Design in 2019

Designers are everywhere these days. There’s all kinds of them! There’s likely to be a new trend towards the emotional designer in 2019, an individual whose job it is to design products that invoke a specific emotion. There has already been the emergence of product designers – with the not-so-specific job description of “designing new products for a specific business or industry – presumably products that didn’t previously exist”.

1. A Wider Adoption of Design Thinking

We expect 2019 to see more normalization/adoption of design and design thinking across all kinds of industries, a trend already prevalent in European business. Subsequently the growth of an entirely new set of opportunities for individuals with a design background.

Which brings us to our second trend prediction…

2. This rise of DIY

As companies accept design thinking into their organizations, it’s inevitable they will conclude which aspects of their marketing and content creation they should be spending their marketing dollars on and which aspects they can bring in house. Overall the DIY trend is nothing new with easy to setup eCommerce solutions like Shopify and WooCommerce. We’re seeing a larger corporate trend to taking the lead on managing their online solutions with requests for customized user-facing content management systems. We’re also seeing a larger trend to easy-to-customize design solutions more accessible and sustainable for small businesses. Not to say a designer or developer isn’t required along the way, they just may not be as necessary to maintain content after the site is built. To that, there is an increased interest in totally outsourcing the back-end maintenance on solutions. This allows businesses to focus on content with their existing marketing team, outsourcing only the specialized creative and more sophisticated technical jobs to agencies and firms.

3. The Social Designer

Designers will be thinking bigger and tackling bigger issues. The fact is that while everyone becomes more comfortable with design and communications, the excess of smaller job types (while never disappearing entirely) will be optimized by service systems and in some cases even AI. This will allow designers more time to explore larger challenges and bigger issues. 2019 will be the year of the social designer. These big design ideas will come in the form of innovative products or apps with humanity in mind, nature-first architecture that incorporates real sustainability and more personal online spaces curated by individuals – hopefully with reasons. Fingers crossed this will serve to either help make the world a better place; or point out the ways in which it needs to change.

4. The return of interdisciplinary designer

The return of interdisciplinary designers is already on its way back and we see this trend continuing into 2019. With the growing popularity of things like YouTube and camera culture, more and more people are experimenting with different kinds of creative software and formats. Video editing leads to motion graphics and then into photo editing and so on. As more companies realize this they realize that the right person in a design roll can be totally invaluable. This is one of the reasons while all our team members have their own specialties, we all like to get involved with other formats of media and learn from each other.

5. WordPress on the Rise

WordPress will continue to dominate the CMS world. WordPress currently occupies 58.8% of the CMS marketplace; and powers about 27% of the Internet. Those numbers don’t lie. WordPress is powerful. Did you know the WordPress core took over 100 years to build? While not technically true as the first version of WordPress dropped in 2003; that is to say the core files have received the equivalent to that amount of time spent on them by a single human. As WordPress is an open source software, which means the vast majority of WordPress sites exist outside of the WordPress.org network – the actual time spent on developing on or with WordPress will be considerably higher than that.

WordPress provides a core functionality that is incredibly versatile; it also offers the most readable (searchable) default file indexing system.

Seriously WordPress by itself does a better job at indexing files for SEO than most from scratch developers. Being open source, there are also a multitude of SEO plugins that you or your developer can use to further boost your online ranking.

So between the beautiful default file structure that Google bots eat for breakfast and the versatility of the front end and content management system, a strong WordPress development can meet the needs of most businesses in a cost effective and versatile way. WordPress sites can be owned outright, hosted anywhere and are dependent or as independent as you need from any service provider.

6. The Rise of the Full-Stack Designer

We see creative digital solutions becoming more accessible and more digital designers partaking in their own development. The full-stack designer is becoming a real thing as designers are problem solving, adjusting and even writing their own code. To expand that point we can also expect to see more personal development from self-starter designers and creatives overall, as information sharing sites, video sites and peer-to-peer learning sites have become commonplace. YouTube is now a more valuable source of working knowledge than many college campuses.

7. More Flowers

The final trend we are predicting in 2019 is more florals. Why? Because they look really really great! We expect to see this kind of pattern in more digital work this year along with other bold patterns. If done right images can be optimized and backgrounds tiled. Think big tiles and bold patterns designs. Just remember to optimize your images.

We are recognized as a Top Website Design Company on DesignRush.

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