You’ll also notice in that same commercial, the Apple logo being animated with a rainbow series of high-chroma colors that are bursting out of the middle of the apple. As you look at them, you can see how they translate to identity design. They’ve hired a whole series of designers and illustrators to create these Apple Stickers. It’s basically a quasi set of emojis that are unique to Apple. For instance, Apple is currently running a commercial for Apple Stickers. It’s not uncommon for concepts from those areas to carry over into identity design. We also follow what is happening in other areas of design like fashion, or autobody styling, or motion graphics in film, commercials, television shows, etc. To me, this is a trend that I could’ve just as easily reported on ten years ago, but now they are more complex, bringing new relevance.
By laying one circle over the other, you see the intensity build up. For instance, Michael Bierut transformed the MasterCard logo by going back to a pure transparent overlay and getting rid of the striped element in the middle. They’re trying to find new ways to push it forward, and that is what’s supposed to happen. And that’s cool because it shows me that designers aren’t being complacent. Every time I think they’re dead, they continue to sprout they put out new roots, and something else blooms. Transparency and monoline are a couple of trends that have had long lives because they continue to evolve. Geometric shapes and forms to create multidimensional logos, often using monolines was prevalent. Geometry was the other one that really was coming into play.We saw stripes in massive abundance, being used in concentric circles, letterforms, and patterns like chevrons, zig zags, and simulating waves for movement.We’re starting to see a bit of an upswing with more attention given to those really simple elements that we were looking at last year. It’d be fair to say that the pendulum has barely moved. Simple shapes, lines, type, and forms either converged or played solo to create solid, lasting marks that were easily interpreted. As I pointed out last year, simplicity ruled the roost, and it still is.There are three design baselines I noticed in this year’s crop of logos: This year’s trends weren’t so much a revelation as a continuation and evolution of things we noticed last year-which isn’t a bad thing. As designers we are burning through ideas rapidly, and we’re learning that there’s a cap to all of this-there are a limited number of ideas out there, which is why we see things that peaked ten years ago, coming back, but with a fresh coat of paint. Trend cycles that used to run in 30 year chunks, are now cycling through at half that rate if not less. We usually look for nuances or progressions of past trends to try and identify where things are going. I can’t believe it, but this is the 15th LogoLounge Trend Report, and nothing, yet everything has changed in the last decade and a half.