Using trends to redesign
So it’s that time of the design process, you’re going to have to think of a new idea or a new way to showcase your work, whether it’s a digital or tangible product, it’s hard to churn that creativity in you to deliver something totally new.
Remember that trends are recurring patterns and trend analysis is an attempt to spot that pattern. Do your best in reading articles and surfing the web for the latest or upcoming trends.
In this article, I’m going to show you a different way to churn out creative designs through studying trends which are not relative to the design (Trends of cars used for UI Apps). I know it may sound confusing but I’m sure you guys are intrigued to know what I’m talking about! So let’s get to it.
1. Study your trends.
First things first, choose the trends that you want to implement your design on. I took smartphones and then studied the upcoming trends smartphones are going through and broke it down.
First I listed out the trending smartphones
Based on this list you could make a mood board. I do this to have a nice visual image in my head of the upcoming trends.
2. Break them down
To drum into different elements of the trends you’ll have to dive deeper and analyze each element separately. You can take certain sectors of the design and then dive deeper into different elements. Here’s my breakdown on smartphones.
If you’re still confused on how to do this, here’s a small step by step procedure you could follow :
How?
- Start sketching or listing out different elements which you see first and then go deeper into your study.
- You could also disect your trends into different categories for example — for a mobile phone you could disect your categories into Aesthetics, Form or even the operating system!
- Map them to your current product and what trends may look good on your product.
3. Interpret
How do you make sense of your trend study? Here’s how to try and implement those trends and try to interpret them in your designs. Based on my trends I decided to redesign on 3 mediums.
A Car
The Volkswagen Beetle is a sporty coupe that is loved the world over. I decided to use my trends for a potential redesign.
So using my photoshop skills ( which aren’t up to the mark ) I still managed to pull off a decent redesign using my trends.
I’ve also listed out how I used my trends while redesigning my car.
Doesn’t it look different? I’m sure that by spending more time on this I’d make it far more aesthetically appealing. For all you, UIFolks interested out there I’ve redesigned the Hot Star & Decathlon web page. I’ll just show you guys a glimpse of both and I’ll leave it up to you guys to guess what trends I may have used, list it down in the comments below.
Summary
Knowing now, how the needs, behavior, and expectations of users will evolve, it can help companies act fast and invest in research and development of products and services that can cater to those needs and expectations.
The purpose of Trend Analysis is to spot a prevalent trend within a user group and/or to determine how a trend developed/would develop over time. This exercise helps identify new opportunities and ideas for concepts or products. Therefore, it is a good idea to conduct Trend Analysis during the early stage of the design phase or also help you redesign!
If you’re interested in seeing my work here’s a link to my Behance and Dribbble profile. I also keep posting on Instagram so that’s here too.
