2020 was a hard year, and I’m neither the first nor the last to mention it. However, we can’t underestimate how pandemic influenced the industry. Locked down in their homes and countries, creators had to seek a different energy output, and graphic design has become a perfect medium for it.
Last year, as we were laying the graphic design trends for 2020, we positioned humanity as the primary focus for all design fields. Who might have known that it really will be all about humans? Design world greatly resonated with the global social events, forcing many of us to reconsider the values of accessibility and inclusivity, typography, graphics, animation, and social media. On one side, designers and entire brands were seeking to support the community during these hard times. On the other, they used graphic design as a canvas for their personal experiences. The latter resulted in the uprising of bold fonts, funky hand-drawn illustrations — and the decline of flat illustrations, which proved to be not as supportive and human-oriented as we expected.
The major tendency for 2021 will by developing the creative heritage of the pandemic. There is no way to erase this experience or just leave it in 2020, so graphic and web design won’t alter course and rush into something new. Design trends will stay focused around social and experimental movements: from psychedelic art and ubiquity of 3D to accessibility. However, it doesn’t mean that reconsidering the pandemic heritage will be the only interest for designers. We’ll see some great alternatives in illustration, branding, and UI, so there will be room for creative search, whatever your field is.
Illustrations are going farther and farther from realism, plunging us into the fantastic world created by digital artists. Such visual psychedelia isn’t a recent invention — it comes from the art of the 70s, which is now all the rage. However, in 2021 it will just keep gaining popularity thanks to the artists who are bored with everything else. For someone, the slogan, “The stranger the better” can be a synonym of this trend. And for others, it’s more about deliberating from canonic concepts and opting for surrealist abstraction, color madness, and irreverent cartoon characters.
Monochrome & Duotone Design
The reception of product design has undergone significant changes in 2020. Sustainability is a necessity now, not just a funny extra. And creative packaging is a huge advantage, more and more appreciated by customers. Custom-made illustrations and fonts, storytelling, collages — there are many means brands have already implemented. Monochrome and duotone design are just another way (yet, quite an engaging one) to get all eyes on the product.
These graphic design trends are a logical follow-up to minimalism, which keeps attracting branding, packaging, and even UI designers for the past few years. And it’s interesting to watch how the design world is moving from strict minimalism to its creative iteration, which encourages us to take a new look at the idea of a limited palette and simple color theme. Following the trend, the minimalist color solutions meet more complex typography, symbolistic logotypes to balance the overall design while keeping it minimalist.
Bold Typographic Solutions
What is true about typography is that there are never too many experiments in this field. We’ve been messing with basic sans serifs for far too long, so in 2021 designers can’t stop searching for something new and different. True, it all began last year, in 2020, and during all this time, designers were seeking to make fonts as bold and magnetic as they have never been before. This phenomenon is tightly bound with the rise of experimental art: typography leaves the harsh reality and drives us to the safe and charming unknown.
So, what will this not-so-new graphic design trend bring us? Extraordinary display typefaces with surprising geometrical decisions and 3D fonts from one side, and acid color palettes & gradients from the other. There is also a tendency to compositions charged with oversized typography, which is rapidly gaining momentum in branding and packaging. I can hardly remember when typography was favoring experiments so badly — so we can just guess if it expands even more by 2022.
Socially Conscious Design
Being human today means to struggle with lots of social issues: global warming, racism, sexism, animal abuse, global economic crisis, political scandals and the COVID pandemic. It’s evident that designers can’t just stand by and do their regular work. So we’re in the presence of the major arise of social design, where creators do their best to affect the existing matters with their work.
The design world has never been an isolated system, and 2020 has made it particularly clear. The vitality of designers’ contribution to easing social tension has reached its peak — so now no one can say anymore, “I do creative work, it’s not my business”. Instead, everyone in the industry is welcome to provide support any way they can: through photos, illustrations, brand identity, or well-set media campaigns.
Accessibility in Design
The keen interest in accessibility is another huge achievement of the pandemic, if we can say so. Self-isolation has attracted designers’ attention to those who greatly suffer from the lack of socialization and resort to digital content and applications to compensate for it. These are the seniors and individuals who have visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities. Of course, creators have been struggling to achieve greater accessibility for quite a while, but 2020 kick-started a few significant projects, and we expect this focus on accessible design to expand this year.
We’ve proven to ourselves that designing for accessibility isn’t something from outer space. By taking advantage of the color contrast for the layout, patterns, and labels for the focal elements, microcopy, and the feature to change the font size, designers create a more enabling environment. This is not to mention the contribution of some well-known companies, like the Xbox Adaptive Controller for the gamers with limited mobility and the remastered Spider Man for the low vision players.
