Keeping up to date, studying and understanding design trends is an important way for designers to better and improve their work. Some of these trends stick around for a while, whilst others fade away pretty quickly. Here are some graphic design trends that you should consider avoiding in 2021.
Heavy use of gradients
‘Good design’ is definitely a subjective term, but I think it’s widely accepted that if your design is more on the simple side, it will be considered ‘good’. A few years ago, designers avoided using gradients all together because it gave the impression of design from the 90’s. But with the rise of ‘flat design’, that situation changed, and gradients grew in popularity. Overusing gradients can distract and overwhelm viewers when looking at your designs, its best to use gradients sparingly. It can also make your designs look too heavy and leads to a bad visual hierarchy. Its best to follow a balanced approach when using gradients, try using them to add subtle depth into your designs or to draw the user’s eye to a specific part of your design.
Relying on stock images
Not everyone has the budget or resources to take professional looking images, so of course designers are going to use stock images. The key to using stock photos is to carefully think about the images and how it can benefit and improve your work. Its best to look for a variety of images, images that look natural and images that will reflect your clients and audience well.
Helvetica
Helvetica is a classic. Designed in 1957 and used by some of the biggest companies in the world such as apple, NASA and BMW, Helvetica is one of the most used typefaces today. However, it’s argued that it’s become so overused that it’s lost its distinction. “As much as I love Helvetica, there seems to be a tendency for inexperienced designers to overuse the typeface, especially for branding work,” says Jason Lawes, owner of Red Sentence, a creative design and strategic marketing company. When you want to emphasise your designs or grab someone’s attention, its best to avoid Helvetica but if you’re writing a body of text, Helvetica is still ideal. There are so many fun and exciting typefaces out there so try and experiment with them to create something cool and unique.
Muted colours
Simplicity in design is in, but so is bright and vivid colour schemes. According to Jessica Rhoades, owner and designer at Create IT Web Designs "muted, natural colour schemes are going out of style. Costumers want their graphics to pop on the screen. They want to be bright and stand out from their competition”. The use of bright colours can also help trigger emotions when looking at them. For example, the colour red evokes love and/or hate, yellow evokes happiness and blue evokes calmness and tranquillity.
Complex designs
Again, simplicity is key. Over complicating your designs can lead to visual clutter. By reducing the number of elements your design has or adding some negative/white space here and there can actually do the opposite. A simple design doesn’t mean you need strip your design down just for the sake of it, a simple design means only the necessities are included in the final product. Ask yourself questions about the value of each element you’ve included in your design and if you think it won’t serve the user, remove it.
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