Trend List
'Graphic Design is as well as fashion design or music is influenced by contemporary tendencies. Even more in a world where information is transmitted with speed of light. Trend List's task is to search, name and sorts these tendencies in graphic design. It is trying to spot when and where they rise, in which countries they are most extended or you can follow their evolution in time.
Selection of works mainly focuses on posters, books, catalogs, magazines, album covers, and invitations for cultural sphere. It is because these publications usually provides large space for experiments and the "most current" graphic design.
It is interesting to observe how many of today's "professional" designers create "conceptual" design, custom-made for client, that prefers content instead of formal appearance (which seems to be nowadays quite unimportant). But in the same time they are using graphic language very typical for visual communication in recent years, which can be also characterise as a trend.
Trend List explores the graphic design from an entirely opposite side. It ignores content of the work and analyses just its appearance. Based on the formal attributes of the site and it then sorts and catalogs.
But is it possible to separate content and visual part? It is possible to present graphic design without further explanation?
It seems so. It happens on every exhibition of graphic design, where the works are also taken out of context and the audience is not usually able to go under the surface of exposed posters. They do not examine the content . They perceive design only visually.
Trend List is not a criticism of contemporary graphic design. It just points to the fact that graphic design as well as everything else, is affected by certain trends, and today is not exception. But a lot of designers do not agree and still insist on the originality of their work that is based on pure concept. Wim Crouwel says: “You are always a child of your time, you can not step out of that!"
So why close our eyes to the rules and styles around us? We are always looking for something unique and new, even at the cost of incomprehension? After all, if someone is able to create a modern design it just means that he is able to express the spirit of our time!