2025 Graphic Design Trends You Should Know

In this video we're talking about 10 up and coming design trends I think you should keep on your radar. Before we start this train, I know trends videos come and go, and yes, some of them are going to be repetitive, you might have already seen them in another video or blog, and you may be tempted to say something like, this is just early 2000s design. You're probably right, because it's just a trend. It's just a trend right now. It's all good, we're just having fun researching what graphic designers are up to these days, as well as what the market, i.e. customers and clients are looking for. We're going to be talking about everything from scrapbooking to ink trap fonts today, so you're going to want to stick around for that. And hey, if you're new to the channel, my name is Drew, and I run the production department here at Kittle, where I get to bring you educational content just like this video. Most of the time, I'm just saving cool stuff that I notice on Pinterest or on my Instagram, especially if I see it repetitively, probably like a lot of you. Let's go through each one of these and then talk about some use cases where I think they are relevant. Okay, our first trend has been on the scene for actually quite a while, and so I've added it here because it's not going anywhere, and that is minimal typography, especially in streetwear. And when I say minimal type, what I'm really talking about is pretty much type-only designs. If you look at some of these references, you're noticing a trend within a trend, where it's not just the use of clean, bold typography, but it's actually just typography, period. You might have the occasional element or two, like a little globe or a little box or a small icon in a circle, but the vast majority of designs like these are using type as elements, meaning the blocks or boxes of typography are meant to be used as elements within the design. And this is such a cool example of hierarchy, balance, and an excellent use of white space. And while streetwear does come to mind, this sort of type trend lends itself exceptionally well to packaging design, web design, poster design, and branding with a more bold or expensive, luxurious feel to it. Oftentimes, the thick sans-serif type are paired with elegant scripts that will create that more luxurious feel. And if you want to dive super deep and learn about how to achieve this style, we have tons of videos on this, which you can check out on the channel, where my brother, who owns a streetwear brand, is dissecting some of the most popular designs and showing you how to create your own. Now, let's stick with typography for just a second and talk about utilitarian design. When you see this, you're probably thinking of a packing label, right? That's what I think of. Stuff like barcodes and icons inside of boxes and circles are heavily utilized in organizing designs like this. You can also think of a plane ticket and how everything from the barcode to individual boxes of type are harmoniously in a grid across the entire piece of paper. I like to think about this trend kind of as if maximalism became organized without the use of all the bold colors. Utilitarian style design has minimal roots in terms of the clean black and white colors, but most of these designs actually have a lot going on. It's like adding tons of extra stuff for no real reason other than to keep filling up the grid. You can think about it like this, having a large rectangle and then going wild with all the different smaller rectangles you can fit inside that one big rectangle. At first, I really did only see this trend showing up occasionally on streetwear clothing, like using the little label icons, maybe on a sleeve or at the bottom of a shirt, or maybe filling in a design with a barcode. But now I've seen this trend reach everything from packaging design for drinks to full merch designs, book cover design, presentation design, poster design. I even saw this used as a full menu design at a restaurant I went to recently. There's a lot you can do with this semi-minimal, semi-maximal design style, and I would encourage you to give it a try. Now, one design style I continue to see on my feed is this surrealism collage style graphic. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this kind of design, surrealism takes what is realistic and blends it with what would be considered unrealistic. Another more technical way to define it would be meshing the conscious mind with the unconscious mind. And the result is oftentimes a dreamlike expression, and while the art style first emerged after World War I, we're seeing its influence now in graphic design since tools are advanced enough to get you that clean cut and paste and warped and meld with different elements together to form this phantasmal collage. You're going to notice a lot of elements like butterflies, sparkles, galaxies, roads where they shouldn't be, moons and planets where they shouldn't be, mixed with people's faces and heads to suggest this dreamlike idea. Or you might notice people's heads within an image being replaced completely with a different graphic, like a cloud or a mirror or a TV screen. And at first, this was just the artistic approach, and little by little we've seen more typography enter the scene, and designers are utilizing different styles of font, whether they be handwritten style or a nostalgic serif-looking font, and there's this component of an influential quote from an author or an artist or otherwise that helps the viewer decipher the overall message. Now you might think that this kind of style has a minimal use case, but I actually see this quite a lot in the conference area, church graphics, musical album world. There's something about this particular design style that can help you bend two ideas that are so remotely different into one cohesive design. Things like presentation slides, social media graphics, definitely poster designs, and album covers for sure can benefit from a style like this. A design style I've seen primarily popular in web and app design is the use of bento grids. Now you probably already guessed this, but the bento grid is based off the popular lunchbox, the bento box. A bento grid is a popular Japanese grid system that utilizes mini boxes to organize content, or in most cases food, into smaller compartments. It's honestly a genius way to share a lot of information in a single space, especially if you have multiple things that you need to tell a viewer or multiple CTAs where you might want to share and lead a viewer to a different place. It's kind of like utilitarian design in that the overall design is a large rectangle with smaller boxes and rectangles inside of it. Except in the bento grid, the smaller components have their own border so they can remain independent of the overall information design. Now again, I've mostly seen this utilized in web design and app design, but you can still use this gridded system to influence your own creative projects, whether that be something like a t-shirt design, a flyer, maybe even a menu for a restaurant or cocktail bar, that could be really cool, or just any other variety of information that you want to share. Just get creative with how you set up the boxes and use a variety of lengths and widths to catch the viewer's attention. And what's really cool is with Kittle's rounded corner feature, this style is actually pretty easy to achieve by adding some simple box shapes and arranging them around and then using that corner tool. Now this next trend I am calling gradient shapes and grain. I know you might be thinking, oh no, another gradient trend? But this one is a bit different and more subtle, and it has its roots in a much older, nostalgic 90s kind of design. See, what I'm talking about here is the use of organic, wobbly shapes with a slight blur and some noise added to it, which gives it a subtle grain effect. And it's reminiscent, like I said, of that 90s style poster design. Now you could say this trend is seriously just for the coolness of it, there's no other purpose except to have a cool looking gradient shape in the background, but I think the placement of the shape and the gradient is actually what helps pull the reader's eye to where they're supposed to look in the design. It's almost like trying to provide or show motion without having any motion graphics involved, and I think that's pretty cool. And this style lends itself really well to a variety of other styles and use cases with different typographic elements. I've seen it used on websites, posters, packaging, hey, I even used it on my own book cover design you can see right here, and I published this book well before I made this video to research these trends. My purpose here was blending two symbolic colors together. The sans-serif type isn't really competing or distracting from the major visual component in the middle. I'll admit, there was a time period where I think gradients were extremely overdone and just looked super dated, but what's cool about this trend is that it takes those gradient designs and it pushes them into the background of your design and truly makes it a more subtle piece of the overall canvas. So keep that in mind, especially in projects where you need to add that spot of color that maybe looks like it's moving. We've all seen and felt that 3D graphics and motion design has been used a lot more over the past several years. I mean, the things you can do with these video tools and the templates at your disposal, and now with AI video editing, a lot of motion graphics are all over the scene. But what I'm going to talk about here is more of the 3D product shot style graphic that I've seen used a lot to make it look like there's motion. And no one probably does this better than Apple, right? I mean, maybe the major headphone companies like Beats or Sony, because they also commonly utilize this falling looking style in their marketing. But we've seen this hyper 3D product shot graphic pop up everywhere, whether that's advertising for ice cream or a coffee shop or some new shoe. And what this trend is, is more than just having a product photo with some type at the top or the bottom. This style takes the product or the object and blends it into the design itself, as in it becomes a component in the design. You've got text going around it, through it. You've got other components and shapes interacting with the product or the object itself. It's a much more dynamic and interesting looking design. And I do mainly see this in advertising. And that makes sense, because as things move more video, more into animation, this style lends itself to that. So when in doubt, always think about that slightly angled floating edge to the product, as if it's just slightly falling out of the sky and it's been frozen in midair. Maybe give it a try with something random like a lamp, I don't know. So sustainable and eco style design is a trend I've talked about in the past. But when I was talking about it then, it was more focused on the actual logo and branding design itself. And what I'm going to talk about here is the actual rugged or textured component of the packaging itself. In a way, it's kind of like we're going back to basics. And by proxy of the sustainable movement itself, designers have found a way to make beautiful packaging and designs with not a lot, with as little as possible really, or at least as little color as possible. We're already seeing a ton of simple cardboard style box design with minimal type and illustration. And if there's color, it's usually baked in. It's not an individual wrapper or an extra piece of glossy paper. We're seeing a lot more recycled material come as inserts or advertising or business cards with the packaging. And it has its own character and charm due to that very specific texture of the material. And then you add the use of very smart typographic placement and you have a beautiful, even luxurious looking design. And in terms of use case, this one is pretty obvious, but it doesn't have to be limited to eco-friendly focused brands. I've had everything from soap to coffee to t-shirts come in packaging just like what you're seeing. So I would just experiment and see if a project or a client you're working with fits this type of aesthetic. And the recycled packaging might actually save you some money in the long run. Might be something to look into. Alright, let's get a little whimsical for a moment and talk about digital scrapbook design. I think collage design in general has been a trend for some time because it allows you to put components together that don't normally belong, similar to my point about the Surrealism design. But with scrapbook design, it takes on a much more linear and personal timeline story approach because when you're scrapbooking, it's usually topical. It could be your favorite band, TV show, a vacation you had, future business goals, anything. And the analog pen, paper, glue, scissors approach makes this a really cool and relatable down-to-earth design style. Now we actually did a video with this, you can check it out here, with some tips on how to achieve this style. And a few things we picked up on were, of course, the use of cutouts as if you did it with scissors, handwritten fonts, or writing your own messages and doodles and then vectorizing them, the use of ripped paper pieces and textures, and then using vibrant colors throughout your overall design. Like Surrealism, you might be tempted to think that this style does not have a lot of use cases, but I think you'd be surprised. Not to mention that this style definitely captures attention in presentations, title slides, thumbnails, social media graphics. Imagine putting together a whole carousel where the scrapbook follows along and connects each slide as you swipe. One trend I am super excited to see is the wide use of what we call ink trap fonts. And an ink trap font, for those of you who don't know, is a typeface where small gaps are intentionally cut into the letterforms, usually at junctions or corners of those letters. Now, the technique was originally developed for printed type when printing on rough or absorbent paper, because the extra bleed from that ink would fill those traps, so to speak, and you were left with a full letter. And it's so neat to see how they have been adapted as a stylistic element in design today. But getting back to the trend, we're seeing these fonts along with wobbly, inorganic-looking fonts used in designs all over the place, from presentations to packaging to merch design. And what I love about this design style is that, by nature of how the typography looks, it retains this professional and serious look, but with a playful charm to it. I don't know how else to describe it, maybe you can help me out in the comments, but I think we're going to see a lot more of these types of fonts used in branding. Oh, and by the way, if you just want to play around and experiment with some of those ink trap fonts, we've uploaded a variety of them to Kittle for you, like Mary Cherry, Getty Grotesque, Brickilage Grotesque, Murmur, and many others, and I'm sure that's only the start, because as they become more popular, we're definitely going to upload more. So feel free to play around with those, you can use the link down in the description to get into Kittle. Alright, our last trend for this video is what I'm calling doodle or naive style design. And no, I am not talking about those kinds of doodles that look like they were drawn by professionals, because those doodles are almost so good that they become, like, actually hard to achieve, and I'm saying this as an illustrator myself. No, what I'm talking about is the actual, naive, wonky, flat-looking illustrations that are drawn the way they are on purpose to fit a design or product on purpose. I don't know about you, but for me, this design trend seems really empowering. Like, who didn't doodle in their notebook in class when they were younger? Or draw on their iPad, I guess. I'm not really sure what kids are using in elementary school these days. Probably a MacBook Air or something. Anyway, there's an endless number of vectorizing tools today, including Kittle, where you can upload your drawn doodles. You can vectorize them, even change the color, and you can utilize them on whatever kind of product or project you want. Here's another cool thing. The doodles and illustrations are being used with a variety of type, from handwritten and scratchy type, to clean, bold, sans-serif type, to elegant script type, and somehow, it all seems to work. And now, I don't mean that you can just randomly doodle something and it fits with everything, but if it fits with the brief of the project or the product, then I would say, give it a try. It's kind of like hand-drawing a pattern with a library of illustrations that you can pull and use at any point. Now, I am seeing this doodle trend paired with packaging design, primarily. That doesn't mean that it won't work for merch or posters or other digital graphics. I think this style is also being paired, rightly so, with a sustainable or eco-friendly trend. Because it is that organic or natural analog-looking doodle, it kind of makes sense depending on what that brand is selling, and I would love to hear what you think about this trend, or any of the other trends that we've talked about so far in this video. Again, trends do come and go. They get recycled. They morph. They evolve. And I think you're an exceptional designer for at least staying up-to-date and keeping an open mind with regards to the yearly design trends. You never know how you might stumble upon and be inspired by something, and pull and combine and make something new. And hey, you might be the one that makes the next new design trend. And now, if you're looking for a design tool at least to play with, I mentioned Kittle a few times already, but we would love for you to give it a try. I'm not asking you to buy anything right now, but you can truly test out these design styles, those fonts, like I said, or any other creative project in Kittle. And you can sign up using the link down in the description. Get yourself on a free trial. Test it out. See what you think. And if it does fit your fancy, come back, grab the discount code to get a nice little discount on your first subscription. I mean, why not? I've already kept you for a long time, so I won't go into detail on every single feature in Kittle here, but we have over 700 videos on our YouTube channel for you to check out if you really want to go deep into what Kittle can do. Don't forget to like and comment down below, and please subscribe so you don't miss other educational videos just like this one. Everyone who subscribes truly helps us out a ton. Thanks so much for watching, and we will see you in the next video.