Look around and you will notice the power of graphic designs everywhere. Graphic designs have become a part of our everyday lives in a variety of shapes such as signage, books, posters, websites, branding, packaging, magazines and newspapers.

A graphic design is what makes such things attractive and aesthetically appealing.

As the global marketplace is evolving and growing, the requirement for striking graphics for businesses has become extremely important. It plays a crucial role in setting up and maintaining a successful business. From brand recognition to communication to efficiency and productivity, graphic designs can set a strong foundation for a business.

They give a business a visual presentation and a face that makes it widely recognized and appreciated. The typical meaning of graphic fosters users to reach for the brand and feel attracted to it or to instantly decide that it’s a submissive product and has no value associated with it. A strong brand identity can infuse a sense of credibility and trust in your customers and conveys a message that you are a reliable and well-recognized company.

However, graphic designing is an ever-growing process where new trends keep on appearing every now and then. They emerge, stay for years and fade out, thanks to the continuously increasing curiosity of the graphic designers.

Whether you are a graphic designer or a business owner, you definitely wouldn’t want your designs to look outdated. Therefore, it becomes important to stay up-to-date with these new emerging trends and give your designs a new look and feel.

Today, in this article, we have rounded up 14 possible graphic design trends to follow.

1. Bold and Dramatic Typography

With typography becoming a major part of any brand identity, users are seeing creative typefaces emerging every now and then. Typography is not just for reading – it is for conveying the right message. The latest trend in Typography has introduced bold and playful typography that draws the attention of your target audience. You can add drama to your typography with the help of texture, color, and size. Letter stacking and playful, bold statements make your typography not only stand out from the rest but also make your website look cool.

An example of bold and dramatic typography trend:

A graphic design by Snask for the Washington Post has justified the idea of using bold typography to illustrate a tactile idea. It features a combination of various topics including art, music, drink and food and the outdoors.

2. Fanciful Illustrations

Fanciful and whimsical illustrations are yet another emerging graphic design trends where illustrators are striving to create unique yet powerful illustrations or imagery to make businesses stand out. Graphic designers making use of illustrated hero images, isometric projections, digital and analog, techniques and tools, brushstrokes and sketchy lines.

An example of fanciful illustrations trend:

A great example of fanciful illustrations can be seen on Dropbox site that takes a customized approach to introduce a fun human element on its homepage.

3. Retro modern style

Retro modern styles are drawn from the early 80s and 90s and look really cool. Retro styles were first used in logo design, and penetrating to almost every other facet of graphic and web design. The modern retro style is inspired by arcade video games, Tron, big cell phones, pixel art, and vintage pixel art.

An example of Retro Modern Style design:

This illustration by Ralph Cifra of modern equipment in a retro style has a contemporary yet retro feel, complete with an iPad and 3D glasses.

4. Material design

In 2014, Google released its material design guidelines that incorporated international white space, large-scale typography, edge-to-edge imagery, and deliberate color choices for a graphic and bold look. A majority of people are referring Flat 2.0 to material design, simply because it is an update to the existing flat design. Though Google released it for mobile and the web, you can expect to see material design in almost every type of design formats. Moreover, tile-based and card layouts are a part of the material design.

Pinterest is a great example of card layouts and tile-based layouts.

Another great example of material design is showcased by Balraj Chana which incorporates different principles of material design including shadow and light effects, large type and bold colors.

5. Intelligently built menus

Hamburger Menu has become the hot topic among graphic designers and webmasters. Though some people literally hated the concept of hamburger menu, it has replaced traditional navigational menus and introduced more intuitive navigation. Hidden menus that will soon become the new norm. Hidden menus are supposed to appear when they are needed from apparently out of nowhere. The main agenda behind this is to offer what’s really important for the user at a specific time.

Outdated Browser website showcases one of the best ways to use hamburger menus on a site without making navigation difficult for users.

6. Modular text and Modules

How do you like reading a lengthy content? Well, not everybody is fond of reading a dreadfully long content. Earlier, the trick of writing long content was to break it down into short paragraphs and points to make it easier for the user to read. However, users are becoming impatient and considering the number of options available, it has become extremely difficult to hold the attention of a user.

But does that mean you should stop writing long posts? Of course no! Modular design is here to the rescue. This latest design uses the technique where content is displayed in small grid pattern blocks with lines and columns to not only make it easier for the users to read your content but also to hold their interest.

Natalie Armendariz’s design serves as an effective management tool while boasting of a more freeform and loose grids. This design shows that layouts do not have to follow a strict grid or pattern blocks to fully embrace a modular design.

7. App Inspired design

Users are getting accustomed to faster browsing experiences in native applications. In fact, designers offer that sites should integrate quick wins from app designs such as tailored user experience, zero distractions, and speed. Now, webmasters are catching up on app-inspired design to either add a level of exclusivity or to an app like features. In a nutshell, app-inspired design trend fosters clean and simple design which eliminates all the unnecessary elements.

For instance, Free Make music school puts together minimalist yet essential elements.

8. Usability focused design

This point requires a whole different article to explain it in-depth. However, we are not going to leave this point saying just that. Today, design is all about user experience and user interface. As a matter of fact, a design is only as good as the presentation of a dish. If it is not tasty, nobody is going to eat or in our case browse it. Therefore, no matter how cool your design looks, if it’s not usable, it’s of no use. And when it comes to website design, the whole idea of designing a site narrows down to “improved user engagement”. You no longer would hear such comment, “Yes, the design is quite beautiful, but I apparently find it hard to navigate around”.

Bit Map Galaxy has a power of visual content that builds high usability and fastest loading times.

9. Responsive Design

Apparently, responsive design is no longer an option, it has become the need of the hour, thanks to the continuous emergence of new devices. Moreover, the mobile screen has already become the first screen and offering mobile-friendly versions of the website is more important than ever now. In fact, Google, a giant search engine, has already started crushing websites that do not provide mobile-friendly designs. Responsive design helps your web design look presentable on every internet enabled device and offer better user experience. However, a good responsive device should have immaculate usability so that whenever a site is accessed from a mobile, the user enjoys the same user experience.

The best example to illustrate this design trend is Netflix redesigned website. They have unleashed their new brand with new graphic materials, logo and visual identity while following the principle of responsive design.

10. Parallax Scrolling

The parallax design has been around for some time now and has become a trend in the graphic design world. In parallax scrolling effect, the background and foreground move at different speeds to build a sensation of depth. Parallax Scrolling effect tells a story in an animated pattern that holds the users’ interest.

The concept of keeping the user interested in your site by adding a scrolling effect has well illustrated by The Dangers of Fracking where they have integrated a parallax scrolling effective with minimalism. It features a horizontal scrolling just above the footer which certainly fulfills two purposes – one to provide information in an interactive way and second to hold the users’ interest.

11. Motion

Animations and motion pictures bring still images and illustrations to life. This design trend grabs the attention of a user with just a flicker of movement. With the help of cinemagraphs and 2D animation, graphic designers transform still images into motion to draw the eye of the users without distracting them from the content.

Artist Said Dagdeviren shows some beautiful examples of animations and motion pictures.

12. Flat

The flat design incorporates subtle gradients, white spaces, bold typography, colorful, clean and simple look. It is basically inspired by the Swiss, Bauhaus and minimalism style. Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player introduced flat design in 2006 which was renewed by Apple’s iOS 7 in 2013 and later in 2014 by Google’s Material design. The trend of flat and simple design has the power of a visual language that offers fast loading times and highest usability. The flat design has drawn so much attention that you can expect to see this design grow from UI design to illustration and surface pattern design.

To offer a sense of depth, Disky Chairiandy incorporate shadow and light effects in a weather app to illustrate a Flat 2.0 design.

13. Slight Raster Graphics & Resolution Impartiality

With the evolution of the internet, marketing has taken a new face. Today, businesses are promoting their brand on the internet and thus, it becomes more important than ever that a successful online business delivers speed and performance along with striking graphical intervention. For this, graphic designers are using SVG graphics to optimize utilities and offer better performance.

Paul Irish, a front-end developer has combined CSS, HTML and SVG to create some beautiful visual filters for visual content.

14. Focus on Wordmarks

Logos are a major part of a brand identity and are supposed to last an eternity. The emergence of new businesses and rebranding of traditional businesses make it difficult for the customer to connect traditional logos with their relevant businesses. Therefore, today graphic designers are focusing more on wordmarks. They are self-contained, complete and can certainly last a lifetime without the need to rebrand them.

Get inspired by Junian’s wordmark logo design that features letters and round 5 mixed martial arts logo.

Graphic design keeps changing with time and therefore, it is important to stay up to date with these designs to improve your designs while offering enhanced user experience.

Hope you like our list of graphic designs. In case we have missed anything, you are always welcome to share your ideas and/or design predictions with us and our audience.