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.
