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Video Transcript
I’m Kirsten Cutshall with Steel Advertising. It’s February 21st, and here’s the top design trends in under 5 minutes.
2025 is bringing exciting design trends that blend creativity with accessibility, sustainability, and innovation. AI is here to stay, serving as every designer’s ultimate wingman. While keeping human creativity at the forefront, AI is enhancing the design process facilitating more detailed work and new production capabilities. Here are the top design trends that we’re seeing right now:
Hyper-realistic: Design is going from graphic to tangible, producing images so detailed and lifelike they almost look like pictures, with an added level of surrealism and intensity. Focusing on precise textures, dramatic lighting, and shadows makes the visuals seem hyper-real.
Custom type: Customized typography features tailored letterforms that reflect a unique personality. Ranging from hand-drawn scripts to experimental shapes, or irregular bubble letters, bespoke type stands out and give their designs a personal touch.
Characters/mascots: Characters are back! Fueled by AI, illustrated characters are becoming the face of many brands again. Designers can craft a couple takes on a highly stylized character, and then AI can generate endless iterations of different emotions, poses, and uses
Light-driven Visual Effects: Light-driven effects are stepping into the spotlight. Light-driven visual effects incorporate gradients, glows, and color overlays, using light as more of a central design element. Watch for aurora gradients that add visual movement to design and anaglyph effects that use red and cyan color shifts to produce a layered or glitchy effect.
Monochromatic: Monochromatic designs embrace a single-color palette focusing on texture, contrast, and lighting to create their forms. White-on-white designs use subtle shadows for a soft, embossed effect known as neumorphism, and dark mode design pairs dark colors, deep shadows with accents of neon for a sleek, high-contrast look.
Fantasy look: The fantasy look is showing up everywhere, it’s lots of fun. The fantasy design trend blends mythical, futuristic, and nature-inspired elements. Featuring whimsical characters and extravagant environments, AI makes this trend more accessible to designers by generating imaginative compositions quickly. This allows designers to create otherworldly scenes with ease and enhance storytelling in digital experiences.
Embracing Accessibility: What’s the point of a great design if some people can’t engage with it properly? Accessibility for all is becoming a design trend on its own. Brands are adopting high contrast color palettes, bold typography, and visual organization to not only meet but embrace Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Sustainability in Design: The off the screen trend toward sustainability is now extending into our design language. Earth tones and colors, recycled texture elements, and nature-inspired patterns communicate that we care about the environment and those environmentally conscious values are really standing out.
Design is rapidly becoming more incredible, as designers are able to practically execute things in their imagination with ease. The future of design promises to be the fusion of creativity with AI-driven possibility.
Thanks for tuning in and don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to discuss further! Embracing these design trends will help your brand stand out!
To learn more, check out these articles:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DFNm_PHuHP2/
https://venngage.com/blog/graphic-design-trends/
https://www.printmag.com/branding-identity-design/brand-design-predictions-for-2025/
https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/graphic-design-trends-2025/
By: Emily Heller
