Five graphic trends to keep in your sights in 2025

Forward Thinking 2025 is a manifesto for bringing humanity into all you do as a creative person. In this piece, It’s Nice That’s own Liz Gorny and Ellis Tree pick out the anti-trends, and who’s doing them best.

The most talked-about piece of graphic design of the year, if there was such an award, would surely go to Brat; that potent combination of Dinamo’s ROM typeface and acid green. It’s interesting that that specific shade of green – exact hex code #8ACE00, for those still wondering – was actually chosen for its “anti-trend” tendencies, or what Special Offer’s Brent David Freaney calls “off trend”. This sentiment showed up in other corners of the design world this year, like in an interview with Parámetro Studio, one of perhaps the most exciting names in graphic design right now, whose team consciously takes inspiration from things that “might be out of trend, or a bit aged”.

Some might say this makes the job of the trend forecaster a bit harder! We did, for example, consider including a defining disposition of “anti-trend” to cover this whole year when researching for this piece. However, the show must go on, and what we found instead, was the rejection of adherence to trends showing up in each of the visual styles we’ve identified. Studios and creatives may be creating work in a complementary space, but each name in this list is carving out their own new approach, mini-protest, in the process.

Far from being a manual for visual creativity right now, this trend list shows some of the tastes and flavours, process and manners, with which some of our favourite names in the industry are creating work right now. Work that shifts alongside culture – sometimes, even moving against it.

In logos: First Edition

We usually encounter logos on our phones, Deliveroo might sit alongside Instagram, and so on, where all these symbols compete for attention as sharp, hyper-legible gems. But we’re getting the feeling that designers are growing tired of manufacturing digital-friendly buttons, over and over. Perhaps, and this is just a guess, that’s why some are crafting bookplates instead of app icons – graphic stamps better suited to first-editions than a start-up’s brand guidelines.

We’re calling this First Edition: the rise of parchment-ready “logos”. You might have noticed it as an increase in ornamental, hand-drawn or stamped insignia, often documented on scraps of vellum. Ever since Burberry swapped back to the serif in 2023, the word heritage has been flying about regularly in graphic design. But we’re not talking about brands embracing bygone branding. Ex Libris is about designers actively creating historic designs, in the process, creating their own heritage.

This all goes back to the 15th-Century, when the word ‘brand’ itself was only used to refer to cattle, and books were just beginning to be “published” en masse. Printed pages were expensive, so well-to-do lords “branded” their books using custom-designed labels or stamps, also known as Ex Libris. (One of the earliest examples comes from a Carthusian monk called Hilprand Brandenburg, who used armorial woodcut bookplates hand-coloured each one, essentially to make sure his books weren’t nicked.) Today, designers are doing something similar: “stamping” projects or brands with a bookplate, rather than a traditional wordmark.

Have a look at the branding work of Mestiza Estudio for Outline Brooklyn, for example, a clothing company founded in 2022 that looks considerably older, or this etched work from Muon for Korean tea brand Apter, founded in 2023 – in both cases, the brands place themselves within a heritage narrative through design. On a practical design level, this means studios like Parámetro using whole forest scenes for logos, or Ram Studio creating signet-inspired logos. Some, like Studio Hanli and Louise Borinski, have even created their very own bookplates, inspired by the history of Ex Libris in the Middle Ages.

Non-invasive and delicate – sometimes even unreadable, this is a logo that adorns the footers and margins rather than shouting centre stage. We think we’ll see more of this in the year to come: designers and brands signalling a personal declaration of style, protecting its theft with techniques borrowed from 15th-century monks.

In typography: Art Deco

Could Art Deco be coming back around 100 years later? We’ve certainly seen a lot of influences from the golden age appearing in the type world.

Starting out in Paris in the 1910s, and becoming the defining style across Europe and the US in the 20s and 30s, the cornerstones of the movement are said to have been: geometric shapes, sharp angles, elongated stylised figures and vertical design elements with a semi-ornate style — a lot of which have been dancing their way across letterforms.

Always clean and contemporary, yet an open embrace of everything avant-garde, the resurgence of art deco type might be a current attempt at making something look like it comes with a timeless nostalgia whilst still saying ‘we’re current and modern, just a little more elevated’. Unlike some of the signs in the wonderful world of Wes Anderson, quant and distinctly vintage, we’ve seen designers taking on elongated and elegant letters that have a post modern feel with a bit more of a hand-made edge.

Take the work of Memory Studio for example, with a background of training in traditional trades, co-founders Eli Horn and Lexane Rousseau have been transferring skills in “hand lettering, drawing and painting” into modern brand identities that seem to have this timeless, French feel. Harvest, a two person collective and ongoing supper club have similarly hand-cut their unique logo, its upturned descender on letterforms like the R making hints at an art deco world with a rough riso-printed finish for its more organic origins.

If art deco is a contemporary style for now, its resurgence has been masked by modern twists that tweak its tail ends like Requena Office's rebrand for Fonda Europa earlier this year, where we saw the studio create a flexible typeface for a Barcelona-based food eatery that took from the visual language of art deco to revive the “historical, spatial spirit of the restaurant”, rounding off the typefaces sharp edges to “bring it firmly into the present day.” Designer Pao Bassol, recently crafted an identity for an up and coming specialty coffee shop in Switzerland that immediately feels like we can trust its traditional roots: Here, the typographic era’s iconic slender N and unravelled S have been used to mark a brand with “a story behind every cup.”

With designers taking its boldness, glamour and versatility into wider-set modern lettersets, we might see more art deco inspired type developing this year, or at least there might be some traces of it hiding in the contemporary — it’ll be there in spirit.

In assets: Miraculous Movement

It’s no new news that the return to analogue techniques has continued to surge across creative disciplines this year. The natural charm and beauty of handcrafted things is still standing firm against all of our digital developments — this was something we dived into, in more depth, for 2024’s Forward Thinking series. We didn’t, however, anticipate just how labour intensive some creatives’ analogue approaches would become this year, particularly in the field of animation.

Breathtaking, beautiful and admirably impractical, we are seeing designers, illustrators and animators like Alex Khabazzi and Jasmine Foo take on the lengthy process of knitting, or in Jasmine's case crocheting, stop motions frame by frame. Bringing atypical materials that we might have initially considered too static for animation into motion, these creatives are carrying out the slow and intensive labour of moving images stitch by stitch — chasing what Alex refers to as, “a beautifully twitchy effect” from their woollen canvases.

A similar slowness has emerged in stop-motion from the print-world over the last few years with creatives like Julia Schimautz or Hiromu Oka making marks with their animations from hundreds of risograph prints on paper. A process that Hiromu claims is certainly “not very economical” when producing moving works, but the magic of which can’t really be recreated any other way. These frame by frame print outs have even moved a bit more in the mainstream in the last few months with Co-op’s animated ad quite literally rolling out of a receipt printer.

Some creatives have been taking the labour of animation a step further by growing their own garden to develop each frame of their films with plants or soil: the mystery and wonder of Edd Carr’s work can only really be felt by a quiet viewing of animations like Yorkshire Dirt: a film entirely printed on ground soil, using low-tech processes Edd created himself. Gabriel Garbel is also one to mention here, for in this corner of the field, his latest animated endeavour has truly taken some heavy involvement from nature (a combination of delicate birch leaf scans he has somehow crafted into moving frames).

If no material or tool is truly off limits, we don’t really know what to expect from 2025, everything’s up for grabs when it comes to stop-motion! All we know is that these unexpected methods are a welcome departure from the far too slick and sometimes soulless motion that pervades the design world and a ready reminder that some of the best work in animation will always have the warm and grainy touch of imperfection.

In motion: The Library

Autoplay has become such a dominant force in graphic design, that, when looking forward to the future of the industry in this series of features, we had to dedicate a whole feature to it. It makes sense, then, that our impulse to keep things in constant motion naturally shows up in this feature of what’s visually trending in design too. The trend here isn’t motion overall – that could be an endless feature – but the idea of the motion library.

Imagine a deck of cards being shuffled by an expert dealer. (Thinking about Ocean’s Eleven tends to help me with this visual comparison, but if you’re a Casino fan, that works too.) Each card jumps into the air, revealing its face, if only for a second, before the deck jumps back into place. This also describes a motion behaviour we’re seeing crop up regularly in recent years. As design studios strive to keep brands mobile and “alive looking”, they are animating even static assets – making each “jump” to life. The effect of this is something we’re calling The Library, where the behind-the-scenes cultural imagery of a brand is bought front and centre.

This trick has been around for a while, but this year, studios and designers have introduced new ingenuity. Two Times Elliott went all out in an identity for D&AD, using a motion library format to frame the hundreds of works that appear at the festival, while Acre used an unfolding wordmark to uplift the output of creative company Prose. Entirely unique behaviours were developed by CC Studio and Hato for Capture One, inspired by the idea of “uploading photography”, and by TwoMuch, who used bulbous scrolling screens in a video lecture for Capsule.

As we saw in 2023 with the use of “graphic windows”, designers continue to find new ways to “frame” the work of others. The motion library is the latest edition, and we think it will explode in even more directions in 2025.

Ruling Mood: Toad Core

This one was hard to pin down at first, but there’s no denying that the illustration scene has been channelling a whimsy sense of escapism — it’s what we’re calling Toad Core and it’s become a bit of a defining mood for the year. From twinkling toes of Lucian Barbu’s gnomes to Hannah Michelle-Bailey’s mythical ‘garlick babe’ memes, we’ve been swept into the simple living of cottage core (with a fairy-like twist), and we’re loving every minute of it.

Inside this world of forest pixies, mythical creatures or “little critters” as artist Anna-Laura Sulivan calls them, the innocent joys of sunsoaked days or sleeping in — life’s mundanities — have become subjects for “digital lovenotes” with a nostalgia, warmth and fuzziness that softens even the more serious folk.

Much like the way we love fairies because they represent all things mystical and magical, and a life in harmony with the natural world, these small, often sleepy creatures' uneventful adventures are appealing to a desire for a simpler time and a sense of cosy comfort — a resistance to our fast-paced digital lives.

We think this trend is signalling something we all need: rest. In a culture of burnout and overwhelm, (according to Mental Health UK’s Burnout report 2024, 91% of UK adults experienced high or extreme levels of pressure or stress in the past year), we don’t get much respite from a tough work life balance and all the demands that reality makes, and that might just why these very chilled out caterpillars are having such positive calming effects. For Anna-Laura at least, placing herself into these worlds through the making of her watercolour comics, is a way to remind herself and others that despite life’s tiresome toils “it’s really good to be here.”

Or perhaps this movement is a hangover from lockdown living, which brought on a return to simpler homely habits like baking and gardening, an extension of cottage or farm core aesthetics.. Whatever direction the wind is blowing in, we think this visual trend might continue to be on the rise as a creative respite from reality in 2025. It will still be a place that we can go to “when the outside world feels overwhelming”, says Hannah, as we all know she says, “it’s comforting to escape to somewhere simple and magical (even only for a little while).”