7 graphic design trends: Which one will boost your communication in 2024?

From nostalgia rewind to surreal dimensions and more, discover the most popular tendencies to level up your creative projects this year.

The Depositphotos team continues to reveal and explain booming trends in creative communication, marketing, and services. After releasing the general Creative Trends 2024 review and a more specific explainer on the recent photography trends, we are diving deeper into concepts and approaches gaining momentum in graphic design.

This article will help you update your social media layouts, website UI and banners, as well as printed materials, product packaging, and overall visual identity—all to grab more customer attention and make your marketing messages clear and more memorable.

Key points to remember about graphic concepts trending in 2024

Tech advancement in design, rapid market and customer digitalization, and new generations of buyers experiencing childhood nostalgia are the main factors influencing promo campaigns and rebrandings this year.

While designers and visual artists will be able to speed up their design routine by using AI-powered and automated tools, UI specialists and marketers will have the opportunity to pivot and analyze the business impact of bold campaigns at earlier stages and lower costs. Millennials will continue to be the most influential audience group on the market, however, Gen Z will start catching up with them in terms of spendings. In turn, brands will take their changeable tastes into consideration and seek partnerships with young influencers and content creators.

The younger generations will continue to set new aesthetics in motion and form “tribes” on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. However, some of the visual concepts they’ll follow will resemble past aesthetic revivals. To learn more about retro-inspired trends like Old Money and Y2K, check out our article, Leveraging 2024 trends: How to minimize risks when experimenting with booming aesthetics.

Eye-catching typography will become another significant trend in 2024. We’ll see more experiments with text-only designs, animated fonts, and interactive lettering. At the same time, graffiti styles and sketching will often appear in AR campaigns and product packaging, merging online and offline realities for customers and making brand experiences exciting.

Check out dozens of authentic photo and vector examples—all of which are in line with the current design trends—in the dedicated collection by Depositphotos experts.

7 graphic design trends and where to get started with each of them

Trend 1. Nostalgia rewind

Best works for: social media campaigns, offline marketing campaigns, and packaging.

In the past, we could easily pinpoint a major nostalgic trend of the year (for example, the Y2K aesthetic started booming three years ago and retro futurism became popular in 2022). Now, various retro concepts coexist and stay relevant for the same audience. Moreover, TikTok users often play around them to create their unique styles.

What about borrowing neons of the 80s, combining them with simple analog camera effects of the 90s, and shooting models in stylish early-20th-century outfits? Postmodernist visual mischief and intriguing retro style riddles answer the question of how to communicate with several age groups of customers at the same time. Let everyone find someone catchy in your collaged designs!

Trend 2. Type transformed

Best works for: website and app interfaces, posters, and large-scale ad materials like printed banners.

Text is becoming a leading element in contemporary design! To make brand messages clear, memorable, and easy to consume for potential customers, designers will dedicate more attention to fonts—from their size, color, and ability to form a self-standing visual composition. One that sets the right mood and generates aesthetic pleasure.

In 2024, we advise you to animate text in your creative campaigns and elaborate on visual storytelling using letters and their backgrounds. Consider street culture as your source of inspiration, and the functionality of your layouts as your major goal. “Fluid” and handwriting fonts will increase in popularity this year.

Trend 3. Green by design

Best works for: product packaging, printed materials, and product design.

The global state of ecology is not likely to get better. For this reason, the demand for nature-friendly, zero-waste, and eco-responsible brands is still increasing. Besides updating your strategy to reduce your brand’s CO2 footprint and getting your products certified by world-recognized environmental organizations like Rainforest Alliance or Forest Stewardship Council, make sure your customers associate your brand with sustainability and social responsibility.

There are a couple of ways you can reflect your active stance towards environmental protection. First of all, unclutter your layouts and use natural color palettes. Second, leverage shapes borrowed from nature like leaves, sea waves, and forest silhouettes. Third, opt for textures that imitate natural materials such as stones, wood, or sand.

Trend 4. Risoprint revival

Best works for: website design, ad video, and social media layouts.

Stylish grainy textures and striking overlays created through risograph printing will help you grab user attention this year. Not only is it a technology for creating posters, product packaging, and booklets, it’s also an atmospheric visual style for online communication. The key elements of risoprint are minimalistic yet vivid color palettes based on up to three colors, a background with or without its own texture, and the misalignment of layers made to add a handmade feel to your designs.

To create an eye-pleasing risoprint palette, combine your leading brand color with pure and bright colors that complement it. Use your background to reinforce your brand message too—choose textures that emphasize the origin of your product or the raw materials it is made of. If you represent a digital business, apply textures to make your service more real and tactile for customers. Here are some examples of risoprinting styles.

Trend 5. Hand-drawn touch

Best works for: social media campaigns, activities featuring influencers, and user-generated content (UGC) reposting.

Good old illustrations are back, and the reason is that users are likely to feel overwhelmed with highly-detailed content generated by AI. In addition, with photos and live-shot videos dominating social media, analog-style illustrations or those made with a pen or pencil in hand will help brands and influencers stand out with their content.

Doodling is a promising technique for creatives and marketing professionals to develop ideas and reveal their artistic potential. But it’s not their only advantage. Icons, titles, and illustrations imitating simple drawings look familiar for customers and reduce stress they may experience while interacting with banking apps or healthcare institutions.

Trend 6. Narrative illustrations

Best works for: website pages, presentations, email design, and product catalogs.

Where you have a capturing story, there is audience empathy and emotional involvement. In turn, positive emotions and associations with your brand will help boost client loyalty and turn them into brand ambassadors. In other words, visual storytelling through illustrations is a great way to save your budget at the bottom of your sales funnel.

In 2024, illustrations will accompany text-based communication like product descriptions, brand stories, and presentations for partners. From simple whiteboard sketching to watercolor painting that requires time and effort, opt for a technique that emphasizes your key message. For example, if your service advantage is attention to details, use highly-detailed and accurate sketches.

Trend 7. Surreal dimensions

Best works for: special projects, app designs, and video advertisement.

You won’t believe it, but 2D and 3D can coexist within the same mobile application interface or communication campaign! Judging by projects launched at the beginning of the year, the modern credo of designers is: bold experiments and going beyond professional canons.

As a result, we’ll soon see how video ads will include elements of analog animation and 3D graphics, interfaces will include audio response features, and interactive storytelling projects will invite us to jump between online and offline realities.

To understand this trend, think about touch points between you and your customers that you’ve been ignoring until now. For example, you can appeal to your target audience through concepts from their favorite songs or books, or travel in time to images of what communication between you and your audience would look like a century ago.

Wrapping up. Which graphic trend 2024 should you use in your communication?

Feeling a little confused and can’t decide which design trend to start with? Act by using the principle of saving your resources. Leverage ready-made images that correspond to the graphic trends of the year. The Depositphotos team composed a large collection of stock files to get started easily.

Consider that the main aspect of choosing a trend is how well it matches the vibe of your product and your communication style. If you have several promising options in your mind, start with one you understand best.