2011 Logo Trend: Banded

The report for 2011 shows that color is still prevalent, but scaled down in the form of tints. Brown or gray is dominating the neutral hues. Meanwhile blues and greens are softer. They’re seeing more Pinks too.

Lightness is being carried out in other ways: Airier shapes that seem to lift off the page, line weights are thinner, and there’s plenty of transparency as well. Here’s a quote that sums up this year’s trend rather well.

It feels like what people believe a logo to be is also becoming more transcendent. A logo is no longer a single piece of flat art. It can be a favicon, an icon, or an entire set of marks that work together to support the team. Its boundaries have become less strict as well. There was a time when most logos could be enclosed in a simple hand-drawn square, circle or similar geometric shape, but now many logos drag outside those outlines. They just don’t want to fit the old mold.

Here are the trends they identified this year:

• Gradients
• Juvi
• Vibrate
• O
• Earth
• Monoline
• Series
• Brown
• Dandruff
• Concentric
• Loopys
• Banded
• Comma
• Buckys
• Fruit

Check out the full gallery here. Image courtesy of LogoLounge. Credits: 1. BrandBerry, Artive 2. Higher, Voscast 3. Dickerson, Healing Touch 4. Frog Design, Microsoft Word

2010 Logo Trend: Shift

Catching up myself with LogoLounge’s annual logo trends. Last year was awesome for logos!

This year some of the tools available to designers has had a hand in some of these trends. For example, new Ilustrator tools such as Swirl, Pucker, and Scriptographer have clearly left their mark. We also see that current events also influence ideas that make their way into logos. For example, O-shaped logos popped up after the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. There are also new standards like Transparency. We’ve seen plenty of them now to be perceived as a trend. Transparency is here now. We also see an increase in hue brightness, and  it’s most likely due to the pervasive use of on-screen color, which is light that is projected (and also RGB and not CMYK). Text based logos are really strong as clients and designers are distilling their messages to be concise and direct. The use of color has been greatly expanded.

Here are the trends they’ve identified for 2010:

• Cubist
• Spores
• Ghosts
• Tendrils
• Shift
• Parts
• Pixels
• Hexahedron
• Dust
• Peepshow
• Festoon
• Stains
• Burst
• Wallpaper
• Box-up

Check out the full gallery here. Image courtesy of LogoLounge. Credits: 1. Asta form, Sheriff Studio 2. Go Welsh, Penn State Architecture 3. Effusion Creative Solutions, musicplace.com 4. Liska + Associates Communication Design, Becker and Becker.

2009 Logo Trend: Circulate

Heavy-hitting logo design website for logo-lovers LogoLounge published the seventh annual Logo Trends feature. Always a great read, it shows how designers continue to push the envelope. The feature not only captures what has come out of designers’ minds over the course of the last 12 months, but it also informs what we might see later on. Full of color, shapes, text, and ingenuity, the latest trends do not fail to impress.

This year’s collections include:

• PhotoFill
• Concealed
• VariDot
• Candy Stripe
• Texting
• Encrust
• Monolgue
• Doily
• Flip Flop
• Mosaic
• Sequential
• Recycle
• Dandelion
• Circulate
• Gossamer

If you also want to catch up on previous year’s trends: here are the links:

2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003

Sample courtesy of LogoLounge.com