Hey, as it's the end of the year, I thought I'd put a little video together with some personal
thoughts on notable design trends and interesting things that happened in design in 2021.
So just a note that this video is going to be more freeform than usual, but I'll be
back with more polished content in the new year. So to kick things off with a bold claim: I feel
that the pandemic dealt the final blow to design minimalism (at least for the moment being). People
were already kind of sick of minimalism after a decade of austerity in the wake of the 2008
financial crisis. But after being locked up at home for a year or two, no one has any stomach
for that cold corporate blandness. Designers have always taken a stronger liking to minimalism than
the general public. But I don't think I've seen this level of passion from non-designers on the
subject until the last two years. Someone will make a social media post about a logo, removing
some drop shadows, and people will jump into the comments section with anti-minimalist vitriol.
Minimalism was already going out of fashion anyway, because once everybody's doing it,
it's really hard to stand out. But if it was slowly meandering its way to the exit before,
then the pandemic has really put a metaphorical boot up its arse. Now in spite of another year
spent staring largely at the same four walls and the endless same screens as the last one,
there was a different energy this year than last. In 2020, many tried to make the most of the new
indoor lifestyle by catching up on DIY projects and making their homes feel
more cozy. There's a strong psychological compulsion for comfort. And so nostalgic,
sentimental styles like cottage core on Instagram and its corporate design equivalent, Chobani-core,
became ever more popular. But this year, however, people couldn't even brighten up their apartments
with the global supply chain seizing up. It feels like the spell has been broken.
This year was less about creating a cozy bubble and more about questioning the status quo. People
are generally fed up. 2021 is the year of the "great resignation" and the year that
the anti-work subreddit hit the front page more often than ever before. And in design,
I've noticed a big shift happening in the last 18 months. A major factor,
I believe, is that zoomers (that is Gen Z) are becoming more prominent in visual culture.
I give all credit and blame to zoomers for digital brutalism and its various permutations, which are
becoming increasingly mainstream in design. You might not know the label, but you've definitely
seen it. Deliberately ugly fonts, often distorted, all caps, repeated or all of the above.
Loud and clashing colors, disjointed layouts, basic geometric shapes in various patterns.
Spotify Wrapped 2021 had a lot of these aesthetic cues as a pretty mainstream example.
Maybe it's just my old millennial mentality, but I think of this style
as the Adam Driver of design trends. Is it so ugly that it becomes cool, or is it so cool because
it's so ugly? I guess that's the whole point: to scare away the old people so that only the young,
cool, and beautiful will get the message. Many of us ancient millennials are having families with
young kids and have either gone into management or, feeling the crushing weight of our mortality,
quit in order to finally pursue the dreams that we put on hold. The designers who are truly on the
front lines, the junior and mid-weight designers doing the production work, are in their twenties.
And they view visual culture in a very different way than my generation. Young designers are
increasingly influencing significant design trends as my cohorts move up, move on, or move aside.
And so those trends will slowly move from underground culture and hip lifestyle brands
until, in about a decade, fast food restaurants will be using the style and the cycle
starts all over again. Stuart Hicks has an excellent architectural channel on YouTube,
and he has a theory that resonates with me. He talks about the 50-year curse for buildings,
which states that structures that are 40 to 50 years old tend to seem run down and out of date
rather than vintage or retro in a desirable way. We have a blind spot from our current
point in time that prevents us from appreciating architecture in this particular slice of the past.
And I feel the same holds true for graphic design, but on a far shorter, more compressed timescale.
The blind spot for what is considered ugly in graphic design is quite fluid. Aesthetic styles
come and go; some last only a few years, while others stay relevant for decades.
Thanks to retro throwbacks like Stranger Things and Mad Men, a certain vintage aesthetic will
come back into style and then drop out again. So it's not as easy to come up with a fixed-year
guideline as in architecture, where the turnover of trends tends to be slower due to the endurance
of medium. Buildings are made to last. Graphic design is often ephemeral. So what does that mean
in practice? Well, it seems like 2021 was a year where a vintage aesthetic from around the late
sixties to early 1980s felt particularly on trend - with quirky serif type faces, even with a bit
of art nouveau throwback via 1970's psychedelia is having a moment. Burger King's new brand identity,
rooted in the 1960s and seventies was one of the year's best and most well-liked, but this isn't
ordinary nostalgia, at least not directly. Age discrimination aside, I highly doubt that the
creative team at Jones Knowles and Ritchie, who were behind this redesign, were dominated by Gen
X'ers and boomers nearing retirement, who would have experienced the sixties firsthand. Instead, I
think this has more to do with the cyclical nature of which visual tropes of the past are considered
cliche or ugly as a new generation comes into play. They don't share the same living memory
of associations with certain older aesthetics. They're viewing the past with fresh eyes,
unburdened by the associations that older folks might have. For instance, somebody born in the
1980s, like myself, might associate seventies color palettes of browns and oranges with being
in that time window of tacky and kitsch stuff that you would find in the back of a thrift shop
that nobody wanted. So what does this generation consider kitsch? I think in the current moment,
basically anything that happened during the George Bush era is cringe-worthy, but especially the
proto-hipster aesthetic that looks like the scribblings of an eighth grader's notebook.
Think of the Juno era. Scribble core. But then certain styles from the 1990s, perhaps
thanks to the strange Zoomer fascination with Friends, has started to be reanimated,
reinvigorated, and re-imagined. A small but noteworthy example this year was Pirate Studios,
whose brutalist rebranding was executed completely in ultra squished and ultra stretched
Arial. Not Helvetica. Arial. Even 10 years ago this would have been completely unimaginable.
I believe this relates to the generational transition. My generation has seen too many ugly,
stretched Arial to even consider using it ironically. This generation grew up
in an era where those old system fonts became increasingly rare to see in the wild. So for them,
it's ripe for rediscovery and subversive usage. What we've seen in design this year
reflects how we've all been feeling following another year of uncertainty, and that's...
life's too short to play it safe. Playing it safe online especially, means being ignored.
And I really love what design blogger Armin Vit wrote about color gradients in his yearly roundup
this year, invoking the old school graphic design idiom "but will it fax?" And this was basically a
rule of thumb or a kind of stress test that a logo should be clear and simple enough, when
reduced down to black and white, that it should be recognizable even at the lowest fidelity,
worst case scenario. E.g. on a fax. In 2021, Armin says "But will it fax?" has been replaced
with "But will it Instagram?". It's no longer about simplicity. The new worst-case scenario,
the new stress test, is how can your brand grab attention in the busiest visual marketplace?
And I just love how that kind of captures the shift that we've moved into in our visual culture.
To finish the video, I had some loose observations I wanted to share.
First of all, it's been really fascinating to see how auto makers have decided they need their logos
to light up on the front of cars, because, of course, how else can you tell that they
have high-tech electric cars if they don't light up? And so there's a mad scramble to
redo their entire branding to facilitate this one very specific execution. Some have been
quite good, some much less so, especially Volvo and Cadillac this year. The most shameless and
shameful logo of the year has to go to the "Save The Kids" token. This crypto scam by YouTube
influencers was a complete rug pull, as shown in the amazing investigation by Coffeezilla and Some
Ordinary Gamers, which you should check out. Not only was it completely a fake charity coin, but
they also did a huge amount of damage to the brand equity of Save the Children, an actual
charity that's been run for over a century. Not just the name, Save the Kids, but also using the
same color and the logo being a complete latent ripoff of the logo of the legitimate charity.
But to leave things on a more positive note, I think the highlight of the year
in design for me was definitely the pictogram celebration at the opening of the Tokyo Olympics.
That was just so much fun. And given the response to the video I made on it, I wasn't alone in that
feeling. It's been truly wonderful to see how many of you have tuned into this channel this year
and subscribed. It's been a challenge, of course, personally, to keep making content with
a new baby happening at the same time. But I just love seeing how much you guys are connecting with
the topic of design. It's really encouraging, and I'm looking forward to covering more in 2022. So
in the comment section below, let me know if there's anything that I talked about in
this video that you'd like to see me expound on in a proper video sometime in the future,
but also let me know your favorite trends, highlights, or low lights in design that you
noticed this year. As always, thank you so much for watching, and I wish you all a Happy New Year.