For business owners preparing to launch a new brand, product, service, or marketing campaign in 2025, keeping an eye on emerging design trends is essential. Drawing inspiration from these trends ensures your brand feels fresh and relevant, and helps maintain a meaningful connection with your customers.
To spark your creativity as we head into 2025, VistaPrint spoke to the global community of freelance graphic designers on 99designs by Vista as well as its in-house design experts to identify the graphic design trends set to define the branding landscape over the next year.
From the raw, handcrafted charm of imperfect textures to the serene beauty of rewilding aesthetics or playful energy of scrapbook-inspired designs, this year’s trends share a common thread – a thoughtful balance of simplicity and personalized details that elevate and celebrate each brand’s unique character.
While this year’s graphic design trends may look a little more understated, they are far from plain and no less impactful. For brands looking to make a big impact with design in 2025, here are some of the year’s biggest trends to tap into.
Bold but understated looks for maximum impact
‘Not Quite Minimalism’ is in for a reason –it’s minimalism, but not as we know it. Taking the design staple’s love of clean lines, negative space and sparse layouts and reinventing it with bright, clashing colors and bold type faces, this trend has been growing in popularity through 2024. This style allows brands and designers to create bold, eye-catching visuals that still remain sleek, youthful and modern: proving that in 2025 minimalism doesn’t have to equate to plain.
While on paper, the Mismatched and Bright trend may look maximalist in comparison to Not Quite Minimalism, a lot of the same design principles apply. It’s all about creating contrast in clever ways to bring a brand’s personality into the heart of the design. By combining mismatched fonts, contrasting colors and experimenting with asymmetrical and irregular layouts and spacing –these designs are full of quirky personality that not only embrace but emphasize imperfection.
Authentic, hand-crafted appeal in an age of AI
In response to the growing presence of AI, in 2025 we’re seeing a rise in design styles and techniques that seek to remind us of the authentic power of the human touch. Etches and Imprints is a trend that leans into raw imperfections to create a hand-made feeling. Incorporating fingerprints, smudges and etches, as if a designer had just sketched them up moments ago, the tangible impressions of these designs can make brands seem effortlessly warm, authentic and personable.
Similarly, a move towards Childlike Textures also bucks against the precise and flawless nature of AI-generated designs, by tapping to the creativity and carefreeness of youth. Thick crayon-like lines, vibrant, playful colors, organic shapes and rough linework, together create designs that embrace authenticity and a handmade aesthetic to help brands show they are down-to-earth, fun and approachable.
The Structured Scrapbook trend is also all about bringing the charm of old-school crafting into a digital format. These designs feature cutouts, stickers and overlapping images, hand drawn touches like scribbles and handwriting and textures like torn paper and tape. However, with a strong focus on structure, balance and placement, this approach brings a little more intention while still capturing that carefree playfulness that comes with collaging. With so many elements to work with, there is plenty of room to mix, match and experiment with different elements to communicate the uniqueness of your brand.
Avenues for calm escapism
In times of global uncertainty and challenges, design is often one of the first things that reflects a growing desire to create and embrace a sense of peaceful escapism, and this shows up in 2025’s trends.
Pulling inspiration straight from nature, Rewilding Design leverages textures and design elements that resemble foliage, leaves, stone or bark, with color palettes of earthy browns and greens and soft watery hues of blue. But this trend doesn’t stop there. These designs are often paired with an unexpected twist, such as a flourish of neon pink or pastel lilac to amp up the impact. This creates designs that feel grounded yet fresh, with unexpected vibrant flourishes helping brands stand apart from the rest.
Similarly, inspired by Japandi design, a visual blend of Scandinavian functionality and Japanese minimalism, we are also seeing a trend of Functional and Serene designs emerge in branding. These designs are clean and uncluttered, pairing soft, muted neural color palettes with materials and textures that mimic natural elements like stone and wood to create visual branding that is quiet, calming and effortlessly timeless.
Reinventing the classics to tap into nostalgia
Nostalgia never goes out of style, and it’s always interesting to see which by-gone eras and decades are cycling back in new and innovative styles shaping the trends of tomorrow. In 2025, it’s both the beginning and end of the 20th century that’s inspiring designers and brands alike.
Contemporary Nouveau reimagines the elegance of early 20th century art styles, particularly leveraging the fonts, color palettes and illustrations found on Art Nouveau and Deco poster design. Full to the brim of Gatsby-style elegance, featuring bold typography, bright expressive colors set against dark backgrounds, hand-drawn imagery and clean layouts, designers are adding small modern twists to ensure brands look fresh, not outdated.
On the other hand, the Nostalgic Networks trend taps into the simplicity of 80s and 90s computer graphics, before they became too polished and advanced. Although this style is inspired by the retro tech era, the 2025 take on this aesthetic feels sleek and modern at the same time. Designers are pairing basic geometric shapes like grids, lines and stars with muted, primary color palettes and clean pared-back layouts to bring this early digital style into the 21st century.
From hand-drawn and the hand-made styles of Structured Scrapbook and Etches and Imprints, to timeless aesthetics of Contemporary Nouveau and Functional and Serene, this year’s trends celebrate individuality, blending experimentation with simplicity to create designs that celebrate the individuality of brands. So if you’re embarking on a new branding project in 2025, why not try one of these trends on for size to help craft distinctive, memorable visuals that leave a lasting impression.
Read next: Generative AI: Key Trends to Watch in 2025 as Technology Transforms Industries and Security
