One trend vector continues without change: The vast majority of the winning entries come from the design side of the world. Corporate and commercial work continue to be in the minority. As an industry observer this bothers me. I want to see everything. As a trends analyst, it doesn’t bother me at all. If you want to find trends, look at trendsetters.

Trends start with two groups of people: youth and creatives. Design students are crypto trendsetters (they’re still experimenting in secret). Designers are trendsetters. Design competition judges are über trendsetters. The things they’re doing now will show up in mainstream design a few years from now. Maybe longer—if you look at regional design competitions, you still see a lot of design ideas from the mid- to late ’90s, nicely polished and professionalized [1].

So, what vectors are the trendsetters pushing forward now? First, let’s look at design tropes—visual preferences and techniques, then let’s look at trends in concepts, and finally, let’s consider the social forces that have driven these design trends, and see what they suggest for the future.

DESIGN TROPES
COLOR—Last year color came back as the cautious palettes of the post-bust/9-11 era were overtaken by a new optimism. The colors were mostly soft and light. This year, color has gone three ways: deep, dark and rich, or pure, strong and hot.

Orange, which was the color of the avant-garde in the late ’90s, is still big. Mainstream designs simply use it to shock [2] , while trendsetters are pairing it with hot, hot, pink [3] .

The big news in color is brown. Yes, people, brown is the new black. Paired with baby pink and blue, rich jewel colors, or black and metallics, brown is really happening [4] .

What’s most interesting is the trend toward multicolor design. In the past, a piece might have one or two theme colors. Now a few designers are using the whole color wheel, in either pure, hot tones or pastels [5] .

PHOTOGRAPHY—The trend in the recent past was to use journalistic or deliberately unprofessional, poorly lit photography. That is SO over. Photography is staged, surrealistic, with very sophisticated lighting. Color is deeply saturated, just like the colors of graphics 6] . This is where you should start to notice that many individual pieces are deploying multiple tropes. See the orange and pink of the Nike environment?

ILLUSTRATION—Illustration has been slowly choking to death since the 1950s. First, because Modernism demanded photography, and later because computers made it easy for designers to create their own imagery. Last year, we saw only two pieces (apart from posters) that used illustration.

Illustration is back. Out of 100 pieces, only a dozen or so have no illustration at all. Some use a few calligraphic ornaments as accents or wallpaper. Most combine illustration with photography. But it’s there.

No one style dominates, but it’s clear that fine art, conceptual, graphic, and calligraphic styles are on the upswing, while retro borrowing is fading out (finally).

If I had to predict where illustration is going, I’d say it was to 1969. Mystical hippy styles, appropriately updated, are very big in youth art. By “hippy” I don’t mean op or pop. I mean art nouveau ornaments, layered up with rich, dreamlike imagery [7] . There’s that orange and pink again.