At Sullivan Creative, we carefully follow the trends in the marketing industry – trends in color, typography, logos, and print and website design.
Sometimes our clients have concerns about these trends. They want to be with the trend, without being “trendy,” and they want to be sure that a marketing campaign or a corporate identity won’t be “out of date” in six months or two years. So how do you guarantee something like that?
Fashion Colors for Fall, 2007
The most carefully watched trends are color trends in fashion and interior design. The May, 2006 issue of “Graphic Design USA” showcased the “Annual Color Forecast.” A half-dozen associations and design firms chipped in with their predictions. The Pantone Color Institute said that in Fall, 2006, “neutrals take center stage as a soothing reminder of life’s many reassurances.”
The Color Association of the United States (CAUS) took it out even further, predicting that in Fall/Winter 2007-08 fashion colors would take “a starker and moodier stance that mirrors our more complicated and uncertain times.”
In the worlds of interior design and fashion, designers pay close attention to these organizations, despite their quasi-sociological rhetoric. As a result, their “projections” are more like self-fulfilling prophecies. Actually that’s why CAUS was formed in 1915: “to enable different segments of the market to coordinate their products” and “to buy products worldwide knowing they would coordinate at the point of sale.”
Jane Balshaw, an artist and color consultant (www.quiltedart.com), has been following these projections for years. “There are three palettes of color I see that continually repeat, repeat historically.” There’s the “Classic” palette, “pretty much right off the color wheel: straight reds, navy blues, pure yellow, a true turquoise.”
Then, in a year or so, the trend goes sharper and bluer. “Your reds become more magenta, there are jewel tones, acrid yellows. Then just about the time I get really sick of all of that, it flips into earth tones. And these trends sort of run in five-year cycles, overlapping at the transitions.” Balshaw isn’t sure whether or not CAUS and the other associations are following this cycle intentionally, but it certainly exists. “And with more than five million colors registered in the National Archives, there will be variations on that, and they’re smart to do that, if they’re trying to refresh our palettes and make people buy more stuff.”
This is an example of a trend at its most trendy, which serves the needs of the industry by getting people to buy more clothes and decorations as the fashion changes.
Graphic Colors for All Time
Good graphic design, in contrast, draws on more universal color qualities. To begin with, certain colors are associated with certain emotions – red with anger or danger, yellow with cheerfulness (see Sullivan Solutions Volume 4 Number 4) – although these vary from culture to culture. (Historically, purple was associated with royalty, but in Greece it’s associated with death.)
And certain colors are associated with places or times in history. Jane Balshaw lists as examples Italian, Greek, Southwestern and Colonial American color palettes. “And these are historical because of the indigenous peoples and the materials they had around them to create the colors.”
Graphic design colors will also depend very much on our clients and what they’re trying to achieve. A direct mail piece is likely to be brighter and flashier than the corporate identity of a management consulting firm.
Wendy Wirsig, Art Director at Sullivan Creative, says “When we design a corporate identity, we keep in mind the color trend, but we also want a timeless look, something that will last.” If your color palette is rooted in what your company really is, it’s not going to go out of style.
The Tortoise and the Hare
Of course, color trends are not the only ones that graphic designers have to follow. Trends in typography and website design make an interesting contrast, with typographical trends playing out over decades or centuries, while website trends evolve daily.
Contemporary fonts began in Western Europe in the 15th Century, with the development of the “Old Style” family of typefaces. Garamond is a contemporary descendant.
Garamond
In the 18th Century, the “Transitional” style evolved, clean and unobtrusive; Times Roman is an example, possibly the most widely used font of all time. This was followed in the 19th Century by the “Modern” style (Bodoni), which ironically seems old-fashioned today.
The big revolution in typography came in the 1920’s with the development of sans serif type. The elimination of serifs – the little “tails” at the ends of letters – gave the new typefaces an unmistakably modern look, reaching a peak with the influential Futura font.
Futura
The trend in typefaces today is toward what’s called “humanist” sans serif. Based on the humanist handwriting of 15th Century Italy, these fonts have anti-geometric features such as uneven width of strokes, non-perpendicular cuts and slightly bent tips of strokes. Writing on www.webreference.com, Dmitry Kirsanov says that these features “smooth out the too-harsh edges of the generic sans serif design ... and their net result is a relatively warm and friendly-looking typeface.”
Officina Sans
In contrast, trends in website design move at warp speed. After all, 10 years ago practically nobody knew what a website was! In contrast to print, the Web is a dynamic, interactive medium, so the “design” of a site has to take into account what it’s for and how it’s used – what’s known as the “user interface.”
Driven by rapidly evolving technology, website design has gone down some blind alleys. When the animation software Flash was introduced a few years ago, everybody thought it was so cool that every high-end website was opening up with 30 seconds of animation ... until people realized that this was an unfriendly interface that wasted visitors’ time.
Ben Hunt (webdesignfromscratch.com) lists eight attributes of today’s best, most user-friendly and usable websites: 1) simple layout 2) centered orientation 3) 3D effects, used sparingly 4) soft, neutral background colors 5) strong color, used sparingly 6) cute icons, used sparingly 7) plenty of white space, and 8) nice big text.
Interestingly, the tortoise (typography) and the hare (website design) have arrived at the same place: concern for the end-user, and a commitment to making the communication experience as easy, complete and friendly as possible. Now that’s a trend we can appreciate!
Logos Lighten Up
The famous Coca Cola logo was designed by Frank Robinson, the company’s bookkeeper. The equally famous IBM logo was designed in the 1950s by the Madison Avenue legend Paul Rand, who also designed the logos for ABC and UPS.
Logos today descend from Robinson’s flamboyant script, Rand’s elegant simplicity, or some combination of the two.
Bill Gardner has collected more than 20,000 contemporary logos on his LogoLounge.com site. In the April, 2005, issue of Graphic Design USA he identified 15 logo trends, such as leaves, swirls and stars; as it happens, Sullivan Creative has been one of the trend setters.
Here are some recent logos designed by Sullivan Creative, along with samples of Gardner’s commentary.
Leaves
“As ecological issues remain topical, the leaf will continue to be an iconic element in green design.
Puffies
“They break the traditional logo rules with gradients, but, technically, we’ve overcome many of the production issues that used to give shading a bad name.”
CMYK
“These base colors, spurned as long-time restrictions by designers, suddenly became the novel darlings of consumers.”
Weaves
“The weaving of linear elements brings substance to the mark, and the interlocking lines add strength.”
Swirls
“For the well-crafted marks of this genre, there is a lightness that comes from more white space than line work.”
Stars
“The star has always been a foundation stone of logo design, with symbology that varies from quality to celestial guidance.”
Whips
“Linear in form, whips swoosh through the air with a sense of destination in mind.”
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For information on how we can help you with your next marketing program, contact us at Sullivan Creative or call 617.597.0072.
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