Trends come and go. If they can put in a few good years, and maybe spawn some other new trends, they’ve done their duty. If trends don’t achieve super-star status and graduate into the Movements category, they fade out over time as fewer and fewer designers choose to follow them. The trends shown here have had their day in the sun, and are now in the Declining Trends category. Typically, they rarely drop out completely (I’m pretty sure you can still get faux-wood grain on many products), but instead move into less sophisticated categories or down-market into the value brands. This is not to say you should never use these design elements, just be careful not to make them your primary first-read aesthetic gestures.
As colors go, orange (specifically Pantone O21c) has had a good run in the design world. Despite taking a back seat through antiquity to various golds, blues, reds, and whites, it would seem the visual merits of the color were finally recognized in the mid 20th century. As the legend...
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The use of Arcs and Ellipses to define physical shapes is a Declining Trend. For some perspective on this form/graphic design element’s origin: designers in the mid to late 1990s were extremely fond of putting arcs and ellipses on anything that wasn’t nailed down. The advent of 3D CAD modeling...
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Silver paint is a Declining Trend, but the story of its rise to glory is worth knowing. Around the late 1990s, starting in the Consumer Electronics category, silver paint started a decade-long march across the design community. The inception was most likely two sources: the long use of lightly metallic-flaked...
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