Five typography trends set to make waves in 2023
This year’s trends are all about what’s underneath. From code and generative typography to type as a political tool, how and why we create type will be driving what’s coming next.
It’s Nice That’s 2023 Forward Thinking campaign is supported by Material Design, whose latest design system update, Material You, signals a radical new way to think about design for the entire tech industry. Material You explores a more humanistic approach to design, celebrating the tension between design sensibility and personal preference, and not shying away from emotion. Click here to find out more.
We’re experiencing an unprecedented moment in type history – where so much of what we’ve been taught about typography (it should be invisible, it’s slow to evolve) is dissolving before our very eyes. And behind it is a bright, luminescent, gorgeous field of hallucinatory magic.
For much of recent history, the work of a designer was a job of pairing, where the illustration or photograph did the heavy lifting of communicating tone or mood, and type was appended, often around the edges, almost as a label. But today, with the help of a multitude of technological innovations and experiments, a new era is emerging: where typography itself is able to embody mood and vibe like never before, leading to some of the most breakout campaigns to be entirely typographic (check out Tátil Design’s Rio Carnaval campaign from earlier this year). What designers are doing with type today is akin to what it must have felt like to live in Dziga Vertov’s era, with technological innovation opening up new ways of seeing and understanding the world around us. And as new visions open up – as technological opportunities show us just how innovative type can be – deeper questions surface, regarding why the default has been what it’s been; what ideas or ways of thinking have benefitted from it; and who owns the visual cornucopia of typographic language. Below, we take a look at the five typography trends set to shake up the creative world in the year ahead.
