Response questions for assessment

Student Forum
#1

Hi, to finish my assessment I need three industry professionals to answer these questions for me:

  1. What design trends mostly influence your personal style?
  2. What design trends do you think will be most dominant in 2020?
  3. How do you keep up with current design trends?

Greatly appreciated, Thankyou :slight_smile:

#2

Oh, boy! :unamused:

Are these really questions from a college instructor? They’re horrible questions since each one of them misses the mark. Worse still is they give a false sense of what’s important to the students. Geech, who do they have teaching this stuff?

Anyway, I’ll answer.

Question 1. With 30-plus years as a graphic designer, art director and creative director at several newspapers, magazines, ad agencies, corporate in-house agencies and, now, a major U.S. university, I don’t pay any particular attention to the trends. Temporary trends are largely irrelevant. Good design needs to incorporate a sense of being with the times — as in the current decade — but following here-today, gone-tomorrow trends with the intention of emulating them is not only a waste of time, it’s counterproductive to the development of the designer and to the designer’s clients given that, by definition, what’s trendy next year will likely be untrendy the next.

Question 2. I don’t know what trends will come and go in 2020, nor does it matter. It’s utterly unimportant unless one is dealing with a decidedly trendy client whose business depends on anticipating, planning for and tapping into a trendy audience’s preferences for shallow, trendy things.

Question 3. Like I said, I make little to no effort to keep up with current trends and never have. That said, I pay attention to what’s going on around me and if I notice a faddish trend emerging, I typically avoid jumping on the bandwagon. I’ve said it before here several times, but designers should be trendsetters, not also-ran trend followers.

#3

There were earlier “trend” posts like this.
I think they all turned out to be spam…

From now on, any student who gets sent here as part of an assessment by their instructor needs to instruct the instructor to post first, explaining the reasoning for their assignment.
Done with this.

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