Adhering and incorporating trends in to your design can often be a push and pull. Creativity is something that some feel is innate and following the trend is the opposite of what creativity should be.

Trends matter because they showcase our culture at specific times: what we love, what we hate, and what we want to move toward. It highlights what we crave artistically as a society and how we interact with each other through specific trends.

Colors and Gradients Galore

No mute colors wanted! Vibrant color palettes breathed air in to the dead of winter and will continue throughout 2019. This encompasses gradient backgrounds to image overlays to animations and infographics.

One way to really see that bright colors are for 2019 is Pantone’s color of the year: Living Coral. Pantone states that this color nurtures a positive attitude and playfulness. This seems like a no-brainer for having color within your brand, but the friendly reminder is always nice.

The addition of gradients in the color palette can be a useful and purposeful design element to break up text or to build highlights around specific content. The biggest shift from 2018, is not the use of gradients itself, but that they are in bright colors and becoming a main design focus area.

Emotional Design

This may seem a little harder to incorporate, but once a designer understands the messaging you wish to convey, the visual cues will and should pop right off the page. The user will instantaneously feel what the intended emotions are and have the desired reactions that were strategized.

The current consumer of today looks for an overall experience and emotional connection when looking in to brands and products. The traditional transactional relationship does not work with today’s consumers. Having a deeper connection with your audience will build a stronger and longer lasting relationship as you mature together.

Depth and 3D

With the rising use of virtual reality, this trend is a way to play off of the capabilities of virtual reality without having to have the actual experience or equipment needed.

Designers are using influences from virtual reality with additions of depth to have a more real or tactical feel to the design elements.

But, designers are all also using that depth design element to create 3D techniques to a traditional flat design. Techniques like elevating the design to give levels to an element without the need of special equipment is a trend that is exciting and filled with anticipation of how it can be used to its fullest. With the use of animation to highlight the influence of virtual reality with the updated design element from a traditional flat perspective.

Animation

Gifs seem to be EVERYWHERE, why? Because it’s a trend. You see people solely communicate with the use of different gifs to convey emotions to have an entire conversation.

Animation is seen in HTML emails to send a special message or to entice the user to click through to begin the discovery stage to convert to purchases.

Where animation is on the rise is in the use of mobile applications. Websites are optimized for mobile viewing and so does animation without difficulty. This can be really effective when smartphone use is at its highest.

Data in the Forefront

Infographics have been a popular design element for a few years, but this is shifting by utilizing the presented data in a thought-out story. Yes, here are the numbers, but how do they tell the consumer, easily, what we need to tell them?

This combined with an interactive feature (animation, scrolling panels, click and draw maps), is an element that users love to understand that numbers with the guidance of purposeful design.

UX Conscious

Purposeful design. This is what many UX writers and developers are taking in to consideration when creating the design and layout of websites and applications. This is a very thoughtful and meticulous task that may not seem initially part of a design, but a very crucial step.

How a consumer perceives the ease of your company’s website or mobile application will be a deciding factor in the conversion to sales. Consumers look for the OVERALL experience as part of their decision-making on initial purchases and loyalty to a brand. This element and part of the design stage has to be engaged heavily.

Sketch

Many are seeing Sketch as the go-to web design software for 2019. This software is built specifically for web designers and has capabilities to cover the majority of the design process – such as designs to prototyping to client presentation. Predictions are seeing more companies move towards Sketch and away from Photoshop as their main design software.

Freelance Staff

It seems like an impossible task to incorporate all these new trends in to what your company is doing or wishes to accomplish. One way this can be done is to hire an agency, if the budget and strategy allows, or hire individuals on a freelance or temporary basis to build in aspects of the above trends in to your current branding, messaging, and experience.

Benefits of freelance designers vs agency:

• Individualized attention and contact
• Response Time
• Specialized skills and abilities
• Cost

Consulting with Colleen Eakins Design will help your company pinpoint areas where utilizing these trends may not be such a bad decision and won’t weigh you down like the baggy jeans of the 1990s!