14 Design Trends to Keep
an Eye On in 2024
We’re absolutely thrilled about the fantastic design trends that will light up 2024. It’s a year that promises to be vibrant with an impressive range of visual styles, taking us from minimalism and hand-drawn illustrations to the innovative and exciting worlds of artificial intelligence and tactile designs.
So, buckle up to discover the 14 graphic design predictions (made by Placeit’s team of creatives, artists and designers) that await us in the next 12 months! 
14 Design Trends for 2024:
- Collage Charm: Rediscovering Into the Digital Age
- AI Design Will Steal the Show in 2024!
- Minimalism With a Pop of Color
- Add Movement to Your Brand in a Cool Way
- Retro-rn to the Fun Old Times
- Choose 3D Design to Get Closer to Reality
- Inclusion and Diversity a Must-Included for 2024
- Play With Interactive and Tactile Design
- Grab a Digital Pencil and Start Drawing
- Bento Box Grids a Must-Have for 2024
- Gradients Stealing Hearts Since 2021!
- Let Your Fonts Express Themselves
- Don’t Be Afraid to Go Big With Maximalism
- Bring Life to Your Designs With Natural-Ly Beautiful Elements
1. Collage Charm: Rediscovering Into the Digital Age
We all know how to make collages and how amazing they are to create lovely and stunning masterpieces. Well, good news: this style makes its entrance (digitally) into 2024. So, for this year, let your creativity run wild and break traditional styles by revealing your essence in graphics through textures, shapes, images, and highly appealing visual compositions. Based on user research, this trend arose to break with visual uniformity, giving space to creativity and the mix of various elements to provide a unique visual experience that has the best of both worlds: handmade collages in a digital environment.
This trend is ideal for conveying originality and personality and is suitable for a wide range of industries and niches.
2. AI Design Will Steal the Show in 2024!
Get ready for the design revolution of 2024! In 2022, AI design made its grand entrance, and now, in the upcoming year, we’re set to witness the complete consolidation of this design trend. At Placeit, we’ve embraced AI in our design process, and designers worldwide, too, are swiftly adapting to the revolutionary fusion of cutting-edge technology with human creativity and talent.
But let’s take a closer look at how design fuses with AI. This trend for 2024 will be all about embracing the unexpected! Abstract, surreal, hyper realistic elements with unique shapes and many details will take center stage. Also, get ready to explore landscapes, objects, and characters that defy reality, offering a modern, futuristic, and hyper-realistic look. Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence demonstrates how reality blends incredibly well with imagination and how adaptable it can be to digital and offline materials.
💡Learn more about the AI tools Placeit’s designers use to create the templates you love!
3. Minimalism With a Pop of Color
This fabulous design trend started in 2022, mostly with packaging, but like other design trends, this style pretends to be translated into more designs to take simplicity to the next level. For 2024, this colorful minimalist design trend brings bold, vivid colors but keeps the essence of minimalism. Although it’ll carry bold colors, even fluorescent (loved by the Gen Z), it doesn’t mean everything is saturated. Instead, the color will serve to liven up and give an unforgettable look to any design, text, or shape. Keeping a clear, clean, tidy, and chic style of minimalism.
4. Add Movement to Your Brand in a Cool Way
Some years ago, advertising remained static, but in 2024, a new design trend emerged, focusing on screens and virtual reality. This trend encourages brands to keep up with the market, adapting their branding materials with movement. This includes any type of animation on texts or other graphic elements like logos, images, and transitions to create more direct and appealing messages.
Adding movement also involves providing more information and revealing more about a brand’s personality. So, for the next year, challenge your brand to include animated elements in various branding materials to convey a powerful message that genuinely impacts people and leaves behind static, traditional designs.
5. Retro-rn to the Fun Old Times
It isn’t a surprise that we yearn for the good old days as years go by. Such is the case with this graphic design trend that adds a fun element to any design and creates nostalgia for those who enjoyed the retro days. Since 2022, the ’60s and ’70s vibe is definitely on the top of the minds of so many designers who aim to balance the past and the present in one graphic.
So, if you’re part of them, we recommend adding these elements to create an authentic retro style:
😀 Emphasize facial expressions
🌟 Add bright, fluorescent, or muted color palettes
🌺 Include starburst stickers, flower graphics, and vintage elements
🟦 Incorporate bubbles, ovals, waved rounded, thick, and funky fonts
6. Choose 3D Design to Get Closer to Reality
This design trend has stood out since 2020 in the digital and offline world, but in 2024, it’ll retake the spotlight as many design programs and AI tools are making this style more accessible to a broader audience. It’s ideal for giving realism, volume, detail, movement, dimension, and depth to any illustration, logo, mockup, character, product demo, typography, website, marketing materials, and branding.
This peculiar effect makes each piece look attractive and realistic, which is why many artists have been inspired by everyday life to create 3D elements, and for 2024, it will be a great companion with AI and interactive elements.
😊✨ Want to see our Placeit mockups taken to the next level? Say hello to them on Canva! Check out our new Placeit App for Canva and enjoy the best of both worlds!
7. Inclusion and Diversity a Must-Included for 2024
To begin with, diversity and inclusion aren’t trends; they’re practices that should be embraced and endured over time. However, we decided to include it in this list as it will be predominant for 2024.
As the years pass, we’ve witnessed a growing openness among brands and society. Through this ‘design trend,’ we can observe how brands, designers, and clients worldwide are increasingly conscious that typical stereotypes don’t influence design aesthetics and communication, providing the green light for inclusion. To correctly apply this practice for 2024, we should include instead of exclude, whether it’s in the design itself, photographs, and illustrations. Let’s aim to incorporate more models with different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, abilities, conditions, cultures, regions, and personalities. Androgynous models are an excellent example of inclusion. Similarly, in terms of colors, let’s opt for using a wide range of colors instead of blue and pink, often associated with specific genders.
8. Play With Interactive and Tactile Design
Another design trend that comes to give a fresh breeze to 2024 is interactive and tactile design after living purely through screens.
Now, this design trend focuses on both digital and physical experiences; the first focuses on including and simulating textures from real life to get this natural and authentic look and provides animations to level up the design experience. In the physical aspect, this design trends into mostly printing that appeals to the senses, helping it through different materials like craft or triplex or distinct finishes like holographic, metallic materials, 3D, and glossy, among others.
9. Grab a Digital Pencil and Start Drawing
This design trend is minimalist but powerful and aesthetic. It conveys a sense of personality, authenticity, creativity, freedom, and playfulness and adds a human touch, a relief in this digital era. Hand-drawn stickers, line art, and doodles can be black and white or add a colorful soft touch. Also, they can be your main piece or complement your design. Also, for 2024, you can incorporate a type of animation to make it stand out. Finally, if you’re not 100% convinced about this graphic design trend, remember that 90% of consumers love a brand’s authenticity, and what better way to do it than through this?
✏ Pro tip: to make these illustrations stand out, combine them with handwriting textures like pencils, markers, and chalk to get a playful and youthful look.
10. Bento Box Grids a Must-Have for 2024
This design trend is a lovely and aesthetically pleasing style for 2024 called the bento box.
This style involves arranging boxes with rounded corners in the same space but with different sizes and types of information, whether graphics, texts, or data. When placed together, they create a cohesive and organized look that resembles the traditional bento boxes from Japan.
This design trend is especially useful for online platforms like websites, landing pages, and mobile design. It’s also suitable for physical materials such as flyers and posters. If you need to organize information cleanly and cohesively, the bento box design trend will be your ally for 2024, allowing content and design to combine harmoniously.
💡 Linktr.ee and Notion are two good examples of the implementation of this design trend.
11. Gradients Stealing Hearts Since 2021!
Since 2021, this design trend has been hype among worldwide designers. Why? Because of their multi-colors that go amazing with pretty much everything. But in 2024, gradients won’t be used by the design world only in traditional ways. This time, we’ll see various unexpected blurs to convey an ethereal, futuristic, modern, and even psychedelic look. To achieve this look, the gradients should be soft and smooth, from candy pastel colors to even vibrant and bold ones, to get this dreamy and highly contrasting look.
The functionality of gradients is primarily to add focus to the design. Blurs work well as a decorative effect or in the background to highlight text or images. They pair very well with minimalist compositions. So, bet on incorporating these gorgeous effervescent gradient colors not only into backgrounds but also into shapes, typefaces, logos, and whatever illustration you want to convey an aesthetic look.
12. Let Your Fonts Express Themselves
Now, moving on to fonts. In 2024, typographies will have a font-astic twist as we will see a wide variety of expressive and different styles in many graphics. This design trend for 2024 will focus on mixing various typography styles and colors in the same paragraph or even word. We’ll see multiple shapes, whether in 3D, simulating liquid, waves, or abstract, and some might even imitate real-life materials and textures such as plastic, water, and liquid metals, for instance.
Integrating this design trend into simple and minimalist compositions is crucial in rocking it. This ensures that the fonts are the main focus while being accompanied by well-distributed elements like abstract or geometric shapes and decorations.
🌟✏ You might like reading Font Pairing Made Easy
13. Don’t Be Afraid to Go Big With Maximalism
This design trend is the opposite of minimalism; it’s all about excess and no limits. It inspires the quote more is more, and it often combines with the anti-design trend. So, if you plan to apply this style in 2024, your must-haves are
- Oversaturation,
- Using all the space available,
- Contrasting, vibrant and bold color palettes,
- Layered images,
- Impressive fonts and
- Repetition of elements.
But the best part is that there aren’t written rules as long as your pieces contain these elements, mainly packaging, branding, advertising campaigns, product design, and even websites. The goal is to create a dramatic, dense, vibrant, rich composition to convey originality and vitality.
Maximalism is a design style appealing to Gen Z, synonymous with rebellion, spontaneity, and expression.
14. Bring Life to Your Designs With Natural-Ly Beautiful Elements
Over the years, our culture has focused on preserving the environment and taking initiatives to help us care for the planet. This 2024 is coming with great expectations, in which this natural wave returns with more strength, having botanical, organic, and natural elements as protagonists, which will be winners. These elements with green waves will be a favorite as they convey freshness, tranquility, and balance. So add this natural touch to patterns, textures, and designs, and even play with eco-conscious materials and muted colors.
And… That’s a Wrap!
This 2024 turns out to be very promising and dynamic. This list showed us specific trends that yearn for the past and others that seek to break with tradition to give life to new creations. And, after all, integrating these styles makes design so fascinating: we always have a wide range of possibilities to choose what goes best with our brand’s ideals.
Want to learn more about what’s trending this year? Then, don’t miss out on our 14 web design trends to elevate your website’s look!
Now it’s time for you to pick your favorite design trend and let us know which you’d like to apply to your business or brand. Indeed, at Placeit by Envato, we have a template to refresh your visual identity in an easy-peasy way. 😉
