Re: 2013 Design Trends in Print

Design trends. Hm. Well, in light of the original Aaron Kitney blog post, here's something of a rebuttal: 13 Popular Print Design Trends of 2013 (That Make Us Cringe). I don't entirely agree with all of these points--some of these techniques have their uses, while others are much more fundamentally flawed and don't have much to do with 2013--but it's not a bad overview of design mistakes.

And speaking of trends, here's a predictive infographic I found here:

I hope it's wrong, because it's really, really ugly.

But here's the problem with trends: they're transient and temporary, by definition. Rather than spending our time and effort concerning ourselves with trends (following them, creating them, consciously avoiding them), wouldn't we be better off pursuing an ideal, timeless design philosophy? Plato's design, if you will. It would look good and be usable for any audience, at any time. This may be impossible, but I'm not willing to believe that yet.

Of all the sites I've seen on the Internet, MetaFilter probably comes closest to timeless perfection in visual design. Here's what the front page looked like in its beta-test infancy in 1999:

And here's what it looked like this very afternoon:

Very little has changed. Even the colors are the same. The layout is clear and usable. Instead of chasing trends, maybe we should strive to get things right the first time.