Photo: Charles Deluvio / unsplash

When is a trend your friend?

An effective visual brand should be, first and foremost, relevant. As a designer it’s important to stay current with design, palette, and composition trends—but more importantly, by diving deeper, you’ll begin to see that these trends themselves have a relevant audience. The key is understanding whether there is a significant enough overlap with your client’s brand.

trends, by nature, come with a clear set of rules. follow them and you’re in.

You can look at a few examples of a design trend and easily discern what its corresponding rules are. As a designer approaching a new visual brand project, that blank canvas can be daunting and therefore, it’s tempting to just pull out the rule book of the latest trend and be done. It’s essential that we explore our client’s origin story, their mission, their values, and their related audience to develop a visual language that’s congruent. Now sometimes, being on trend and visually ‘hip’ is key to a brand’s appeal. If you’re client’s audience is hip and fashion-savvy then a visual brand that feels ‘right now’ is more than appropriate.