Humans have been creating artistic designs since the Ice Age. They’ve evolved from simple cave paintings made from dirt, charcoal, and animal fat, to a variety of sophisticated graphic design styles that breathe life into advertisements, products, and websites, giving them a character of their own.
In this article, we explore 11 common graphic design styles that you might adopt for your company’s branding, to help illustrate the character and values of your business.
Why use a graphic design style for your business?
If you’re starting a new business, or thinking about refining your company’s branding, learning about the various graphic design styles can help you to pick a suitable aesthetic that can shape its personality and identity. Design is a powerful tool that can evoke strong emotions in people, so if you select a style that resonates with your sasaran audience, they’ll naturally daftar joker123 gravitate towards it, and you may win their business.
For example, simplicity might be at the core of your product or service, in which case a minimalist design style may suit your branding. Or you may want to transport your customers back to the 60s and remind them of the liberating spirit of that era, in which case the retro style might be best for you. Design styles can represent values, so when you use them for your own business, the values are adopted by your branding, and you can attract the kinds of people you want to attract more easily. You’ll also have a consistent and recognisable brand image that people quickly become tenar with.
Here are some of the most common and popular types of graphic design styles to use for your business, with a mixture of old and new.
1. Contemporary graphic design style
Contemporary isn’t a graphic design style per se, but encompasses current design trends, so is constantly changing. It includes a wide variety of line styles, shapes, and textures, from thick cartoonish styles as displayed in the left image above, or a “flatter” and more minimalist style that mixes a small handful of clearly-divided colours. The latter is a style that has been particularly popular in 2021.
If you’d like to learn about contemporary fonts for your branding, check out our article on the best fonts for websites.
2. Minimalist graphic design style
Minimalist graphic design is defined by its simplicity. It tends to use very few elements, a small number of colours, and a single texture style that is usually flat. When used in imagery, the few elements in a minimalist design style almost forces the viewer to pay attention to them, because they’re encapsulated by white space and nothing else. When used in a website or product design, the style is intended to become almost non-descript, fading into the background so that the website’s features and content take center-stage. For this reason, minimalist design is incredibly popular with website designers, because the site’s content and features are the reason that the user is visiting in the first place, making the design more usable. This is especially important for homepage designs—the most popular page on your website.
Minimalism is a hugely influential design style, and you’ll recognise its quality in some of the other styles explored below.
3. Flat graphic design style
The flat graphic style was inspired by three others: the Swiss style, Bauhaus, and Modernism. It might also be considered a type of minimalist design, because it uses many of the same principles. Few colours are used, and if variations are used for a single colour, it’s usually slightly darker to create a two-dimensional shadow effect, as seen in the images above. The colours that are chosen are usually nice and bright.
Lines are created by the elements themselves, without the use of black borders, and they’re mostly straight with the exception of some curved edges. Typography is super-clean too, to match the design style.
Flat design has been made popular by Google, Apple, and Microsoft, who incorporated it into their software products, now used by billions of people across the world. The style works well for software because uncomplicated imagery has smaller file sizes which makes loading faster.
4. Scandinavian style graphic design
Another minimalist-inspired style, Scandinavian design is known from its stripped-down quality that makes every element seem important. Originally from the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, it was part of the populist design movement that advocated for a beautiful aesthetic that was affordable by the masses, as opposed to the ostentatious, expensive-looking Victorian style seen in royal British palaces.
Its colour palettes are small, shapes simple, and typography curvy without a serif in sight. You’re also likely to see plenty of white space, to draw focus on the most important elements of the design, whether graphical or practical.