You want to stay on top of the game. You want to catch the eye of every viewer. You want to look fresh, modern, and organized. In other words, you want to use new design trends.
Researching, understanding, and staying on top of the latest design trends can be incredibly important in design. But what do you do with a movement when you’ve found it? After all, hopefully, you already have a clear brand for your business. Should you uproot everything you’ve done to keep it new and trendy? Or should you ignore them and stick with your tried and true methods?
Trends can be great tools to supplement your existing brand and keep up with popular design themes. Here are a few simple ideas for embracing new trends while maintaining brand integrity.
Pick and Choose
Adopting every fad would leave you with a chaotic, inconsistent mess–which is the last description you want to be associated with your business. So it would help if you did a few things to pick the trends that will work best for you. Filtering through trends to find the most timeless and applicable to your business will be the most useful.
Timeless
Do you ever run into an old photo that makes you cringe at the outdated styles? New design trends can be just as temporary. There’s no guarantee that an emerging pattern will last or become an actual “trend.”
Try to Predict the future of a trend. Will it stick around or fade out of existence in a few months? If it does go out of style, will it still look good? Often, the more extreme trends can date a visual more severely.
Does it serve your company?
What are the trends used for? When I wrote this blog post, 90’s grunge was returning. That could be perfect for a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. But it’s likely to turn away parents looking for baby formula. Perhaps that’s an obvious example, but it’s crucial to notice a trend’s uses and emotional impacts. As always, your design ought to reflect your values and vision. If a movement requires changing or stretching your brand, it’s not the trend for you.
The Little Things
You may occasionally need a brand refresh, but you’ll usually want to keep your look memorable and consistent. So where can you even apply these changes?
Temporary media, like social media posts, fliers, or other small things, can be a great way to experiment with different trends and styles before making any huge commitments or ride the wave of the movement and wait for it to pass.
Your spin
You don’t have to copy everything about a new design trend; try taking inspiration from it instead. Colored gradients might be popular, but if your brand isn’t that colorful, that doesn’t mean you can’t take inspiration from it. Try making a freeform gradient with various shades of black and white.
By adding your flair, you keep it modern and unique. You never know; you might even set off a new design trend.
Brand with BRJ
Big Red Jelly’s Brand Team can help you refresh your image to find the latest styles for your company or create a timeless new brand. We can also develop trendy templates for social media and print assets. See what we can do for you!
