The anatomy of a design trend
A discussion of the theory of design trends with sample trends in Industrial Design, Interface Design, and User Experience.
Key Insights: (1) Design trends can be structured in megatrends, macro trends, micro trends and fads. (2) A design trend map can help structuring design trends over time. (3) If design trend reports are done by single persons, they are typically more inspiring than those done by groups/organizations.
Trends are an immanent part of the design world, e.g. as part of inspiration processes (see Mühlstedt, 2020). There are referential publications, which built a theoretic fundament. For long-term developments, there are the Kondratiev waves (Kondratieff, 1935; The Long Wave Cycle), clustering centuries in “industrial revolution”, “steam & railways”, “steel & engineering”, “mass production” and “information” — although they are controversially discussed in science, they are quite popular in culture. Also commonly known are the Gartner Hype Cycles (gartner.com), structuring technologies in the phases “technology trigger”, “peak of inflated expectations”, “trough of disillusionment”, “slope of enlightenment” and a final “plateau of productivity” — this approach tends to be non-scientific, too. Other recent publications like the Creative Curve (Gannett, 2018; thecreativecurve.com) distinguish persons’ preferences to ideas in the stages of “fringe interest”, “sweet spot”, “point of cliché”, “follow-on failure” and “out of date” — a model very similar to common innovation adaptation theories like Roger’s Adoption Curve (Rogers, 1962–83; Diffusion of Innovation) with the stages “innovators”, “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late majority” and “laggards”.
left: Kondratiev cycles (By Rursus, CC BY-SA 3.0),
middle: Gartner Hype Cycle (By Jeremykemp, CC BY-SA 3.0),
right: The Creative Curve (Gannett, 2018)
All these models, amongst others, are appropriate to create a base layer for a theory of trends. It’s important to distinguish those long-term developments and contemporary topics from design trends.
Trends are early manifestations of uncommon topics, compared to the status quo. Trends are the probable future.
They do not necessarily have to be new; they can take references from the past or they might be new just in the domain of interest, e.g. the field of design. Furthermore, questioning the term “trend” itself, there are not so many models respectively literature explaining how they appear, develop and how their character can be assessed. Hence, it might be worth moving from (semi-)scientific research to the reality of product design and to analyze the trend research and its sources there.
Trendspotting, Trend Research, and Sources
The most common sources for trends are well-known websites with collected images, articles or other data about designs, such as Pinterest, dribbble, Behance, Dexigner, Dezeen, designboom and many others up to any image search engine. Aside, there are other typical source types used in design projects:
Data based: Stock photo trends like Adobes Creative Trends, Shutterstocks trends or the trends of Getty Images
Curated: Annual Reports like the Fjord trend report, Pantone color of the year, UX Collective’s trends and many more
Cross-domain: contemporary topics in other fields which might be transferred, e.g. by using the analogy method
Highlighted: Awarded products and designs like iF Awards, Red Dot Awards, Awwwards and contents of design museums
All the listed sources are good for ad-hoc searches and browsing (information pull). For instance, for one of my projects the design team visited the “Pinakothek der Moderne” (a museum for design) and talked to one of the curators. For another project the team talked to experts of different design fields (interior, textile, material etc.) — a cross-discipline approach and very inspiring as well. Other trend resources — more on a recurring base — can be magazines, books, talks, conferences, meetings or conversations (information push). Conferences are always a good source for inspiring thoughts, just as meetups of smaller or local communities.
Looking at all those sources, it gets necessary to structure trends further. And besides different content fields, especially the trend duration seems to make a difference in character and usage.
Types of Trends
Trends are one level underneath bigger structures like the mentioned cycles. Others than those which are at least partly reactive, trends are taking past or contemporary upcoming topics to predict the present time or the future. Hence, there is an immanent uncertainty in them — one aspect why they are so fascinating. The types of trends are “megatrends”, “macro” and “micro” trends (fig. 2). They are followed by smaller structures, the “fads”.
The first level is formed by megatrends. They are often connected to social developments, bonded to specific generations (X, Y, Millennials, Baby Boomer etc.) or affected by political or economic interrelations. Therefore, they are long-living. Typical examples of megatrends are: globalization, climate change / sustainability / ecology, urbanization, mobility, connectivity, demographic change, knowledge culture, new work or social change.
Megatrends are large-scale shifts in culture, society or economy, respectively expected manifestations of these developments in the future.
Next, there are macro and micro trends — the ones this article focuses on when referring to “design trends”. These are often existing for 1 to 5 years, some also longer. Naturally, they appear in one domain and might spread to others. E.g. a trend using elements from “art deco” could come up in graphic design, transfer to web design and seen in architecture as well. Then the interesting question is if this trend will also affect industrial design, visual design etc. Macro trends are rather established longer living trends. They should be commonly known by many designers and accepted as possible solutions. Examples for macro trends are “flat design”, “natural materials” or “voice interfaces”.
Macro trends are early manifestations of contemporary, accepted topics of interest, at least in the fields of design in a period of about five years.
Distinguishing micro from macro trends should mainly be done via time, diffusion and relevance or size of the topic. A micro trend might be seen in just few examples and just one field of design. It can be a small detail. Several micro trends can lead to a macro trend, which can go hand in hand with a megatrend. Examples for micro trends are “huge shadows”, “speckled materials” or “parallax scrolling”.
Micro trends are early manifestations of uncommon details in a specific field of design, which relate on the zeitgeist and attract an audience in a period of about one year.
Finally, a fad is a very short-term, e.g. seasonal effect. Also, geographically or socially it can be limited. Typical examples for fads can be found in clothing, foods or (youth) language.
Curation of Trends
After analyzing numerous micro trend articles, posts, collections and imagery year by year, one underlying effect became visible:
The more people involved in curating design trends, the more generic and uninteresting the outcome seems to be.
Hence, if one person creates a nice post about visual trends, if one expert writes an article about logo or typo trends, often it results in inspiring and catchy topics and examples. Of course, they are of different quality as each author’s style, talent and effort differ. But overall, a group’s or company’s voice towards micro trends should be formed out of individual positions.
As designaffairs, the company where I work, is focused on industrial design (ID, also PX — product experience), visual user interface design (UI, also IX — interface experience) and user experience (UX), it became clear that for each topic one person had to be selected to curate a trend overview. As this activity is an annual one, it seemed the best plan to have new persons each year to also show a variety of mindsets. In 2019, it was the first time that 3 experts curated a selection of about 9 trends each, shown and described on a poster. As this internally used material was well received, led to nice internal discussions & knowledge transfer, could support some sales meetings and was used in several client workshops, in the year 2020 this task was repeated (fig. 3).
Separate articles can be found to each of those three topics. In addition, to get a more summarized view on all the different trend developments, a design trend map is developed.
Design Trend Map
The first step towards a trend map is to collect several singular micro trends. It’s hard to put this on a scientific base, so the approach here was to collect them from the design trend posters which were created by members of the team. Analyzing several years and putting all the items in relation to each other led to a list of design trends:
outdated trends: ID: key highlights, UI: drop shadow, skeumorphism, neumorphism, polygonal, brutalism, duotone, UX: parallax scrolling
established trends: ID: product app interface, rounded shapes, UI: dark mode, flat design, huge shadow, UX: voice interfaces, always beta, micro UX, mobile first
ongoing trends: ID: generative pattern, gradients, constructivism, speckled textures, soft glows, hyperreal materials, glitch, candy pop, UI: gradients, isometric, grain/noise, variable fonts, off-grid, glassmorphism, UX: friendly interface, microcopy / UX writing, chatbots
This list is neither meant to be complete, nor true for everyone or fitting every purpose overview, but it is an attempt to take strong single trends and bring them together for at least the fields of industrial design / product design, visual design / interface design and a broader field of user experience. The main issues connected with these are:
Wording: as trends are often not established, it is uncertain if there is an official, spread, accepted word or term (like “neomorphism”) — sometimes also a term is replaced by another or changes over time (like “microcopy” became “UX writing”)
Synonyms: in many cases there are synonyms for one trend which are used in several regions (e.g. “duotone” vs “bicolor”) or by several groups (e.g. “dark mode” vs “light-on-dark color scheme” vs “dark theme”) or even company-specific terms (e.g. Googles “Material Design” vs Microsofts “Metro Design” vs general “flat design”) up to different spelling (e.g. “chat bot” vs “chatbot”)
Searchability: while some of the terms are very well searchable (e.g. “skeumorphism”), others have manifestations in different domains (e.g. “brutalism” in architecture and web and visual design) and others again are almost unsearchable by having multiple or common meanings (e.g. “isometric” or “mobile first”)
After examining all these topics in detail, a combined design trend map was created (fig. 4). The map contains curves of micro trends in design, which were developed by using the trend posters of different years, researching additional trending topics in mentioned sources, by doing conversations with designers and getting their expert opinion, and by using the Google trend analysis. This map is mainly sorted by a horizontal timeline. Starting with some “early” trends which are starting between 2000 and 2010, most topics could be placed in the years of 2010 to 2020ff. The origin field of each trend is shown in a color code for industrial design, visual design and UX. Each trend is shown as a line, starting from the top area. This means that the trend started or was inspired by neighboring topics, like art, fashion, technology and other fields of design or innovation. When the trend enters the middle area, it means that first examples are out in the field where the trend is used in product design.
The line then continues in one of three directions, each with different meanings:
back to the top: after some successful experiments and examples the trend is not commonly used or accepted, at least for (product) design
to the bottom and beyond: these trends are established, moving from a trend to an established asset or path of design; they might become a macro trend
staying in the middle area: these trends are ongoing, seen in examples again and again and are developed further
As these trend topics are sorted in the map according to the assessment of experts, a further proof can be done using the Google Trends search engine. This shows the occurrence of search terms over a specific time, worldwide or in selected regions. With this it was possible to adjust several of the graphs, like explained with the following examples.
Upcoming Trends: For new trending topics which in addition have a very specific name, like “Glassmorphism”, the trend search reveals what the design experts already had in mind (fig. 5): a first appearance end of 2020, followed by a steep increase as it was recognized on several platforms, then an uncertainty how the further development will look like.
Ongoing trends: For trends which can be observed since a longer period, a typical graph looks like in the example of UX writing (fig. 6). Although the term has always been part of search requests, there is an increased interest visible around 2018/2019. This is already less easy to interpret, as the results for UX writing is different from “UX writing” (search with quotation marks) and both UX and writing are common terms as well.
Trend comparison: The search results seem to be absolute when investigated individually. The y axis is just giving a percentage from 0 to 100 — so a combined search shows relative importance. In the example, UX writing is combined with flat design and generative. This shows further issues of interpretation: for flat design, which seems to be a decreasing trend, the interpretation implies more that this trend became established.
Of course, these text term search results can only be an indicator for a trend analysis, but especially to check the timing of its occurrence and periods of higher interest they appear to be very helpful.
Summary and Outlook
Design trends are a good method to show thoughts of a group, to give insights to a company’s mindset and simply to inspire other people. A structured view on them with the clustering in the types “mega”, “macro” and “micro” is relevant when working with those. One critical factor for success seems to be the number of people involved in creating and defining a shortlist. It indicates that trends need singular opinions, that a consensus of several persons smoothens the peaks and the excitement with them. Hence, several curated collections are a proven way of how trends can be presented. A summary of them shows outdated, established and ongoing trends, which helps to structure the topic further. Finally, a design trend map makes the summary visual and gives an overview in the fields of industrial design, visual design and user experience.
With every following season of course the map can be iterated further. Also, other trend analysis ideas, such as a meta study of trend reports or an analysis of the awarded products, are promising further approaches. It would be of interest as well, if groups in scientific research could cover this topic more intense and illuminate trends from different angles.
