This week’s class was dedicated to a design critique, an opportunity to show my immersive prototype to my lecturer and classmates to receive their feedback and ideas. I find critiques can be nerve-wracking placing your work in front of everyone for their opinion, however, they often provide valuable ideas, opinions and inspiration that can improve the overall quality of my deliverables, so they are worth a little stress for the rewards they offer.
I have looked more deeply at design critiques in the past, so this week I decided to look at the Graphic Design trends for 2024, three months into the year I am interested to see what the big ideas in graphic design are as they could offer inspiration for the visual style of my project.
When considering the visual design of any of my UX projects, illustration and graphic design are regular sources of inspiration and ideas. The disciplines of UX, illustration and graphic design are linked with ideas and trends moving freely between the disciplines. The fact that the visual design side of UX is built on the same principles as graphic design, for me opens a whole other sphere of inspiration.
When considering the current graphic design trends, I read this article from Medium, https://uxplanet.org/illustration-and-graphic-design-trends-for-2024-147d1a2296b1
This article looked at several current trends in both the visual style and the meaning behind some of the pieces, any of these trends could crossover into the UX design sphere so it is worth having a deeper look at each of them.
When looking at the visual styles that are currently popular, commercial brutalism and Dadaism are the two that this article mentions. Interestingly they are not that similar, with brutalism being the straightforward, raw almost industrial style.
Source: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/neue-brutalism-trend-is-taking-over-design-world-in-2022-76857cbe0dbb (Last Accessed 31/03/24)
As you can see from the above example, brutalism uses strong colours and bold text, for my designs, especially if I am creating a design for a brand for whom being straightforward and honest are key components of that brand then brutalism could be a style I use. I wouldn’t use a distorted typeface such as the one above, but I could use a colour palette made up of strong colours alongside a bold typeface within a UI for example. For the right project that approach could work and enhance the brand and its values within the design.
Dadaism is harder to pin down as it was more of a movement within early 20th-century art designed to be a counter-culture and protest especially towards the elite whom they blamed for the First World War. Contemporary Dadaism is more about taking the style of the movement and using it within a modern design. Dadaism is more challenging to use in a UX design as it encourages going against convention, this is something we usually try to avoid in UX design as changing the way people expect things to work, goes against their mental models of how things should work. This immediately damages the usability of a product and its user experience. Therefore for me, Dadaism is something I can look at and take inspiration from its colours for example, but taking it as an overall style would not work for the type of designs I work on.
Alongside these visual styles, the article looks at two more social trends that are appearing in graphic design pieces and I think we could see making the switch to UX design as well, these are Activism and Anti-AI.
Activism in all areas of design is a key trend, we live in a world with many issues, war, famine, climate, and the list goes on. With a lot of people now choosing the products they use based on the stance of the business behind the product on these issues, incorporating activism into a design can be key. In terms of UX, this can be making tasks paper-free, reducing energy consumption by streamlining tasks or including a section within a product to include the business's views and actions on a particular topic.
AI is another inescapable trend and as much as it can assist in certain aspects of the design process many people are worried about its effects on jobs and creative industries. Some people are worried about their jobs, and others about the loss of human creativity with AI text-to-image or text-to-video tools. Others are worried about their intellectual property being used to train AI tools and make them better and capable of being used ahead of people. Some artists have developed a tool called Nightshade to make their work unusable by AI training algorithms. While this isn’t directly related to my designs the rise of AI is something to keep an eye on and follow for both its positive and negative benefits.
There is a lot for me as a UX designer to learn from other design fields such as Graphic Design as we are all linked inside the same ecosystem. Trends as well as issues in one field will often be seen and felt in the other, therefore keeping an eye on what is going on in the world of graphic design is always useful.
Design Critiques are always useful and I did receive lots of useful, actionable feedback which I can now use to improve the design of my immersive prototype as well as to help me to get started on my next deliverable an e-book or narrative website.