Design Trends for 2017 Everyday Businesses Can Use!

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You don’t need to be a fancy graphic designer to understand these design trends. If there is one thing everyone has in common is we know when something looks good. Design trends are influenced by so many things, the media, fashion and usability to name a few. There are a few design trends that have continued from last year into this year and a few new emerging ones for you to use.

Cinemagraphs

You’ve all been exposed to GIFs for some time now and there is simple, a quick snippet of animation. Well, cinemagraphs are very similar but are based on still photos with simple, subtle elements moving within them. Making the image more visually stimulating, just take a look at these examples.

Design Trend cinemagraph sizzling bacon

You can actually taste the bacon, can’t you?

Design Trend cinemagraph birthday cake

It’s annoying that she can’t blow the candle out but it takes a standard photo and makes it more realistic, bringing it to life.

Patterned Geometric Shapes Design Trends

Geometric shapes are what most people think are shapes; circles, squares, triangles etc. Making patterns of these easily recognisable shapes can make your artwork more memorable and suggest your business is organised, structured and efficient.

Design Trends geometric shapes asteroids

Big Bold Colours

Big bold colours make a big statement. Various kinds of design go perfectly with bold colours. Google have provided a colour palette you can use to create big bold colour pairings. Alternatively, you can use Adobe Color or Paletteon to find great colour combinations.

Design trends colour palette by Google
Design Trends bold colours

Colourful Gradients

Since Instagram changed their logo last year to a multicoloured gradient, it’s become a very common, good looking trend to use colourful gradients. Logo, banners, icons, buttons, picture overlays the trend is everywhere.

Design Trends colour gradients

Custom Graphics/Illustrations #DeathToStockPhotography

Don’t get me wrong stock photography is brilliant (in most cases) it’s beginning to fade it out and using custom made graphics and illustrations. Giving your graphics a unique look that will be remembered by your audience.

Fast Food Icons Set

All of these trends can be achieved by using simple, basic and free(most of the time) programs. To make cinemagraphs all you need is a camera to record a simple action without moving your camera so it remains you keep the “still image” aspect of the cinemagraph. Once you have recorded your clip you can use a Giphy to convert your video into a GIF file. To make geometric patterns you can use canva. Canva is great and simple graphic design tool that you can use to make patterns out of shapes, edit images and make bold typography. You can use a site called Angry Tools to make colour gradients to use in your images. Now you could contact a graphic designer to make special icons and such or you can use a program like mondrian.io. It allows you to create vector drawings right in your browser window.