Top 5 Digital Graphic Design Trends: Ramping Up Creativity in 2022

The year 2022 has brought a massive shift in expectations and responses of consumers to Digital Graphic design trends. If we’d summarize digital graphic design trends for the current year in just one statement, we would come up with something like “feeling nostalgic while being open-minded”. Here is a quick list of some top trends in digital graphic design for 2022:

• 3D movie characters
• Web typography with some twist
• Animated motion content
• Cinema 4D abstract art
• Cyberpunk with Unreal Engine 5

It almost feels like the current intentions lean more and more towards finding meaning and pleasure in hard times aligned with trendy concepts in digital graphic design. Some even look for ways to break through everything that has been holding us down in the past couple of volatile and vulnerable years. Designers from all over the world are coming up with the unexpected insights while mixing the unmixable with an open mind. They’re crafting dazzling designs full of vivid colors and promising futurism. There is no doubt that digital graphic design will keep evolving. But are there any key elements that will be important for any web designer in the nearest future?

In this blog post, let’s see what this year has for us to look forward to in terms of digital graphic design trends. Without further ado, let’s make some predictions about the digital graphic design trends we listed above.

Computer Vision For Making 3D Characters

3D technology has been heavily utilized for quite a while now. But taking into account the immense potential that 3D technology delivers, such big players of the filmmaking industry as DreamWorks, Bluesky, and Disney still happily use it for making mind blowing animation and special effects Besides, 3D finds huge use in simulations like architecture, military, medical etc. In fact, some of the most exciting things that happen are mostly related to 3D technology.

Right now, computer vision (CV) is essentially the inverse of computer graphics forming a 3D model based on an image or video. It’s getting so smart that today it infers lighting, textures, patterns. That’s in addition to 3D shapes.

It’s been predicted that computer vision will play an even bigger part in filmmaking in the future. Just imagine having the ability to film an actor, then change the perspective, change the actor’s shape, change the dialog, change the clothing and hair style, and so on. Sounds like an incredibly powerful thing. Isn’t it? Another example – having one person for acting and another for physical appearance. Or being able to swap out one actor for another in the blink of an eye.

Also, 3D CV systems work well for tracking localizable points such as markers on an actors’ faces in motion capture (mocap) for animations in movies and video games. The 3D AR techniques will be used even more in the gaming industry and filmmaking for adding new animated characters in a real world scene.

Moreover, CV will be utilized for model fitting where it starts from the corresponding points a homography matrix which can be fitted in in order to describe the motion model that can warp one frame onto the other overlapping frames. This is the main idea behind image stitching. Today, it’s already possible to jointly calculate and recover the 3D pose of the calibrated camera from the matching points. This approach is also very useful for calibration of video stabilization software.

Of course, CV has a huge number of other uses beyond producing films and other graphical output because of the CV’s capability to do the same stuff that current computer graphics does.

Typography With a Twist & Distinct Personality

Even though the typography trends have been pretty steady for quite a long time and we haven’t seen a bunch of websites that actually used vibrant or vivid color fonts, everything has changed in the last couple of years. The main reason for that was to boost brand awareness and recognition.

Yes, typography has the power of transforming everything into an engaging visual that becomes a highly effective tool. And since the website design is 95% about typography, then fonts of the text should convey and deliver a special/distinct message to its reader. In order to get the perfect web design, coming up with the right font for the site becomes a very important part of the job with all the other related factors such as size, type, alignment, etc.

In the past, we actually saw a certain amount of basic color customization such as usage of bright fonts on dark backgrounds or use of dark fonts on light backgrounds. Where everybody sticks to somewhat-white color and somewhat-black color. In most cases that is the best way to achieve the best readability. And even though there were enough arguments on color psychology, but, at the same time there is usability which is a very necessary psychological matter too. But today, with all these social/environmental changes that’s been going on lately, typography experiences some metamorphosis shifting away from brutalism of the 2010s to a custom-made typography and Serif fonts. Which are so appreciated by most business owners.

Typography trends 2022:

Cropped – rocks with lots of creativity! No doubt, it will be in-demand for the next couple years or so.

Chaotic – a hot trend for the generation Z which loves unconventional ways in every single thing (including shapes of letters and words).

Isometric – delivers perspective & depth to font and text designs. Also, provides more options in terms of composition by giving a great geometric feel. And it is great for playing with retro text design trends.

Interacting – letters are turned into real-life objects & elements to connect with the words.

80’s patterns – allow designers to play around with the nostalgic imagery and create fun, colorful, and eye-catching fonts.

Rustic/intimate aesthetic – makes fonts look handmade and more original than any basic fonts out there.

Yes, typography rules. And we would say that custom creative typography is one of the leading trends in 2022. In actuality, this trend has been around for several years now, taking the leading places. And we would doubt it would go away anytime soon since designers love to go wild and create eye- catching designs. So, custom typography definitely continues to make a huge impact on hand-made fonts.

Animated Motion Content

In 2022, motion graphics creates animation that uses shapes and text in most dynamic ways to help bring great tales and brilliant ideas to life and show it on the screen to a wide audience. Besides being good for displaying statistics and charts, it’s also very instrumental in avoiding dull advertising and making any brand’s personality more character-driven, which means recognizable.

Back in the days, most graphic design services were advocates for rather simple designs. Today, all kinds of businesses still want to see nice and subtle elements conveyed in their motion content. But also demand from their graphic designers to spice everything up with some attractive animation to make a long-lasting impact on users’ memory and enhance brand visibility.

Yes, you can make some amazing designs and ads in Illustrator or Photoshop. But if you have a design that’s not moving, there’s no motion. So, there is a huge difference after designers use After Effects on that same ad to pick out elements to make them move around the screen and move these elements around in space and time. And that’s how you get an excellent way of connecting and communicating with the target audience and adding more depth to content.

With the rapidly advancing IT technology, animated motion content doesn’t take a toll on the site speed any more. The main purpose of animated motion content is to make people stop scrolling the feed, click on your website for more info, and dive into your brand’s story. And that’s the reason why it has been trendy. No doubt, we’ll see even more in the future.

Abstract Art Created With Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D is a technology which can render environments altogether and turn them into realistic-looking pictures that look alive on the big screen. C4D gained greater popularity in 2022 because of its awesome ability to handle a wide scope of different design projects that mostly involve entertainment.

Today, C4D is utilized not only for producing professional TV commercials for biggest brands and companies in the world but also for creating special effects, simulations, rendering, and motion graphics, as well as for pre visualization. Moreover, Cinema 4D has a text tool that can be used for creating texts in the form of splines that are based on the font outlines encoded in the font.

One key feature of C4D for designers is the ability to import AI files. It is really easy to turn vectors into 3D objects, you just have to import your vector and place it inside an extruded object.

C4D provides many render Engines V-ray, Arnold, Octane and Redshift. As well as many plug-ins are also available like TurbulenceFD, V-Ray4C4D, X-particles which create amazing effects. Besides, works can be connected seamlessly to After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop. Designers create amazing abstract art in C4D and give it an extra kick with Adobe products.

Many motion designers say that Cinema 4D is one of the easiest motion design software you can possibly learn. C4D is incredibly powerful while utilized for modeling and animations in addition to building characters. 

If you plan to learn C4D step-by-step, the best way to learn it would be taking classes online via Lynda, Udemy, Grinfer, and such. Or find good digital designers online and start learning Cinema 4D from them!

Cyberpunk Environments with Unreal Engine 5

Cyberpunk already took center stage in 2021. This trend became more popular over the others because it’s related to some of the hottest topics of the 21st century: ecology and the global pandemic. And since Facebook has launched its controversial Metaverse platform, we can already tell that the cyberpunk theme will continue to soar. Moreover, the idea has the potential to rework the whole Internet and turn it into a fully immersive world of virtual reality. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind here is the Matrix movie. But we’re sure that it won’t be so intensely painful and excruciatingly dangerous as in the Matrix story.

Last time around, the cyberpunk theme has influenced new trends in fashion and philosophical vision of the future right after the first Matrix movie came out. Today, we see that this paradigm still drives huge interest in cyberpunk. Obviously, even more tropes will eventually erode since the aesthetics of a well-known Matrix concept is a good way to allure consumers into this grim and exciting world of cyberpunk.

In 2022, cyberpunk comes to life on the screen with Unreal Engine 5, which is great for creating some stunning graphics (check Hellblade out). The Unreal Engine 5 is favored by artists, especially by those who put a greater emphasis on the excellency of the quality of digital graphics. Besides, no advanced knowledge of programming is required which makes it even more appealing. Physics is just awesome too. Access to the source code gives the ability to engineer to create complex solutions without running into constraints of the engine. One major advantage of Unreal is that it’s completely open-source, so every aspect of the editor, tools, etc., can be stepped into and modified to meet developer’s needs. Another good thing is that it is in C++ and this programming language has already gained some excellent reputation for speed (for a good reason).

Unreal Engine 5 has a competent Blueprint visual scripting system that is easy to grasp and operate. Moreover, Unreal Engine 5 allows you to launch on all consoles and has both AR and VR support, and even has cinematography to make your in-game scenes. It doesn’t take 5 years to learn Unreal. Although it does have a much taller learning curve compared to Unity. So, you can take classes online and become someone who invests time in something that will let you build VR games from scratch. And then tweak it how you like it because some believe that Unreal would truly be worth the hassle in the long run.

Bottom-line

To sum-up, digital graphic design trends play a very important part because they help to create visual content to communicate current messages. You cannot convey your message and engage people at the same time. Graphic designs not just show your thoughts and ideas but also allow people to understand the quality, efficiency of your brand. 

Since a bad or outdated graphic can create a bad impression for consumers, it is a “must” to stay up-to-date with the latest trends that can create good graphics and build a bridge between your brand and your buyers/audience.

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