- Feb 1, 2020
- 7 min read
A new year, let alone a new decade, is usually celebrated with nostalgia, as well as with the curiosity and desire to decode what’s to come. In our own realm of design, we highlight trends and major design events, and we sure love creating those best and worst lists - just like many other industries have done these past few weeks. Yet there’s something about the creative community that refuses to dwell on the past and hopes to reimagine the future. As creators, artists or designers, we learn that the future's not ours to foresee, but ours to make. We constantly strive to be the one who’s one step ahead of the game, delivering the new and unexpected. If this rings true to you, you’ve come to the right place. And for that, we bring you our take on the creative themes and design trends that we think will continue to dominate in 2020.
Open Design
Creatives come in all shapes and forms, but particularly for designers working in tech, their focus directly connects to the software they use and the code that goes behind every pixel they see on the screen. In the past, designers were faced with the necessity of learning to code to be able to execute their designs. Now, it is about learning to accept code as a generator of design.
Open source code languages have always been one of the internet’s foundations - like Firefox, for example, an open-source web browser - allowing developers to share, modify, add and adapt code together. But it’s only recently that it’s seeping into the front-end side of the server, with designers experimenting with creative coding and generative design systems, and the world of digital design embracing these tools. International events are being held, such as Open Design Movement summit and MozFest - all to share and make the web and its design more inclusive and curious.
Open-source design is a key concept as the web evolves, and it means that designers have to change or let go of perceptions about design. It’s no longer a final product we send out into the world, but a work that can be played with, adjusted, and even “destroyed” by the user. In 2020, design is no longer precious.
Educator, designer, and computer programmer Zach Lieberman, one of the most dominant figures in the world of creative coding, creates unpredicted patterns and movements, whether abstract or typographical, using code as a generator:
This type of design, which does not have one specific output, rather various options, creates a visual language that takes its cues from the worlds of disruptions, repetitions, and patterns. No color palette is associated with it, as is no grid or style. This ‘randomness’ might be a key design concept for the year ahead, along with the concept of what machines will ‘think’ design should look like. This meta way of thinking alone will add a philosophical element to the creative process.
SPACE TYPE GENERATOR website
Hyper Realism
After a few years of viewing ourselves and everything around us through filters, to the point of an unrecognizable reality, it seems that we are putting on the breaks when it comes to retouched visuals. Following Instagram’s controversial decision to ban filters that promote the illusion of cosmetic surgery, we are gradually seeing a rise in images that celebrate the raw truth of real bodies and faces. It seems that alongside the almost intentional exaggeration of fakeness, there’s an overall interest in an honest depiction of the world.
This movement toward a more realistic approach creates a genre that will further evolve in 2020, becoming produced hyper-realism. This means that creators will go a step further into accurately representing reality when introducing people and their stories by creating realistic conditions, sets, and locations. Rather than just quickly snapping it on camera, we will see how this ‘real’ quality of stories is exaggerated and emphasized through images and campaigns.
This change is seen in the way brands express their values, such as Mothercare’s campaign, “Beautiful, isn’t she”, which celebrates the reality of childbirth. Another example is the non-profit organization, Hey Girls, which promotes shame-free conversations about periods accompanied by straightforward images.
Calm Design
“Instilling calm, confidence, and connection, this enduring blue hue highlights our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era”. This is how Pantone introduced its 2020 color of the year, Classic Blue, which we foresaw as the natural evolution of shades in last year’s design trends recap. When we look into the implementation of this sentiment into design and aesthetics, the interpretation goes even deeper than the calmness witnessed on the surface. Here is a color that can be used to evoke a sense of connectivity and a feeling of boundarylessness, which can instill empathy within us.
After a long reign of millennial pink, this is a shade of blue that, like its predecessor, is almost genderless. Nothing is more relevant for this time in history, where the ‘word of the decade’ chosen by linguists is the non-binary pronoun ‘they’. In the upcoming months, we will notice visuals that walk the line between dreamy and hazy and which rely on nature and its shades and surfaces, or the more human and tactile elements of fabric and skin. Both provide an immersive, tangible experience.
The Evolution of Sustainability
It seems like everywhere we look, someone or something declares itself sustainable. It feels as though we have reached a saturation point, where consumers have started questioning the genuine use of this term, as it feels it has lost its true meaning. We see brands who push the limits in every direction - creating posh products such as Evian’s reusable water bottle (retails for the pricey £45 and will soon be available in the US), and on the other side of the spectrum, brands, agencies, and companies reflecting on the fact that to be sustainable you have to be inclusive and offer flexibility.
2020 sustainability asks us for our unique lens on the subject, and to observe it from a conceptual perspective, rather than a product-focused one. This year, we’re shifting from looking for answers to asking questions: What does it mean for each and every one of us to live a sustainable life? What does it mean to have a sustainable job? A sustainable house? To create sustainable projects? What do sustainable relationships look like? What does it mean to be a sustainable designer?
We can expect the unexpected: whether it’s in the ongoing shift of people working from home, saving money and time on commuting, to people deciding to dedicate themselves to one single project rather than juggling their attention between multiple ones. Maybe it has to do with going back to basics: simple websites that don’t require major computing sources and servers; maybe it’s printing in one color instead of in all four CMYK pallets. Whatever it is, it makes us excited and we can’t wait to take part in this positive trend.
Solar Powered Website is a "self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine"
Bio-Design
Speaking of planet Earth, 2020 continues to carry with it design concepts and elements that are rooted deeply in the worlds of biology, nature, and vegetation. Maybe it’s our way of compensating for the destruction of so many of the worlds’ natural treasures. We now see plants, nature and organic forms seeping into architecture, fashion, art, and our personal lives.
Amazon, for example, built the Spheres - three spherically-shaped conservatories that are part of the Amazon headquarters campus in Seattle. The glass domes are covered in pentagonal hexecontahedron panels that serve as an employee lounge and workspace and house 40,000 plants.
Another example from the world of workspace architecture is Second Home - a British co-working company that recently opened its first offices in the US in Los Angeles, which look like a garden of water lilies from above. This space was built with an emphasis on incorporating plants and nature as much as possible into the design and interiors, all to improve the working environment.
While these examples are quite literal in the way they incorporate nature into their design, 2020 will focus on in-depth research of the use of nature and biology in design. In the upcoming annual London Design Festival, a whole section will be dedicated to the world of bio-design, with designers from all fields showcasing their work: a fashion collection that has been entirely bio-fabricated; garments made of smart living organisms; a toy that combines biodegradable materials and augmented reality; furniture creation by obtaining materials through waste collection and recycling using mycelium, the root network of mushrooms.
In the new season of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design, you can learn more about the work of Neri Oxman, the architect, computational designer, and artist who is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. The founder of a discipline she calls Material Ecology, Oxman is both a pioneer and a towering figure in the bio-design field that addresses questions of scale and implementation in addition to interdisciplinary development and new technologies.
In digital design, we can see organic patterns that continue to serve as a source of inspiration with botanical influences and color palettes that take from the natural world.
Life on Mars
Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, have transformed the idea of life on Mars from a crazy dream to something that we can actually grasp and imagine. Though the trip itself is still years away, the design and architecture communities are already there. In late 2019, Interstellar Lab announced the design of a Mars village in the Mojave desert, planning to start its construction in 2021.
In the London Design Museum, the ‘Move to Mars’ exhibition is exploring and imagining what life will look like on the red planet, from housing to clothes, to transportation and generally exploring the question of what a pre-designed life looks like.
This trend lends itself easily to a certain aesthetic: the use of red and purple palettes and all of the shades that accompany them; futuristic elements; space-themed visuals; and sphere-like shapes. Pinterest’s annual report dedicated a whole section to space, showing the invasion of this aesthetic into every artsy corner.
We can also see this theme in the form of the creation of a visual language of a parallel universe, with images that depict an unnamed, imagined planet. This comes to life in the Zalando campaign for its sneaker store, created by Superimpose, with suns and moons shining over neon landscapes.
