3. 2004 IN PRINT
This year, the trend is “Loud and Clear.” Books, pages, images, and copy blocks are big, spacious, and solidly built. Color is strong, and copy is to the point. Hardly any layouts use multicolumn grids. Instead, we’re seeing full-page compositions. Text runs the width of the page. Photographs are big, either full-bleed or cropped to make the image look large relative to the frame.

Spreads are half-and-half in many cases, with strong contrasts between the spreads. Photographs are paired with either empty pages or minimal copy. Color is back, with many designs running rich, solid colors on entire pages.

Compositions are being weighted towards the bottom of the page, with text set low and white space at the top. Sagmeister leads the way with the fabulous Hugo Boss Prize 2004 catalog [5].

The only alternative seems to be the checkerboard grid, used to conceptual eΩect in SamataMason’s design for the Aptar Group. It’s also used to organize multiple and variable data points in Earl Gee’s design for Doll Capital Management, and the AIGA design conference registration brochure [6] (the data in the latter case being the speakers). Silhouettes are being used well and often, creating strong shapes on the page surrounded by white or colored space. VSA’s design for Mohawk Paper’s “Barbara Barry” promotion is a lush, gorgeous example. See magazine [7], designed by Cahan & Associates for Herman Miller, is a harder-working entry. In fact, it is a strong exemplar of all the trends I’ve mentioned— hardly a surprise. Designers have been wise to learn from them. Text is being set in solid, single blocks, with reasonable leading. Extreme spacing, shaped margins, words in different sizes in one sentence, or sentences wandering around the page at will are gone.

Another interesting, but less pleasing trend is the relatively low showing of high-concept pieces. The AIGA San Francisco’s “Grown in California” call for entries is a refreshing exception. Designed by Pentagram, San Francisco, it gives us icons of design categories in the form of oranges.

Methodologie’s “Small = Big” annual report for the Semiconductor Industry Association works the size concept well, right down to the size of the book. My favorite concept piece is the menu for the Standard Downtown L.A. and Hollywood [8]. A big plastic sleeve holds a simple, replaceable, one-sheet menu. The concept on the back has larger-than-life portraits of smiling, attractive people of different types (plus one Chihuahua), who become your friends’ dining companions when you hold the menu up to read it—an idea I’ve never seen before. Expect more in this vein.

3. 2004 ON THE WEB
Let’s get horizontal, baby.

Winning web designs this year follow some of the same trends as print: spacious layouts with large areas of solid color, big photographs, a minimum of text set in solid blocks, and so on—all of which work well on the web.

What’s interesting is that many of the layouts are strongly horizontal, so there’s hardly any scrolling. More interesting is that many designers are using Flash to create single-window interfaces that bring the words and images to you (a direction Bryan Dorsey at Cow Design was insisting on in 1998—hey, guy, they heard you!). Deep, linear sites that make you click from window to window seem to be going away. A good example of both trends is www.ekizian.com [9].

Many more sites are using sound as well, both to entertain and to provide affordances—clues to interactive elements. Branding with sound is a big, big thing. Just ask www.muzak.com [10]. Or to see how nicely it can work, take a trip to www.jeffvenditti.com [11].

Icons are just about gone. Only one commercial site in this group uses them: www.kncgolf.com [12]. Presumably golfers are a somewhat conservative, technology-averse group. Even so, these icons are small, flat, and simple.

Visually, web designers seem to have let go of the need to make stylized, futuristic, or otherwise mannered pages, focusing instead on the content. They’ve gone back to good design and clear, simple layouts. However, here’s a caveat: Most of the winning sites are self-promos for design and communications firms. In past reviews of interactive entries for other competitions, we noticed that many firms who designed excellent sites for themselves had far clunkier sites in their portfolios. You can’t blame the designers. The reason big, cluttered sites with lame technology get built may have to do with internal agendas on the client side. The same effect is probably working here, and trends across the internet may be very different from what we’re reporting.