Creative Design Trends 2025: From Wabi Sabi to AI-fueled Art

Get ready for the upcoming year! The Depositphotos team is excited to announce that our flagship trend forecast—your guide to advanced marketing communications—is now available for download.

To deliver you first-hand insights, we spent a year monitoring top searches in our 300M+ library and diving deep into events in marketing, creativity, art, and science. We also spoke with leading experts in creative communication. Curious about our main discoveries? Just press the button below and download the BIG design trend report right away.

Creative Design Trends 2025: Elevated Perspectives

Trend 1 The new contemporary

Trend 2 Cluttercore

Trend 3 Getting sentimental

Trend 4 AI-fueled art

Trend 5 Crafted harmony

Trend 6 Embracing the dark

Trend 7 Look from above

2025 is upon us with hyper-jumps in time and space. So, buckle up and get ready to see the world from elevated perspectives. To stay relevant to your audience, you’ll need the flexibility to combine opposites in your creative campaigns, such as whimsical AI art-inspired visuals and photos of time-honored, Wabi-Sabi-themed craft items. Gen Z will demand that you show them some of the friendly, warm chaos behind your products, while Millennials will respond better to dark aesthetics through gothic, punk, or noir references.

To help you better understand which design trends suit your creative ideas, we invited experts to participate in the project. Each of them has years of experience in marketing and communications and knows how to make current trends work for you.

This year, our list of experts commenting on trends includes:

• Martin Zarian, Brand Builder & Co-founder at Factory 39 (Cyprus);
• Sam Wilkes, Creative Director at Vault49 (USA);
• Lucas Yu, Associate Creative Director at Superside (Portugal);
• Yoav Herstein, Vice President of Creative at Bria (Israel);
• Ez Blaine, Chief Creative Officer at Huge (USA);
• Tito Gouveia, Art Director at Leo Burnett (Portugal);
• Macauley Johnson, Creative Director at Scholar (USA).

And that’s not all! To help you start your first experiments with trending aesthetics as soon as possible, we have added dozens of image, audio, and video collections on the topic of each trend to our report. Moreover, you can also try to create an image using the AI Image Generator.

Get our trend forecast now and learn how to strengthen your projects next year.

The new contemporary

“Ultra-contemporary visuals, with their striking and often disruptive elements, resonate deeply with their [Millennials and Gen Z] need for individuality and a connection to larger cultural conversations…”

That’s how Martin Zarian, the Brand Builder, explains why brands that integrate ultra-contemporary style, with its fluid forms and otherworldly elements, see a positive response from younger generations.

This trend involves mixing techniques such as hyperrealism and sketching, as well as using custom color palettes that attract attention with their brightness and unusualness. Download the project PDF to find out what will help you make your campaigns more surreal.

Cluttercore

Minimalism is taking a backseat and now seems too faceless for the generation of TikTok and fleeting aesthetics like “Brat”. This audience rejects the sterility of brands and does not hurry to tidy up their homes themselves, appreciating the little trinkets scattered around the corners that tell their unique story and preserve various memories.

Vintage maximalism in your choice of visuals, eclecticism in composition, and a touch of nostalgia in musical accompaniment—this trend will suit every brand that is not afraid to be weirdly authentic.

Getting sentimental

What is behind the popularity of search queries such as “romanticism art” or “romantic couple hugging” in our stock library, which have almost doubled recently? To answer this question, we looked through the finalists of notable events in the world of advertising, such as the Cannes Lions, D&AD Awards, and others.

As the audience’s interest in sentimental narratives increases, campaigns that focus on customers’ feelings rather than their actual needs have a better chance of success. However, it’s not that simple—download the full report to learn more.

AI-fueled art

This year, the Depositphotos ecosystem was replenished with an AI ​​Image Generator. We also launched Creative Suite API, which offers businesses a variety of AI-powered tools and combinations that can become part of their products or platforms. These two facts are additional proof that generative AI is significantly transforming creative marketing. But what can be said about specific aesthetics that may be set in motion?

AI art—a search query that increased in popularity by over 1600% (!) this year—is often associated with realistic, highly detailed depictions of things that do not exist in the real world. It is also about using several recognizable styles within the framework of one creative project. Our report provides examples and tips on how to generate AI art.

Crafted harmony

“The authenticity of natural materials and simple beauty resonates with creators and consumers, offering a genuine connection in their virtual day-to-day lives.” — Ez Blaine, the Chief Creative Officer.

The trend hiding under “Crafted harmony” refers to traditional arts and philosophies, such as Wabi-Sabi and Ikigai.

Traditional Asian concepts of living in harmony with the environment will acquire a new meaning in brand communication throughout 2025. In particular, brands will try to inspire audiences with time-tested ideas on how to make their everyday lives more calm and comfortable and be optimistic in their campaigns.

Embracing the dark

Dark mysticism is becoming an increasingly prominent theme in visual brand communication. Gothic, dark baroque, punk, and post-apocalyptic—all these recently revived aesthetics share a mysterious atmosphere, a dark color scheme, and the concept of transition.

“Isn’t this trend overly pessimistic?”, you may ask. No way! Color palettes built around purple and blue; sounds of the night, church organs, or heavy rock; and a grunge industrial image background—all to show the audience the way to the light.

Look from above

Elevate your brand’s perspective and show the world in a way that allows each detail to unfold and tell a story! This is the motto of our report in general and a specific design trend that we decided to discuss separately. Photos of the planet from space, reportage photos from drones, and flat lays were the forerunners of this trend in terms of technology.

In 2025, people will need a deeper understanding of contexts, so images taken from higher points will receive more approval from audiences. They’ll let us see things in all their transparency and openness.

Get ready-to-use digital assets inspired by Creative Design Trends 2025

Stay ahead of the competition with our annual data-driven trends report! Discover insights from international experts to connect with your audience, check out fresh analytics, and stay relevant with ready-to-use multimedia content and the messages you share.

And how about experimenting with some of the design trends and aesthetics even further? To provide you with an easy start, we crafted a collection of trending images, music, and video. Start browsing our files to design outstanding, budget-friendly projects that resonate with your audience.