By Dan Hancock, Production Manager
Whether we are building you a custom ad, piecing together your advertorial or placing your ad, APRS Media always try to be aware of what’s on trend. The challenge is staying true to your brands identity and not just conforming to what’s popular.
For us in APRS Media some key identifiables we consider in our design approach include:
- Colours – What new colour combinations are being used?
- Fonts – Which new fonts are popular or which traditional fonts are making a comeback?
- Style – What particular style is current?
If you have your advertisement and branding created for you, try to keep in mind:
- Design Blogs can be a great source of inspiration to help communicate with designers the look you’re after and also to give you a global perspective on what your competitors are producing visually.
- Advertising Campaigns you have seen that other agencies have produced that seem very ‘now’ versus those that really look like they’re from another decade.
- Studios have their own blogs and project walls on their websites to show you outcomes they’ve previously achieved. This can be a good insight to see if their style fits your brand.
Traditionally companies like Levi’s and Coca Cola have stuck to their branding where they’ve held out and resisted the urge to over-brand, with the benefit of being viewed as a ‘classic’ look. When modern classics like the Twitter bird go through modifications it comes with large scale introduction clips and keynote presentations for slight variations in propelling their brand forward.
We’re always trying to find inspiration in whatever we design at APRS Media and we have identified a few trends (one for style and one for branding) that we are hearting:
- Geo-splicing – WGSN Trend Forecasting states:
“Colour-blocking takes on a spliced geometric style, giving a new twist to a perennial sports story. Especially key for performance fitness, this quirky graphic story also builds on the increasing demand for fashion-infused gym-to-street wear for the emerging youth fitness consumer.”
Key design elements of the “geo-spliced” graphic design trend include:
– Chevrons, stripes and dots spliced together in graphic intersecting patterns
– Sharp lines and mis-sized patterns in off-kilter and asymmetric combinations
– Bold shapes to create negative space with bright colours to complement them
- Mobile-friendly marks – The LogoLounge trend report states:
“If home is our first place, and work is our second place, then mobile screens have definitely become our third place. Smart phone use has increased from 21 per cent in 2010 to more than 63 per cent today, and with 83 per cent of Americans online regularly, that percentage of mobile users is bound to keep edging up.”
The fact that so many people now view the world through a window the size of a business card has spelled an inevitable change in logo design. It used to be that minute favicons had to be kept extremely simple – now, as a rule, logos must be as well, but that doesn’t mean they must be boring. Designers continue to push back and evolve the meaning of “simple.”