I have obsessively been thinking about methods in which you may be able to predict the next trend. Design and psychology have been the two most intriguing topics to me since I was a child, and I believe that there is a massive overlap between the two. After all, design is, in its entirety, subjective. Whats beautiful or functional to me, may be completely in the wrong to somebody else. This, for me comes down to psychology at this point. What makes that person think the way they did to achieve the final conclusion, or the final thought?

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I don’t do this because I want to chase the next trend, I do this because I’m incredibly fascinated by why the trend happened at all (in fact, I think I’ve had a trend repellant trait built in to me (for my work at least). I try to run the other way if I can, I think it produces the most original work this way).

For example, gradients. Over the year of 2018, we saw a huge adoption of the use of gradients in everything - from branding, architecture, fashion and etc. However, gradients are an extremely complex topic when it comes to why it may have caught on as an ultimate tool for design for a few reasons. Gradients, have been built into our visual cortex since the day man was created, because nature in and of itself is a gradient. You see it everywhere, the incredibly beautiful hues of blue to orange and everything in between during sunset, the jaw dropping colors of a forest in autumn, and luscious, deep colors of the ocean when the sun is gleaming down. It’s all around us, constantly. The fascinating thing is, why it caught on again, when it did.

Now this isn’t to say that gradients were not used before, because obviously looking back to any design from any era, it was always in use. Its just that something has psychologically clicked to make it so much more visually pleasing to us recently. It could be that technology has finally advanced enough (AMOLED screens, 8K consumer cameras, VR, advanced digital printing technology) to truly bring out all the color families of a two tone gradient. It could also be that we’ve been so used to flat imagery and colors, that it helps to add depth suddenly, in a world where we are constantly seeing drop shadows and layers. The interesting thing about gradients is that there are multiple pathways that could lead to how it started becoming used in the recent year.

Technology plays a massive part in this reason also, yet that seems to be too simple of an answer. It is completely predictable if technology were to be the only facet of the why. Its an incredibly challenging yet fun exercise to go down a few rabbit holes to truly investigate why what happened the way it did. I think this type of design thinking could be utilized in numerous ways, down to thinking about why a user of a software made the decision they did.

All of this basically trickles down to a simple thought or a question that I always ask myself when I am in the process of designing something. I think all of us as designers need to, and should ask ourselves or clients more often, “how does this make you feel?” At the end of the day, we are always making something for another human. There is not a single process in the world where human contact does not come into play at any moment. Our entire environment around us is created by humans, for humans (besides nature, obviously), so it behooves me to think that we don’t ask ourselves this question more often.

Great design starts with dividing yourself from the perspective of the creator, and becoming the user/consumer itself. As designers shamelessly follow trends and try to be great at the next thing, I think the question should be asked at every step of the way to figure out why the thing you’re making is the way it is.

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