New UX/UI Trends You Can't Miss! - Huge Illustrations, Apple Mascots, Change in Careers & More

In the past one or two months, design has literally changed dramatically. These are the nine most unique design trends literally are being used by companies like Apple and whatnot all of a sudden out of nowhere. The first one is the mascot era is back. We have duo with Duolingo of course, but Apple is sparking a huge debate. Mascots for every tech company. Now this is called the little finder guy and it's based on the finder icon that you see on Mac. Literally a very simple generic 3D model of a little clay person with a finder window for a face. Boy, is it being used everywhere? The MacBook new launch video literally had the finder guy sitting on a little chair miniature chair. There are literally people asking for this on Twitter to become a real product that people want to buy it like as a mascot toy. Literally they're using this in actual websites in actual marketing material. He's become like this Easter egg you have to find. Now this is becoming like a legend for Apple and clearly the marketing shows that it's working. So this could spark a larger scale movement where a lot of tech companies are bringing mascots back. Not just simple icon mascots which Notion has for example, but actual 3D or like this creative cartoon like mascots like we were missing out on for so many years. And you know how other companies start copying Apple once something becomes big with Apple? I think this is one of those things. Okay, so the next trend is called shaders and if you don't know what shaders are or shaders are basically these effects that you can add to your design that give this 3D-esque pseudo 3D effect to any flat image or illustration or UI design. So these shaders are very useful when you just want a three 3D look, but you don't want to create heavy 3D objects on websites etc. This is where Framer is now coming. So Framer in its recent update introduced shaders. Yeah, you can add shaders generically without using plugins or third-party Similarly, there's a slew of other tools bringing shaders back into the market. One is Unicorn Studio which is one of my favorite. I've used this in so many scenarios and so many use cases. It literally just has shaders and 3D interactions for an unlimited array of effects that you can add to 2D graphics. I think one thing that really sparked this back into existence are shaders being created by AI tools. So if you've ever white coded a website and if you ask it to create a cool effect for the background, eight times out of 10 it will create a shader effect kind of a three-dimensional gradient so as to say in the background. So I think this trend might be sparked by AI. Who knows? Another tool that has come out is called Oma. You can literally white code 3D websites and you bet there's shader support for sure. Okay, let's talk about how websites have started to get physical objects on websites everywhere. So now we're seeing this trend. I'll show a couple on the background. In creative portfolios, we see these CDs, DVD discs or disk drives or cameras or different paraphernalia on a table as if it's scattered in front of a designer and there's a title in between buttons in between. And you can literally interact with each one of these 3D objects or realistic looking real object. The next design trend is sort of a play on the previous one. There's a mix of 2D design with 3D environment so 3D landscape. For example, look at this one work smarter, move faster, AI powers you up. Text is flat, buttons are flat, but there are 3D elements just lying around like real realistic looking clouds in this realistic cool looking graphic. You see a lot of this going on around. When you move or scroll, you're essentially making the text go behind say like a hill serene environment this 3D environment or something which is super realistic or maybe cartoonish. Again, I think this is kind of combines with the whole physical realism. I think this is one of my favorite for sure. Okay, so the next one is enlarged illustrations and animation paths. So essentially I'm sure you've seen this webpage from Shopify and one or two other websites that I'll showcase which are doing something kind of similar. It's literally a animation path from the top of the website to the bottom with animations popping up in your face. These are very large animations with large feet or enlarged hands. This is not the first time we've seen this enlarged hands and large feet trend, but this is the first time it's been implemented this way. A foot is literally coming onto my face. I actually saw a video of a vent announcement by Razorpay which is a fintech company the largest fintech company in here in India and they literally just brought you into this 3D environment where there was a huge shoe, there was a character moving and you were in right in front of the shoe. It makes the user feel that you're a miniaturized version of all of this happening in the environment and you're going deep inside that experience. It feels a lot like a lot of those 3D animated movies when they take you through like a scene or maybe like a hill or a tunnel. It makes you feel like you're getting immersed in that animation. I think a lot of websites are getting attention because of this so that's a win-win. Okay, recently we did the Hyderabad meetup and I've been doing a bunch of meetups all across country. One thing I've noticed is how design is moving away from the visual aspect of it. Well, visuals are good at school, but visuals are expected now. It's been so many years since we've had tools like Figma and Sketch. We have 3D tools, we have shaders, we have everything available at our fingertips. Can be done by AI. Cool. But where does it make the most difference in business? And that is where the trend of UX in general as a as an umbrella is moving away from just visuals to something a lot more impactful to business. I will have a bunch of resources. One is this OWD web design news which is literally a bunch of future of web design and future of design, the future of B2B web design, UX, SEO, web design for law firms and how certain things are being done. I think this is a very very good website to check out all these articles essentially and I think you'll learn a lot from this. NN Group which is Nielsen Norman Group created by the fathers of UX is covering a lot of this as well these days. How AI can impact business decisions through design design processes. I think that is very cool to read through and to watch as well. They have videos as well. How can we optimize workflows? How can we optimize business? How can we bring product into design? The next trend into play which is called taste. So definitely design is moving from visuals to more business-centric or to workflow-centric decision. Taste is something that you can never replace. One area that designers predict AI will almost never be able to do replicate human taste. That is why designers are differentiating themselves at. There are literally web pages now dedicated to what taste in design means on subjectivity and how gatekeeping in the design industry etc. I think there's this there's this literal website called taste by dog.cc. Now NN Group also talks about taste versus technical skills. How technical skills might be replaced by AI which is a big big dilemma these days. Taste can take over and you can be in irreplaceable because you have taste. Okay, so yes, there is a huge massive gap between designers and tools which has been for many years. There's a trend of designers now building tools for designers. So earlier we used to have multinational companies just come up and say this is the best resource, but now individual designers are building stuff for people like us to help people like us solve actual problems being faced by designers. One great example of this is Effecto by Pablo Stanley. If you don't know who Pablo Stanley is, read up. This is a dedicated design tool where AI agents can be on your canvas kind of like installing an AI agent onto your current white coding workflow essentially. So if you're on Cursor or Claude or Codex, whatever tool you're using, you can install this as a skill and literally have a design companion while you white code. Let's talk about how glass has now made its way everywhere and every operating system is implementing it. Everything is either liquid or very liquid glass inspired. In recent leaks, we've seen how the next version of Android will be a very very glass inspired. So now the big trend is operating system following the glass trend to a point that it's now embedded inside the operating system. What's next is that users will expect that from applications as well, third-party apps. So you as a designer might have to implement glass in the next five years. All right, guys, that is it for today's video. What was your favorite design trend from today's video? And where do you see designs moving forward visually, aesthetically, UX-wise, workflow-wise? Let me know in the comments. Also here on the screen, you'll see video that you should definitely watch. If you like this video, you'll like this video as well. This I'm suggesting this video to you. Also subscribe to the channel for videos like this every single week and I'll see you next time. Until next time, take care. God bless.