Graphic Design Trend: Trendy Gradient & Stretch Sans Font

I chose to focus on two graphic design trends and combined them into one graphic. The first one is trendy gradient. Trendy gradients can be used in many different ways, one of them being backgrounds. These soft gradients are easy on the eye and can stand out from the other graphic design trends like Maximalism. Soft gradient backgrounds can give great contrast to interesting fonts to grab viewers’ attention. A new font trend of 2022 is the Stretch Sans Font. I came across this font when scrolling through Instagram from the account @orumgrafix. This font is a Helvetica font that is manipulated in a certain way. This font brings a little more sophistication to the posters while keeping it fun and eye-catching.

When recreating these trends, I chose to go with a clothing sale advertisement for Black Friday. I created my graphic by first starting to paint abstract shapes in three colors close to each other to create a gradient in the background. I chose the soft round brush tool to let the colors bleed onto each other. I then framed this with a black-strocked rectangle with the rectangle tool. Then I went onto Pexels.com to grab a free image of a clothing model to carry out the clothing advertisement look. I found an image of a woman in jeans, a jean jacket, and a black tank top from the photographer Bankole Ade-Oni. I took this photograph to a separate artboard on Photoshop to crop it to a circle for the lower half of the graphic. I then moved to the eye-catching Stretch Sans Font. At first I didn’t know how to make this but I played around and had to improvise a little. What I did was choose the Helvetica font and typed out the words “Black Friday” with three ‘A’s’ in “Black” and three ‘R’s’ in “Friday”. From here, I rasterized the text layer, making it not editable at this point. I erased the right vertical line in the first ‘A’, I removed the right and left vertical lines of the middle ‘A’, making it almost disappear, and then removed the left slanted line in the last ‘A’. I did the same process to the three R’s. I then made a small rectangle and placed it horizontally, connecting the top arches of the three A’s in “Black” and the middle horizontal line all the way through. I did the same for the R’s in “Friday”. This trick made the ‘A’ in “Black” look stretched out and the ‘R’ in “Friday”. I then added a few extra details to carry out the rest of the clothing sale advertisement.

Sources

deBara, D. (2018, December 13). The gradient design trend: What it looks like and how to use it. 99designs. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://99designs.com/blog/trends/gradient-design-trend/

Www.canva.com. (n.d.). Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.canva.com/learn/social-media-design-trends-2022/

Bankole Ade-Oni · Photography - Pexels. (n.d.). Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.pexels.com/@bankole-ade-oni-2285063

Siddiqui, Z. (2021, November 26). Typography Trends 2022. Instagram. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://www.instagram.com/orumgrafix/