Don’t take design trends too seriously

Each year in December every self-respecting design blog publishes design trends for the next year. I would suggest to consider them as an entertainment more than anything else.  The term "trends" always looks clickbeity. It seems like it’s promoted like a guide for designers and their clients. But when we design interfaces we think of business goals, of users, of brand. We think of the trends in the very last place.

But maybe I'm missing out? Maybe trends are worth following? I went through the blog posts and articles on UI design trends for the last 7 years to understand if we can use them as a guide.

What I've found out is that the lists are repeating themselves. A lot of the trends that are listed in 2020 were already hot in 2016. Let’s look the diagram and figure out how we can use this information.

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We can divide all the trends into three big categories:

• Visual style
• Technology
• Design process

(картинка диаграммы с тегами)

Visual style. Again, visual design should be guided not by trends but by business goals and user needs. We can’t represent every brand with minimalism or with bold typography. So this category is the most useless. Designer can draw some inspiration from the images and use it when the need will come but this is the maximum potential of this list.

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