We all love fads—for a while. When does a fad become a trend, what do trends tell us about ourselves, and how do they affect the evolution of design? A look at this year’s STEP 100 winners shows us where we are. ¶ “Trend” is a dirty word. No one wants to think their work is based on an ephemeral fad. At the same time, we can’t resist the latest thing. It’s new, it’s fun, it’s young and hip, and absurd—and we love its energy. We can’t help but be affected by it. ¶ Is this a bad thing? Does a trend have to be trendy? Or do the tides of trends reflect real changes and developments in our world? ¶ Of course they do. ¶ Fads bubble up out of the ebullience of youth, who work hard on being diΩerent from their parents (and similar to their peers). They do crazy things. They do lovable things, too, and then all us old people start co-opting their fads. After a while, what was a fad becomes a trend, as elements of the fad enter the design vocabulary. With more time, those elements acquire polish as successive individuals redesign it, and it becomes an accepted, even classic, design trope. If we’re smart about it, we figure out why the fad started in the first place, and explore other ways of expressing the ideas behind it. ¶ To see how trends work, look back—the present moves too fast to see it clearly. Trends are driven not only by reactions against existing aesthetics, but also by technology, available image sources, and, of course, cultural or political change. Let’s consider the 1990s as an example.

1. 1990s TRENDS
It was a decade of relentless, extravagant experimentation. In researching my article, “A Decade of Design Trends” for HOW magazine, February 2003, I found four main drivers for the trends:

By the late ’90s, designers got tired of all this visual extravagance and rediscovered minimalism, naturally.

*TECHNOLOGY AND TRENDS
Any time technology gives designers new control over production, we get an efflorescence of experimentation.
1830s: Color lithography on stone plates was perfected. Designers delighted in drawing directly on the stone with soft, responsive crayons, and the French poster was transformed by Jules Cheret from all-type handbills into a swirling froth of lovely ladies in full color. Others followed.
1920s: Constructivists took over printers’ typecases to design abstract compositions with fonts and rules only. They abandoned printers’ composition sticks so they could set the metal elements at angles, anchoring them to the platen with plaster or glue.
1950s: Photostat technology allowed designers to transform existing faces, overlap letterforms, and draw their own calligraphic fonts. Think of Herb Lubalin’s fluid, interlaced logotypes, and, ultimately, Victor Moscoso’s curvy, psychedelic poster texts.
1990s: The Mac put the designer in full control of type and image, while eliminating the need to make color separations for graphics by hand. We got bitmapped images, deconstructed fonts, layered graphics, and collaged photography. Original illustration declined as CD-ROM archives exploded, giving designers almost infinite choice among images from across time and across the globe, which they could then transform at will.

This year’s crop shows us that most of the ’90s trends are still active—probably because there were so many we’re still trying to make sense of them. However, the style elements have been polished, integrated into the canon, and redeployed in clean, strong compositions. Techno, retro, and industrial styles are still around, but instead of seeing entire pieces in these styles, we’re seeing elements used as details in spacious, modernist layouts. Target’s park bench fundraiser catalog, designed by HartungKemp [1], is bolted together and uses the boxed-copy device of industrial style, but it also has an asymmetrical cover with a strong silhouetted graphic on it. Wink’s designs for Frango [2] show retro elements on pure chocolate grounds in minimal compositions.

We still see some genuine-artifact items, but instead of being campy, they’re exquisitely designed. The Six Feet Under [3] book is designed as a scrapbook, and the Balthazar Cookbook [4] quotes 19th-century sources, but both have clean, open layouts with strong contrast and hierarchy. In short, ’90s fads have been professionalized, and basic principles of good design have taken over.