Graphic Designing Trends You Must Watch Out For In 2021

With the uncountable large scale changes in the world in the past, brands today haven’t been experimenting with design and colors. This brings us to a thought, we can say they are jumping back to the classic favorites like muted color palettes, serif fonts, and uncomplicated graphics for transparent communication. The intention behind this is to attempt to invoke a sense of calmness, encourage simplicity, and positivity in an ultra topsy turvy world. Loud colors, flashy fonts, and in the face marketing isn’t going to work well for your brand.

So you must be wondering what graphic design trends will dominate in 2021? Continue reading to know the top 7 graphic designs you must embrace in 2021.

1. Increased Use of Muted Color Palettes:

Muted colors are the duller (tending towards neutral) cousins of bright colors, made by infusion of black, white and complementary colors. Below is a comparative graphic that will help you understand the light muted and darl muted version of 5 basic colors red, yellow, green, blue and pink.

Previously bold and bright colors took away the laurels but these days people are appreciative of relaxed and understated colors. Muted colors demonstrate traits of safety, security and even nostalgia. The use of flashy colors and textures in the current pandemic situation doesn’t seem to do well for your business. Most business social media pages currently are falling back to muted colors, with a long economic recovery ahead. These colors make the page look comfortable and genuine. This allows the audience on your website or social media page to be on your page for a longer time.

In addition to making a graphic feel more authentic, muted colors also feel very natural and organic. This creates warmth and satisfaction among the audience currently. Health and wellness are the most talked about topic these days, we assume that consumer product brands will soon join the muted color graphics race.

One more advantage of using muted colors is that it seamlessly blends well with the text. You can use the dark muted version with a light/subtle font color or vice versa. Irrespective of the tone you utilize as the background the lighter version font text will fit best.

2. Noncomplicated Visual Presentation of Data:

There are tons of complex data flying around everywhere. As a designer or a communicator, you must try to make data less horrifying and easier to comprehend. The ultimate goal of every visual data is to make complex data fit into one graphic which is simpler to absorb. Also, your audience should be able to understand data visualization without much effort. Below is an example of a simple data visualization graphic that shows a comparison of 2 search terms: Graphic designing and color palettes.

Some graphic designers have been prioritizing style over the matter for publicity on various social media websites. Not just that, some designers over-load the audience with too much data in just one graphic where the essence of the graphic is lost. In the above example graphic, the topic is very clear and the graph displays the trend with their respective identified color. We can clearly see the Graphic design trend in Blue and the color palette trend in red. Line graphs, Pie charts and bar graphs are known to maximum people hence limiting yourself to known forms of data visualization is recommended. Sometimes you don’t have to even take the help of graphs or charts if you have a single entity with no comparison factors. It will get your point across a lot more clearly and quicker than trying to use complex visualization designs.

3. Geometric Shapes Will Dominate:

Previously a plethora of designers made ample use of flowy and abstract shapes in their designs. But recently, these have been replaced with rigid, hard-edged geometric shapes. Geometric shapes are recommended as they are known to add order, consistency and structure to a visual graphic. You can not only use one geometrical element (eg: Circles) but also use more than one element in your design as they all fall under the same family of shapes. Just not that, you can also use the same element i.e. a circle more than once in one graphic.

Geometrical shapes that are not consistent can be blended seamlessly with the use of a muted color background. Because geometric shapes are so exact and hard-edged, they create a lot of good contrast when used with a more natural muted color palette. Focusing on the right contrast combination between the muted background color and the strong edges of the geometrical shape shall make the visual eye-catching. There are tons of geometrical shapes you can explore your visual graphics with, so get going and start exploring in 2021.

4. Back To Flat Icons and Illustrations:

Utilizing flat icons and illustration was a 5 year back trend that is currently picking up again. That isn’t a drawback, it’s just that design trends peak and get out of fashion and then come back. Currently, flat icons are trending as they can adapt to various graphic sharing platforms like social media, presentations and many more.

We all relate to a few generic icons like: Website, thumbs up, tick marks, etc. Even if you as a designer decide to not include text with your flat icons the audience still gets the message you want to deliver. Icons can be a powerful tool for visual communication. With a few icons, you can tell a simple visual story that will give a lot more context to your social media post, blog post, infographic, or video compared to plain text. You can also use multiple icons and illustrations to create complex visuals like the image reference shared above retaining the meaning. You also have the added advantage of infusing your logo colors along with these flat icons for higher brand recognition.

5. Classic Fonts Are Back in Action:

Classic fonts are gaining popularity compared to fancy flowy fonts. Serif font has been appreciated and well-liked by the formal and informal industry audience. Serif fonts are one of the oldest font styles or typefaces that are still in use. They date back to the 15th century and have been utilized ever since then. It is a brilliant idea to use a classic font like a Serif on your landing pages which will emphasize certain elements. It is best used to give solutions to audience pain areas. The example below shall help you understand this statement better.

They use a simple font to set the tone of their whole site and although they are a huge company now, it feels very authentic. These classic fonts are popular to demonstrate classic, elegant or trustworthiness. They can evoke a feeling of nostalgia for a large group of the population. If you are in a trust-building business like the finance industry you cannot afford to play with fancy font styles in your social media graphics because it will not display trustworthiness. As stated earlier with muted color palettes, brands are trying to seem a lot more genuine and positive with time. Some brands are even using serif fonts with muted or neutral color palettes to really drive the audience towards conversions.

6. Slide Decks on Social Media Websites:

Slide decks are those images displayed in the form of a slide that is created to share on various social media websites. These slide decks are mostly compatible to share on Instagram or LinkedIn because of the way that those platforms handle images. Additionally, the algorithms on Instagram and LinkedIn seem to promote these slide decks a lot more than a single image.

An ideal way to start a social slide deck is with a question to which answers will appear while you swipe left. The second proven way is similar to the above picture, where there are multiple pictures to 1 topic. This is trending currently as many businesses want to demonstrate connectivity.

7. Videos Will Be Text-Heavy:

Looking at the current scenario, it seems we are likely to work remotely as we enter 2021. This makes shooting new video content very difficult. You will not be able to jump over to your video room and shoot a quick video with your team anymore. Or even hire a freelancer very easily. It’s still quarantine time. During quarantine, you would have seen someone talking to the computer and that’s all about your video project. At some point, people are going to get tired of seeing someone talk directly to their computer. Currently, we believe that video content is going to seamlessly blend with text and motion graphics a lot more like animated videos.

As these videos don’t really need time for shooting, editing, finishing touches the turnaround time/delivery of these types of videos is quick. Instead of needing an entire production team at work, here you need to brainstorm an idea and dedicate it to a specialist. It saves you not only a lot of time but also resources. This trend of making videos that are text-heavy is used for various purposes: Full product information videos and also Application run-throughs.

Summing up, the graphic trends for 2021, we are not expecting a paradigm shift. In fact, from a heavy and glossy look to graphics, minimalism and simple graphics are going to be appreciated. To stay ahead of the curve, your Graphic designing service provider or team needs to keep in mind both graphic trends and content marketing trends for optimal marketing output on various social media platforms. 

Ref:
https://venngage.com/blog/graphic-design-trends/