Branding and Logo Design Trends for 2020 – 2020 Design Trends with Chiara Aliotta
Welcome to another one of our interviews for 2020 Design Trends. Today I’m joined by Chiara Aliotta. Chiara, tell us a bit about yourself.
Chiara Aliotta: Hello. Thank you, first of all, for inviting me. I am an Italian designer. I define myself as a brand keeper and I work under the name Until Sunday.
UXPin: Can you share a little bit about your experience? What’s your field of expertise?
Chiara Aliotta: What I mostly do is branding and brand consulting. I work with companies and startups to help define their brands, work on their core messages, and define their targets. And, of course, define their image and how they need to talk to their audience. I love typography. I love designing logos with a purpose and I love sharing my knowledge with other people.
I often participate in two conferences where I talk about my life as a designer and how design can influence everyday people, not just designers and developers. I like making people happy, using what I design. Actually, I found that my work is very interesting because it has touched so many people, and it may change their lives as well.
UXPin: That’s amazing. Speaking of design trends for 2020, you said that you like logos and you consult with new brands on designing logos. Can you share with us what will be hot in logo design in 2020?
Chiara Aliotta: I hope that the eighties’ esthetics are coming back because I’m a millennial, so I’m moving to where my forte is. I see successful studios like Netflix, and the shows Stranger Things and Dark, and they are inspired by the eighties and they brought me back to my childhood. I think if brands want to engage more with my audience—millennials—one way to do it is by bringing back this kind of nostalgia. I can imagine logos to be inspired by neon lights or being pixelated or inspired by video games like Super Mario. I can imagine very fun logos.
Otherwise, another trend that could be very possible is animated logos. We are slowly moving away from structured logos that are printed and always need to be that way and never change. Right now, brands are spinning on the screen more often, and the brand experience actually happens on the screen of different devices. Logos can also be very interactive and interact with the user in different ways. Animated logos could be another trend that could happen in 2020. I am very curious to see how it would go. We are still in the beginning.
UXPin: I’m wondering about the eighties and nineties nostalgia thing as well. A couple of days ago, I had this talk with another designer and they said that they never would have guessed that pink was going to be the next “it” color. I think it’s because of the neon fluorescent color. You said things change and we’re going from the structured logo to maybe animated logos, but a huge part of branding and logos is typography. We had a year of Helvetica. We had a year of Comic Sans – maybe we’ll experience the great comeback of Comic Sans. So which fonts will be, in your opinion, popular in the 2020s? Do you think custom typography will be a significant trend?
Chiara Aliotta: This brings me back to a talk that I gave in 2008 about the power of typography and the ability to be expressive without using images. The title of the talk was, “You just love me for my body.” The title was very provocative because I was trying to ask developers to join a design talk. The talk was about expressive typography and that was also the year where the font Gotham was used to deliver a message of hope, change, and freedom in Barack Obama’s campaign. So that moment, typography was starting to be a very strong element in design. Finally, people were recognizing typography as being an expressive tool, and an emotional tool.
Chiara Aliotta: In 2019, I saw how many websites and many applications were using a very type-only approach. What I expect for this year is that variable fonts will become mainstream on the web, and custom typography for brands would be the only viable way to deliver a message that is consistent and to the point.
UXPin: For the second time you bring up the point of shifting from print to web, and of course it has a great value and amazing opportunity, right? When it comes to logos or typography.
Chiara Aliotta: It’s also my background, because I started as a print designer. Whatever I knew from print I brought into the web, when notebooks were telling you how to design for the web. Supreme was always my reference. There will always be this duality for me in my work.
UXPin: Speaking of which, I think that design in general changes, obviously the trends are changing, but jobs are changing too. It is said that in about 20 years we’re going to have 70% new jobs and positions that we don’t even know about yet. But of course most of them will be in the development field or engineering. But in our environment and our industry, people are saying the UX designer job is disappearing. Would you agree with that? And if so, or if not, what are the new titles that are going to be trending?
Chiara Aliotta: It’s funny because in 2016, the first company asked exactly the same questions to design leaders. And four years later we are still discussing if the UX designer job is going to die. I think it won’t die as long as we need to create interaction between humans and technology.
Chiara Aliotta: So let me recall. One is the drone experience designer. The other one is emotional intelligence experience designer, or human empathy experience designer. As long as technology is going the way of VR and all these new tools that are appearing in our lives, there will be more of a need to create experiences that are close to the way humans actually work, so that we can teach these machines to actually communicate with us.
UXPin: Yes, exactly. I agree with you that UX designers are not going to be needed. They just need to specialize, right? And maybe specialize to the technology that they work with.
Chiara Aliotta: They work with, yes.
UXPin: So my next question to you would be, what is your favorite emerging trend in your field of design in 2020?
Chiara Aliotta: As a brand designer with a focus on branding, what I see right now is how brands are getting more involved in the real world we live in. And how the stories they tell us are more real and tangible. Brands that are getting involved in new trends like global warming, gender equality, sustainability, and so on, will be even stronger this year. And what I like is that these brands are trying not to be meaningful just for you or me as individuals, but they’re trying to be meaningful for communities, and be more powerful. They are starting to understand they have power and that their message is going to be strong enough to dictate change. I like that this is happening this year, and I hope they will invest even more funds to support the causes they believe in. This is going be a very interesting year in that sense. We’re going to have a lot of interesting brands getting involved and making their voices heard.
UXPin: Yes, exactly. Technology is developing and that is the reason why we need brands to be more human. That’s why you have to have a story – not just for the sake of the story, but for the people who engage with your brand.
Chiara Aliotta: Exactly, yes. I agree. True connections.
UXPin: So my last question to you would be, what are your professional goals for 2020?
Chiara Aliotta: A few days ago I finished writing a very long list of solutions, which I’m not going to share with you because time is short, but I’m going to share just one. I hope that behind every prediction that I just gave to you, I will be able to actually face the unpredictable with creativity and use my creativity to beat the odds. That’s my solution.
UXPin: Yes, creativity is like the evergreen trend, isn’t it?
Chiara Aliotta: Yes, it is.
UXPin: Thank you very much, Chiara, for joining us.
