From graphic templates and fonts to actions, presets, stock images and background to use in your projects, everything you need to streamline your creative process is at your fingertips.
Natural textures such as paper, wood, and twine can add a tactile element to your work, and it’s easy to achieve this effect digitally with the help of various Photoshop Actions and Procreate Brushes. These stamp brushes breathe life into the DIY design trend and enables creators to add an abstract feel through watercolour blobs, ink scribbles, paint splashes, and torn paper shapes. This add-on revels in all the imperfections and inconsistencies that come with art that’s made by hand. Use this mix and match style to layer any number of the 93 stamp brushes and you’ll soon be creating more logos, invitations, and prints that burst with personal touch.
Source: Nature-Inspired Design by Graphic Mama
We all agree saying ‘no’ to single-use plastic and ‘yes’ to looking after the environment. This has brings in some definite commitment to sustainability into graphic design this year. This graphic design trend is all about organic textures, botanicals, and neutral shapes and colours and celebrates our planet. This generates a feeling of being immersed in nature, will be one of the biggest design trends of 2021.
This trend features a raw, unpolished, and hand-crafted style, to evoke a personalized and homemade feel. As web designers bring art and craft to their digital creations, we’ll find different materials and mediums collide to create stunning picture collages with this trend.
From photo magazine collages to animated collages, a cut and paste approach has proven popular across marketing materials, editorial pages and social media feeds in 2020.
Source: cloudfront.net
Web designers often get inspired with design trends from previous decades and nostalgic & retro design re-surfaced with the need for comfort, familiarity and reassurance took centre stage.
Source: Graphic mama
If we take a candy-colored walk down memory lane, we’ll find some 3D paper models take everyday items from the 90’s and elevate them to artforms. These beautifully crafted objects are a love letter to this infamous decade and – for many – will immediately inspire thoughts of childhood and simpler times. Video Producers, motion graphic and YouTube creators can do the same by adding an analogue touch with this old film overlay. Does this immediately remind you of the old school cinemas with noisy projectors? The 35mm reel effect gives footage a dusty scratchy and aged feel. Applications: Floppy discs, Casio watches, Nintendo Gameboy, Rubik’s Cube etc.
Source: 3D Design by Graphic Mama
Source: Optical Illusion by Graphic Mama
Source: 3D Typography by Graphic Mama
Brands, businesses, and creators have been making use of hand-drawn elements in their website and branding projects. Illustration styles such as flat design, hand-drawn typography, and colour-less design, raw sketches will continue leaving a trail in 2021.
Source: Shutterstock
This nature inspired piece of work taps into the organic design and adds a ray of warmth to a content spread through lines, shapes, and textures that look hand-drawn. This simple sketch lends a fun personality to the publication. Line art is simple but highly effective way to animate the inanimate objects, add some illustration into your social media posts, business cards, and logos.
Source: bookmypainting.com
Gold and Jewel tones evokes a sense of wealth and a luxurious aesthetic with variations of matte, metallic, sparkly, shiny or embossed. From white gold to rose gold and yellow gold, this marvellous metal looks great whether it’s used as an accent or in designs giving a star status to everyday objects. The liquid gold adds texture, with contrasting colours, in the form of neutrals and pastels, lending the work a more muted and modern edge.
There are jewel tones like sapphire, amber, ruby, rose quartz, lapis lazuli, black obsidian, tourmaline, emerald etc. This look can be explored with watercolour backgrounds which feature a kaleidoscope of crystallized colours and hues that range from purple through to blues and greens. From posters and flyers to websites and presentations, the high-resolution backgrounds add shine to any project. Often associated with royalty, jewel tones have increased in popularity and are an opulent trend that will continue to sparkle.
Source: Gold Design by Graphic Mama
This trend is a bold and beautiful fusion of abstract and futuristic design elements that are ultra modern and experimental, drawing on geometric and 3D shapes, floating objects, bright colors, metallic textures, optical illusions and first became popular in tech commercials by the suspended, rotating movement, featuring floating objects taken to the next level along with checkerboard patterns and jewel tones. It is clashing chaotic and utterly mesmerizing. It often, involves grids, lines, borders, and structural elements to ensure abstract futurism grounded in reality. Sometimes abstract futurism can channel sci-fi, space age feel through the use of planet rings, intergalactic dust and an electric colour palette aiming at party people.
Source: cloudfront.net
When two contrasting disciplines merge into one to complement one another, it makes for an organised chaos. Chaotic styles like asymmetrical layouts, layering and experimental typography can be merged together into the organized structure. This trend is a combination of method with some madness and includes blending photography, typography, and illustration without shying away from clashing colors. A bright and bold backdrop allows chaotic collages to grab our attention, without allowing competing elements to overwhelm us. Users let our eyes follow a trippy trail of palm trees, organic shapes and retro sunglasses. This trend also allows us to appreciate every individual element without getting distracted from the work as a whole. A minimal monochrome color scheme balances the chaotic scribbles, outlines, gradients and photocopier-inspired distortions, which overall lends the work a gritty, sketchbook feel. This ensures that the original image can always be heard over customizable background and foreground ‘noise’.
Source: medium.com
This trend makes use of icons, cartoon characters, 3d illustrations, design dundles, animation assets, to share stories. Emoji’s are modern day symbols that depict thoughts and feelings that everyone can relate to. These are universal elements to express emotions powerfully. A growing interest in mystical design trends like spirituality, witchcraft, magic and cosmic art has led to the increased use of symbolism in design like burning candles and two-headed snakes, this trend can be used to recall a spooky, centuries-old book of spells, spiritual motifs and lunar elements. Such mystic symbols can be combined with geometric shapes, plants, and animals, to tap in some minimalist trend. These delicate designs can be read as symbols of wisdom, love, hope, and serenity. Framed by dots and dashes or surrounded by stars, each standalone icon can be customized in Adobe Illustrator or PhotoShop to suit your creative project.
Source: Cartoon Illustration by Graphic Mama
Source: Emoji Design by Graphic Mama
From representing people of all races, backgrounds, body types, religious beliefs and sexual orientations to de-stigmatizing mental health and standing up for social, political and environmental issues, inclusive trend will be important as we enter 2021. Such illustrations swap literal representations for a more abstract approach while still exploring themes of universality and commonality. Also, a community of characters drawn in block colors and bold shapes can be featured even without facial expressions to open up a variety of creative contexts, allowing a broader audience to identify with the characters. It is a simple but striking collection of graphics that can be customized and edited with Adobe Illustrator.
Serif fonts communicate a sense of trustworthiness and credibility for which people have been craving during these uncertain times. Modern soft serif with rounded edges is far more engaging and elegant and is different from traditional-style type that first came about in mid 18th century. Also, Loverica Bold is a typeface looks classic and contemporary at the same time with its ascenders, descenders, tight letter spacing and above the baseline ‘o’. Each upper case character comes in seven styles, while the addition of symbols, numbers, and ascents means that it can be used in a variety of languages. These days’ elegant fonts are not reserved for wedding invitations and inspirational quotes only. Brands, businesses, and publications reach for these top-shelf fonts to highlight their day to day copy. From minimalist to experimental fonts, modern editorial publications, creative projects, and marketing campaigns encompass all the latest styles.
Source: creativemarket.com
It is an extension of 3D models where image is constructed entirely out of 3D cubes. These are called as Voxel models which are created in Voxel editor. Minecraft Game is one of the very popular application of Voxel Art Graphic Design.
Source: pinimg.com
Source: Voxel Art by Graphic Mama
Monochrome means black and white or various tones of same colour, and Duotone makes use of various tints of two colours.
Monochrome Color Palette
Duotone Colour Palette
These are commonly used techniques for colour consistency which can be created using Dolbi Indesign with the help of Photoshop.
Source: corel.com
Neutral colours effectively add an organic feel to the designs, like in this branding project that replicates the environment’s natural palette. Burnt orange, sky blue, olive green immediately places us amidst the great outdoors, as does the subtle leaf design. This can be combined with imagery, typography, freeform shapes, curvy outlines to create eye-catching social media content to create warm and inviting designs.
Muted color palettes can be used to create highly saturated hues such as Flat UI Colors adding a bit of tint, tone, shade – making the design more or less brighter and subdued. The resultant image shows up with a softer and calmer feel and is easier to work with.
Source: pinimg.com
This trend involved making use of images, graphs, charts, colours judiciously – a proper mix of data, story, share-ability, and design to give image that perfect look. We have a couple of easy to use and highly intuitive data visualization tools to help you through like: Data Wrapper, RAWGraphs, Charted, Chart Studio, Fastcharts, Palladio, Chartbuilder, Timeline.js, and Canva Graph maker. We saw some of the best data visualization projects in 2020: Codex Atlanticus, Where the Wild Things Glow, The Atlas of Moons, A View on Despair, Drowning in Plastic, Starbucks Data Wall Experience, How to Dress for Space, The Many Shapes of England’s Cricket Stadiums, Symbolikon, Space Junk, Leaps in Space, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, LGBT: Unprotected by Law, Data Grammar, Georgia Lupi Data Fashion, Beautiful News Daily, Global Commodities, Building Hopes, Market Cafe Mag, Why Do Cats and Dogs? and many more.
Source: visme.co
This trend involves weaving a story – pictograph – infographics with images and text to convey an explicit message to the audience. It seems like a digital marketing power point template design that can be used in coherence with powerpoint presentations to create layouts to showcase on social media.
Source: pinimg.com
Text Heavy Videos
Text-motion videos, studio-quality videos, or simply animated texts along with the videos are a great way to express the leigh text interactively. Showing the text along with the video thumbnail to let end users know what the video is about. This trending graphic design makes it easier to share blog articles, PDF’s, books, and online reviews. Such explainer videos include whiteboard, shaky lines, cutouts, motion graphics, cartoon, typography, and infographics.
Source: ytimg.com
We’ll experience more decades with these ongoing and upcoming modern graphic design trends that promise to make you time-travel. Learn more about how you can bring the natural world into your next project with our organic designs. We follow the tips to add tactile, hand-crafted elements to using neutral color palettes. That does it for the graphic design trends you’ll be seeing in 2021. Are there any we’ve missed? If you would like to discuss the same with our web designers, contact us here.
Neeti Kotia is a technology journalist who seeks to analyze the advancements and developments in technology that affect our everyday lives. Her articles primarily focus upon the business, social, cultural, and entertainment side of the technology sector.
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