Our team of designers here at Glacier Media Digital love to keep an open mind and embrace new ideas. To ensure we’re ahead of the game, our team hosts monthly lunch and learns to keep everyone up to date with the latest trends and technologies, and our internal project critiques often yield rewarding discussions that teach us new ways to tailor our work to meet the consumer’s needs.

The digital marketing world is a well-oiled machine, consumer interests are constantly evolving and a great way to foresee the direction the market is heading is to monitor upcoming design trends.

Why? Design trends tell us a lot about our audience. They are indicative of what people are responding to and allow us to define customer experiences that are reflective of their wants and needs – leading them down to the path of conversion.

Our creative director Robert often says “designers are enhancers”, so take a peek below for upcoming design trends that could help enhance your project.

 

Negative Space Logos

The design of a good logo must first and foremost be responsive. Simply put, good logos should be recognizable at any scale, on any device. As we fret over the need for responsive logos that are impactful across a range of devices (cell-phones, tablets, laptops and varying desktop monitors) so we begin to see the proliferation of negative space logos.

Negative space logos are logos with minimal colour palettes that feature a shape carved out of a coloured shape or letters. For instance, take the logo above for One. Upon further inspection, you’ll notice that it features the shape of the number “1” as a hidden element between the letters.

Use of negative space can make people think twice, thus creating a longer lasting impression. A design that tells you more the more you look at it can both be rewarding and enriching customer experience, hooking their curiosity at first glance.

Gone are the days of maximalist design that try and cram too much information. These logo designs are no longer legible on mobile, and thus the use of negative space is a creative way to scale up your logo and make a long term impact.

 

Mixing Flat Design with 3D

Take a peek at your phone and you’ll probably notice that all the app icons are made up of 2D vectors. Flat design is the use of simple two-dimensional elements paired with bright colors to create a minimalist user interface. What studies and user testing show, is that people find it easier to navigate websites when there is less clutter.

While flat design is not exactly an upcoming trend, as it’s been around since early 2017, we are seeing the emergence of a new way to use flat design – designers are starting to use colorful flat design elements as a background to emphasize a three-dimensional element in front of it. The contrasting pair of elements often makes the realistic element seem to pop out of the screen, hooking a user’s attention.

 

Bigger & Bolder Typography

Typography is starting to become a prominent design element in itself, even as far as to replace images. Big bold fonts command attention and allows the marketing message to take center stage.

Sometimes good typography can make just as good an impression as an image. It gets rid of the visual clutter and emphasizes what’s important. Creating a straight-forward customer experience that doesn’t waste their time.

Fonts hold significant brand power in that they can be used to reflect a brand’s personality. For instance, a serif font is often associated with tradition and reliability, while sans serif fonts are associated with the modern. So why not shine the spotlight on this timeless tried-and-true design element?

 

CSS Grid Layout

Within the internal design world, the flood gates are now open for more risk-taking designs on the web with the emersion of CSS Grid – designers will now be able to place elements exactly where they want, vertically and horizontally.

Even though the CSS layout mode Flexbox was a saviour for many web developers and designers, including solutions for old issues like convenient center-aligning for web; We expect to be seeing huge shifts in web design as CSS grid opens up a whelm of possibilities to take responsive content organization to a whole other level. The easier the design process is behind the scenes (think cleaner markups!) leaves room for optimized customer experiences.

 

 

We are a third way into 2019 and so far the year is shaping up to be one of the most exciting years within the design world. We are certainly looking forward to using these elements to enhance our projects.

To learn more about the design packages we offer, contact us

https://glaciermediadigital.ca/contact-us/