metallic design, shiny, matte, emboss, etched and cut out, and more.
Voxel art in the making
Voxel is a part of a 3D space, a cube, as we see in games like Minecraft and animated movies like The Lego Movie, The Lego Ninjago Movie, etc.
Similarly, voxel art is becoming a hit among designers as it employs sharp elements merged with 3D combinations and movements.
The slightly kiddish ambience alongside retro appeal transform the entire visual into a great, modern design.
Monochrome and duotone design
Using a limited pallet has already been a part of design practice. Partially influenced seamless, cool vibes and outlook, the trend has gathered steam due to increase in demand for illustrations and complex, high end graphics.
The monochrome and duotone approach allows designers to create a versatile background including the feature rich tricks of technology.
Furthermore, the design adds a sense of harmony and calm in the making, hence, focusing more on the emotive use of color combinations.
Typography chaos
Typography is one of the best visual means to depict cultural times, the organic art shows an attempt by society. In an attempt to break out from the past, chaos typography is the approach to work on.
The idea is to breaking the rule like lacking the letter alignment, random mixing of words and characters, and so on.
The brings a rather funky style creativity, however, stay alert when mixing colors, words, and art, you don’t want to make things completely unrecognizable.
Thoughts!
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a custom logo design company in USA or work as a solo designer on freelance, being on top of these graphic design trends is all you need to make a great portfolio and make good fortune out of top brands.