Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When I worked as a web designer, I was fascinated by how design trends changed each year. Since hanging up my design boots and focusing on being CEO of Envato, my focus has shifted from visual trends, to industry and technology ones. As I did in 2014 and 2015, here’s my take on where the world is moving!...

Trends are mysterious things. Some stay for years and others are just a swift shimmer that leave as fast as they enter the scene. Still others shift and evolve with the times. Design is both the driving force and the result of this cycle of trends—with packaging design creating personal experiences (like the unboxing experience) that connect consumers to brands on a deeper level.

With that in mind, here are the 9 packaging trends that we are predicting for 2017....

Visuals are the currency of sharing on social media. Text-only updates can only convey so much and get so far. Here are 3 stats that prove the worth of creating graphics.

First, 66% of all social media posts are or include images.

Second, forget native visual platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest, that allow photo sharing. In 2013, Facebook became the largest photo sharing website, with its users uploading 350 million photos every day.

Third, use of images was rated as the most important social media optimization tactic, in a 2014 survey by Adobe and Software Advice.

And, it’s not just limited to social media…Content with relevant visuals also gets 94% more views than content without. Even social media platforms now focus on images in their redesigns....

For the early part of this century we saw a lot of colorful artwork in the shape of icons and vibrant mascots. Heavily shaded, three-dimensional characters, and richly rendered forms were all the rage.

 

Now, illustration is heading for a more authentic and organic experience. Low-color, hand-drawn looks that are specifically created for a single-site use are becoming more common and are expected to stick around.

 

Custom designs will more often take on a unique, loose and even childish feel. Websites will feel more personable compared to the copy and paste looks we have been seeing thanks to the prevailing flat design/minimalism bandwagon....

If you look at how product pages take shape across different companies, it's clear that they run the gamut. Some go for the direct approach, displaying an image of a product and explaining why someone should buy it. Other companies create elaborate pages with moving parts and fancy coded elements.

 

Of course, some companies fare better than others at creating delightful product pages.

 

But since we prefer to focus on the positive, we scouted out 14 examples that we find truly admirable. From messaging, to value propositions, to general product promotions, these brands nail these features in a persona-friendly way....

A lot of these lists just cram everything and anything into the lineup. So, we decided to pick our designers’ brains to bring you the best resources that we are using on a daily basis.

Design agencies have developed a major sweet tooth for packaging.

The once humble chocolate bar has become the latest canvas for creatives to experiment with unexpected concepts and show off their design chops.  

Since packaging actually has a real impact on how we perceive taste, these 15 examples of chocolate brands must be absolutely delicious. Check them all out below....

Successful creatives have one thing in common: they're always looking at fresh material to inspire their work. As much as you'd like to sit down and pull from an unlimited well of design ideas, there is no such thing as inspiration in isolation. Radically innovative work demands equally inventive sources. Don't feel guilty for keeping your eyes and ears open to what other creatives are doing, especially if it's the work they're most proud of: these pieces have the potential to take your own work to places where it's never been before!

A word of caution: don't let this inspiration hunting derail you from actual creation. The happiest creatives, as we brought up in this article, don't let comparison get a point where it negatively affects their output.

Today, I'll share 50 of the most inspiring and influential blogs curated by successful creatives. In doing so, we'll be looking at 10 categories....

You never get a second chance to make a first impression -- that’s why your homepage is undoubtedly one of the most important web pages on your website.

For any given company, the homepage is its virtual front door. If a new visitor doesn't like what they see, their knee-jerk reaction is to hit the "back" button.

That's right -- unfortunately, a lot of people still judge a book by its cover.What makes a website's homepage design brilliant instead of blah? Well, it takes more than looks alone -- it also has to work well. That's why the most brilliant homepages on this list don't just score high in beauty, but also in brains....

Color makes a design come alive.It can attract attention, set a mood, and even influence our emotions and perceptions.

 

But sometimes it can be hard to know where to start when choosing a color palette for your design project.

 

So we’ve done the hard work for you— giving you 100 color combinations inspired by nature, food & drink, travel, and everyday items.

 

Want to use these color combinations in Canva? Click here to sign up for free if you haven’t already (if you haven’t — are you kidding me?!).

 

Canva lets you change the colors of your design by entering the hex code in the color menu. Check out the video below for a quick tutorial on how...

While clients often ask you to cram in as much information into a page as possible, seasoned web designers know this can lead to a usability nightmare. Confident and careful use of whitespace, in contrast, is all about giving content room to breathe.

The examples listed here work because everything the visitor needs is still there on the page; all that’s absent would just be clutter. In place of that clutter, whitespace helps create a balanced, easy to navigate interface where you can find what you need without being overwhelmed....

A new book, Let's Play, tasks 100 Swiss designers to play with toy blocks, then photographs the results, looking for trends.

In the new book Let's Play, artistic director Christiane Nill and photographer Lionel Henriod task 100 Swiss creatives who work in three-dimensional fields like architecture, sculpture, and industrial design to play with blocks for the camera then document what they make.

The parameters of Let's Play are simple. Designers are given 270 simple wooden blocks which have been custom created for the project. All blocks are visible at the beginning of each play section, and they're organized into groups of 34 different shapes.

Each player has 30 minutes to construct something using any of the blocks they want, plus three picked by the previous player—those must be incorporated into thee structure. (The first player used blocks selected by the carpenter who made them.) Beyond that, anything goes....

In a creative profession like web design, inspiration plays a huge part in your daily work schedule. It’s not always easy to come across inspiration which is why I started collecting all of the little snippets of inspiration I could find with my new side project.

 

Whether you are a freelancer or part of a larger design team, getting a dose of inspiration in the morning is an excellent way to start your day. With inspiration in mind, I want to welcome you to a curated roundup of inspiring web design elements. Featuring everything from simple, animated SVG logo design to complex interactive storytelling, this page is sure to inspire – so take a look and tell us what you think!...

Unlike any aspect of the aesthetically appealing website design seen today, brutalism is new, fresh, promising, and what not. It is far from minimalism and represents some sort of an ultra-basic design, thus called ugly sometimes.

 

Brutalist is a design trend highly unlikely to make a place in today’s world where the most modern and effective designs are prevailing. Yet, designers in a large count are keeping it in mind, despite the fact that it reminds of a brutish design which was workable in post-World War II Europe since such a design helped revamp in an inexpensive way, thus resulting in cold, stark buildings.

 

A lot of people have lately shifted to brutalism in design trend. It clearly indicates how certain design circles have been overshadowing the modern web, which chooses to focus majorly on alignment of colors, shapes, design elements and lines....

This might be the coolest thing you'll see today -- a church ceiling in Paris being used for a crazy interactive art project.

 

For the yearly art night Nuit Blanche in Paris on October 1, Mexican artist Miguel Chevalier covered the entire upper part of the Eglise Saint-Eustache for his installation Voûtes Célestes, which roughly translates to Heavenly Vaults. He used several projectors to overlay visuals onto the church’s ceiling, or in his own words:

These digital constellations of pixels immerse visitors in an atmosphere bathed in light while opening unto infinity.

 

A new era of tech events has begun

Among the animations were abstract star constellations, colorful geometric shapes and lines following the shapes of the church. The impressive visuals were accompanied by an organ player and a choir, which made the performance even more intense....

So what is product packaging? It’s a practical tool, yes. (I mean, how else are you going to effectively get beer into your mouth?) But it’s also more than that.

 

Like any good design, packaging tells a story. It’s also a sensual experience, literally engaging us through sight, touch and sound (and possibly smell and taste, depending on the product/package). All of these details help us understand what the enclosed product is for, how it should be used, who should use it and, maybe most importantly, if we should buy a product or not.

 

In the Ultimate Guide to Product Packaging Design we look at how to get your packaging to tell the story you want....

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Typeface selection plays a critical role in the readability of your content. Although it may be one of the overlooked aspects when it comes to designing websites. One of the main finding of Nielsen Norman Group Eye-tracking Study of Web Readers was “Text Attracts Attention Before Graphics”. The study revealed:

“Of users’ first three eye-fixations on a page, only 22% were on graphics; 78% were on text”.

As a web designer, you need to pay more attention to typography.To make your design more effective and impactful we have compiled a huge list of typography tools and resources available on the Internet. If you are serious about web design and want to improve your skills, Take time to work your way through this resources.…

If you follow the right people, that's what Instagram can do for you. There are a lot of really talented artists and designers out there who use Instagram as a sort of mini art gallery -- a social portfolio, if you will.

And it's a jackpot for people who love browsing gorgeous design work.

To help you narrow your search, I've carefully curated some of the best Instagrams to follow for design inspiration. I did my best to place them in categories -- illustration, graphic design, pop art and installation, color palettes, street art, photography, typography, and calligraphy -- although you'll notice some of their work could fall into a number of different lists. 

Whether you're a designer looking for inspiration, or you simply harbor an appreciation for art and design, you'll want to check out (and follow) these accounts. ...

Designers of any creative art borrow design inspiration from several sources online. Open source community provides most of the designs we find all over. They also contribute to the open source platforms where other designers can access their creative designs. Borrowing from different people and sources prevents monotony. This keeps the followers hooked and excited. The internet provides endless solutions to our existing problems. Solutions are just a click away. This article discusses such life-changing design inspiration resources to help you solve all your design needs, regardless of what kind of a designer you are, so:

Here are 20 great sources for your design inspiration...

To understand the development of surf art, you need to understand the development of the surfboard—a paradigmatic design object in itself, with an amazing history in the 20th century.

The guys (mostly denizens of Californian and Hawaiian beaches) who developed the surfboard as we know it were often social outsiders. Behind the clean lines and perfectionism of their boards was a desire to create a lifestyle outside of the normal working man’s routine. So it’s no surprise that surfing design eventually blossomed into the hyper-expressive and offbeat style that we now know.

But let’s start at the beginning to see how this awesome story unfolded....

When the weather warms up, the arctic length of the supermarket beer aisle starts to beckon. And every year, when we venture over, we are amazed by the amount of design talent on display. Moreover, it is clear that the trends in beer label design are always changing.

The growth of the craft beer (a.k.a. artisanal, a.k.a. micro-brewed, a.k.a. small batch, whatever) industry appears to be unstoppable. In fact, there are so many bottles to choose from now, almost all of them thoughtfully designed, that it has become rather difficult for any one to stand out. Is it still possible to do so on the basis of a particularly good beer label design alone?

We think so.Here is our trend observation: the best examples of beer label design today do not take the middle road. They are either distinctly maximal (colorful, visually loud, eclectic and full of attitude) or minimal (confidently spare, geometric, typography-oriented, exuding elegance). Below we’ve rounded up our favorite recent examples of each type...