Digital aesthetics never stand still. Trends, vision and cultural shifts all play a part in how the look and feel of the digital world evolves. But it feels like we’re reaching a turning point.
Artificial Intelligence has cemented itself as the next big thing, redefining what so many jobs, careers and hobbies look like. And as designers and developers continue to adopt AI, we find ourselves asking two fundamental questions: where is the future of digital aesthetics heading, and what do we want to it be?
Where The Future of Digital Aesthetics Is Heading
Be Bold & Stand Out
Simple, minimalist and flat interface designs have dominated digital aesthetics for over a decade. While made a necessity due to the limited power and size of mobile devices, the trend quickly became industry-wide, featuring:
- Domination of neutral or neutral-adjacent colours.
- Shape limited to common, smooth and exact forms, like rectangles or circles.
- Sharp separation of bright colours.
- Clean, consistent gradients.
- Almost a complete absence of texture and 3D effects.
- Focused on a clean and efficient appearance opposed to realistic or outlandish effects.
But it came at a cost. As the industry relied on a restricted set of design motifs, we saw a consolidation of design with restricted room for distinct aesthetics. Now, AI generation is exacerbating this by trending towards the safe centre. If we don’t divert course, our future might become one of mathematical averages.
Which is why we are seeing a reignited trend of unique, bold and loud aesthetics. Whether it’s the increasingly artistic Shopify Editions, or just a step in a bolder direction, the future is to stand out or risk being hidden in the noise of generated monotony. While flat, simple and safe interfaces are still the norm (especially for larger corporations), we are slowly learning how to inject personality back into the see of grey.
Imperfection & Authenticity
Early AI generations stood out like a sore thumb, mostly because people rarely have 7 fingers per hand. But years on, it is increasingly more difficult to identify AI-generated art and designs as they have become almost pixel-perfect.
But as you near perfection, you loose one of the most important parts of a creative work: authenticity. Because there’s nothing authentic about a machine using an whole industry’s back catalogue to generate hollow copies at lightning speed.
AI cannot replicate the passion and dedication creatives put into their work. And that’s what people connect with: authenticity, not algorithms.
The prevalence of AI-generated works has lead to a growing rebellion against the technology — and not just about whether to use it or not. We are seeing a shift toward deliberately and overwhelmingly human works as a way to foster and maintain connection. Imperfection, mistakes, inconsistency and vulnerability are all very human traits, and as the digital space becomes more generated, that’s what we’ll instinctively look for to find real, human connection.
The Trend: Safe is Out, Unique is In
The core of how AI works leads it to converge on the centre: the prediction machine naturally favours the mathematical average as that is what’s most likely to be correct. Which is great for the consolidation of knowledge — or even programming — as you’re often looking for a ‘correct answer’.
But in creative space, we’re not looking for ‘correct’.
Our goal is to create something that intrigues, excites and resonates.
So it should be no surprise that modern digital aesthetics diversifying in the face of everything becoming the same.
Designing A Future We Want
Creative fields have always been about pushing forward. And our digital worlds gives us a unique canvas for rapid prototyping, provides the tools we need at a low cost and gives us a safety net to try and fail. Technology is setup to augment what we do best, and the future of digital aesthetics should be empowering people to be creative, not stripping the craft from us.
And together, these trends are clear that is the direction we are heading: a future of bold, imperfect, anti-AI design. Or to put it another way, a focus on human creativity. Because while safe might be easy, it’s uninspiring and repetitive, and it’s not a future any of us should want.
How can AI generate something that doesn’t yet exist if it’s only trained on things that already do?
And if we want AI to work for us in the long run, the last thing we want is to train it on more of the same. If creativity becomes extinct and all we’re left with is AI-generated designs, everything we generate will start to converge on a distant echo of a long forgotten humanity.
And if we reach that point, we may have just lost the chance to come back.