Our 2020 Design and Marketing Predictions
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Make an impact on your business right out of the gates in 2020.
And boom! It’s the start of 2020, the beginning of a new decade! What’s in store for consumers, marketers, and designers? While our crystal ball may not have perfect 20/20 vision, here are our predictions for what the year ahead will bring:
1. Brands will need to earn personal credibility with consumers, as demonstrated by four important trends that will continue to build.
Trustworthy Brands: With corporate and political trust at an all time low, look for brands finding ways to re-build connections and reliability with their audience.
Brand Activism: Whether it was Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign, or Patagonia’s efforts to get its customers to speak out against climate change, activism has become an effective marketing tool. It will likely continue to increase in 2020 with the upcoming presidential election.
Influencers: With the rise of social media, influencer marketing has become an incredibly popular tactic, and it seems safe to say that influencers aren’t going anywhere at the turn of the decade.
Personalization through AI: Using artificial intelligence for ad targeting is already incredibly prevalent. In 2020, expect to see messages that appear as if they were personally created for you.
2. The next decade will see major shifts in digital interactivity as users engage with technology in 3 major ways:
Touch: Touch will continue to be the primary means of digital interaction as it provides the greatest control and accuracy.
Gesture: Expressive and intuitive, interactions such as swiping right can help people accomplish tasks quickly, but only if they are simple and repeatable across various devices in order to develop a standardized language.
Voice: We can expect voice control to become even more prevalent in search, e-commerce (“Alexa, add milk to my cart), and conversational voice assistants.
3. If it’s a video, it’s a go!
Anything that supports and promotes video will continue to dominate. With nearly 80% of all traffic driving toward video, consumers continue to select video over written content. With that said, shorter is better, with videos under two minutes garnering the most viewership and videos 30 seconds or less having the least attrition.
4. The strongest colors will be those that suggest peace and optimism for the new decade.
Pantone recently released its 2020 color of the year, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue. The hue was chosen to bring simplicity and peace to ones life and creations. Because blue is such a predominant color in logos (with 33% of brands using blue in their identities), we predict the complementary and analogous colors of greens, oranges and purples will come into play in the next year. (See our illustration above for an example!)
5. Happy, easy & accessible fonts will dominate this year.
Classic simplicity: Minimalist, Swiss geometric sans-serifs will be here to stay due to the ease they transition into different platforms and create immediate hierarchy.
Fancy but warm: A popular alternative will be decorative, high contrast serifs (think Didones fonts like Modcloth and Target’s Everspring brand) due to improved screen technology that allow for greater detail.
Retro chic: Another popular option will be the neon, curvy fonts with tight kerning that emerged from the seventies and eighties (think Stranger Things), used for headlines, not body copy.
6. Glasses will be half full.
With the beginning of a new decade, consumers will be looking for signs of optimism—even in identity systems. We predict logos that connote growth, forward-thinking and positivity will take hold in the marketplace. Look for icons with playful colors, animation, and a serene, zen-like feeling.
7. Websites will continue to get bigger… and also smaller.
“How can that be?” you might ask. Statistics show that websites continue to get heavier, meaning large graphics, interactive content load, and videos. However, with more of the world going mobile first, we also predict the counter trend to continue with websites going super simple, with sleek illustrations and easy to digest text that will load faster on slower networks.
8. The “weird” names of the 2010’s have passed; next we’ll see simpler one word brands.
With all the fancy, made-up names of the early 2000’s, you might wonder how much weirder can the names get. While made up names like Google, Avaya or Movandi will always be a go-to, the next big thing in naming might be those boring, normal sounding names. Companies like Cultivate, Chief, and Vault, are seen more as rebels right now in terms of naming, according to CrunchBase News. As brands move into a minimalist visual style, we are predicting naming will follow suit, and we’ll see more companies with names like Hitch and Lane.
9. Consumers will want to opt-into content.
In the next decade, concerns about data collection and security will change the way people browse the web. Privacy breaches like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal and security hacks such as Equifax’s have heightened web users’ awareness of their personal data. As more breaches and hacks come to light—which is practically a certainty—people will expect businesses to not only be explicit in how they’re collecting data on their website’s visitors, but also allow their visitors deep control over what personal information is gathered.
10. Instead of “data dumping”, some companies will start “dumping data.”
Companies have been collecting data at unprecedented rates, yet they find themselves paralyzed with the amount of information. While “big data” and “AI” aren’t going anywhere, we predict many companies will actually trim the amount of data they are collecting to focus on what is insightful and actionable for their business.
As you jump into 2020, are you ready to manage your brand into the next decade, meet consumers’ demands and lead them into the future? Use these predictions to help you chart your course for the years ahead, and reach out to our team if you’d like us to help you move the needle on your 2020 business goals.