Every year I review the trends emerging for the coming year.
Now we are coming close to the year 2026. What is different this year? What will be the big themes and styles this year?
First, I will be reviewing upcoming styles that might be popular in the coming year and then shift toward some overall industry changes/trends.
For the first portion of this article (Style Trends), I got some inspiration from Kittl’s 2026 design trends report. If you want to review the whole report by Kittl, in collaboration with Savee you can view it here. I will just be going over a few trends from it that I found interesting but they have several other style trends to look at.
Some of these styles may surprise you. Others you’ve probably noticed bubbling up but never had a name for — until now.
Note: Kittl gave me a special code you can use for 25% off Kittl Pro or Kittl Expert (monthly or yearly subscription) just use promo code CREATIVENEWSLETTER25
UPDATE: I decided to make a video version of this article so if you are a visual learner I encourage you to watch the whole thing below…
#1 Style Trends
Naive Design
This one surprised me a bit.
As a professional designer one might be taken aback by using childlike drawings, typography and illustrations. Our job is to make this look professional and that might mean leaving our childlike inspirations behind.
Naïve Design embraces imperfection, awkward proportions, and visible “human error” as a way to re-introduce warmth and individuality into design work, something severely lacking in today’s polished brand visuals.
It’s a counter-movement, similar to Brutalism in 2018, but with a softer and more emotional tone.
It embraces awkward proportions and visible “human error” as a way to re-introduce warmth and individuality into design work, something severely lacking in todays polished brand visuals.
Remember last year when I went over how we tend to move from one trend to another like a pendulum swings from one side to another?
I believe this trend is a counter response to severe rigidity that modern polished brands have leaned on for so long. This playfulness will be a way brands can remain more authentic and relatable.
Punk-Grunge
The 90’s are back, in the best way possible!
The 80’s had their comeback in the last decade or so, so now it is time to move up the timeline. I do notice that we tend to relive past decades about 30 years after they happened. This is due to previous generations coming of age and wanting to rekindle their past nostalgias.
I believe we see this trend push forward as pushback to over-curated, over-produced visuals — authenticity over perfection (are you noticing a theme here?)
Designers are turning toward grit, noise, rebellion, and the visual tension of “brokenness” to reclaim authorship, voice, and personality.
Where this is showing up?
Album / music visuals (bands, alternative genres)
Underground zines, editorial features, counter-culture magazines
Streetwear branding, limited-run merch, indie labels
Event posters, concert flyers, guerrilla campaigns
Brand campaigns that want to “shock,” “break rules,” or look underground
UI touches or micro-animations: glitch effects, hover distortion, torn overlays
It’s messy, loud, busy, layered and human. Everything 2026 design needs to feel alive again.
Distorted Portrait
Distorted portraits let designers express anxiety, conflict, trauma, multiplicity. Something a “clean” portrait cannot.
Distortion becomes a visual language for complexity and critique. Perfect for 2026’s cultural climate where division shows up in our visuals.
Design has always reflected the times.
In the early 2020s, we chased realism, from 3D renders to cinematic lighting and AI-generated photorealism.
Everything was polished to a mirror sheen. But as AI image generation became mainstream, that level of perfection stopped feeling aspirational. It started feeling sterile.
They expose what’s been hidden behind smooth gradients and curated feeds. A warped face doesn’t just look cool, it feels. It represents fragmentation in emotion, and technology. It’s humanity showing up in the glitch and trying to look beyond the chaos.
A few years ago I studied the popular Glassmorphism effects for the 2020 design trends class I did. That became popular due to 3d programs becoming more accessible. I can see Glassmorphism evolving with this trend to produce distortion through see-through textures.
Now we get to take a look at some of the trends I personally have seen bubbling up to the surface this last half of the year. AI will be a big theme.
#2 AI-Assisted & Hybrid Workflows
Yes, even if we do not like it AI is coming to our software programs one update at a time.
As of writing this the 2026 Photoshop update has not been announced (although they usually do it in late October) but you can bet it will be full of AI updates. Why? Because the world is spending BILLIONS on getting AI out in every software imaginable, and graphic designers are stuck in the middle of it.
Adobe is already adding Google’s Nano Banana AI image generation tool inside Adobe Firefly tools and it will be a matter of time before it comes to Photoshop as a non-plugin update. I hate to say it but Adobe firefly’s model really struggles to generate useful images.
Google’s Nano Banana is the FIRST AI image generation tool I felt like really followed my prompts and kept image integrity each time I did a prompt update to the image. I wrote a bit on Google’s Nano Banana here and compared it to ChatGPT (I believe google has the superior model right now)
I am not sure we can avoid all the new AI tools in our software but it is also sneaking into our workflows too.
I was working on a branding project the other day and was stuck on some of my sketches. I simply upload my sketches to Chat GPT and it helped my brain get “unstuck” and gave me a push toward the direction I needed.
I started the creativity, it just helped me keep the ball rolling. I think that will be the type of workflow help AI will lend us in the coming year.
I really just needed to see it with smooth finished edges without having to vectorize the work. After seeing some options I realized there is a good opportunity for the & to fit like a glove above the O and the U. Something I was not revealing in my sketches. It needed a lot more work than this so I went back into Photoshop to tweak this idea further.
I am tired of seeing AI slop everywhere and I do believe it is time to mesh our own sketches and ideas with what AI can do, instead of just handing it all of the creative power.
2026 will be about how to balance that out and use these tools to keep our originality in tact.
This all leads to the next trends I predict will be popular in 2026…
#3 Organic & Imperfect / “Human Touch”
Adding more intentional mistakes
Because AI slop is flooding the visual markets I believe this will be countered by more human elements. This means more intentional mistakes, Hand-drawn marks, texture overlays (grain, paper, subtle noise), rough edges, ink bleed, imperfect line work. Similar to some of the style trends we talked about before.
Remember when the em dash was seen as a sign someone used something from ChatGPT?
There are things that I have written that ChatGPT helped edit for me and yes, it just loves to put em dashes just about everywhere. I remember trying to delete them and replace them with commas instead to make it feel more human (and yes, that is incorrect from a grammar standpoint) but I did it anyway.
I wanted it to be perceived as a totally human written thought, even though some of it was slightly edit by AI.
There was an almost embarrassment I felt even just using AI to help me. So much so I even deliberately left misspellings in my writing just to prove It was truly me (and most people know that spelling is not my strong suit).
I believe designers will want to echo this in their design elements too. Maybe putting an element or two in what seems to be an imperfect space, or having more hand drawn elements and signatures, human fingerprints and even photo prints.
I think the only challenging part about this trend is AI is getting so good it can emulate some of these hand-drawn uniquely human looking elements. That might lend to further design style shifts in 2027 and beyond as we try to keep up.
#4 Fight AI Slop with Maximalism / Layered Composition
Rich layering of graphic elements — overlap, collage, textures, chaotic but intelligent grids.
What is one weakness of AI especially with layout design? It is terrible at it!
It sucks at the nuanced layered complexity we humans take for granted.
What is something we can do as designers to stand out from AI slop? To punch it right in its weak spot. I believe layered collage style maximilist layouts will really stand out in 2026.
The harder aspects of design to replicate by AI the better and this means many many layers of text, movement, grit, pixels, objects, pen marks and grain.
AI has a hard time with the finer details. The type of details designers love to create at 800% zoom. This is exactly the eye for design we spent years fine tuning and will be to our advantage as designers. It is the little texturing in the background and the imbalance of elements that create design tension that AI can only replicate but not organically produce.
I gave ChatGPT an assignment to emulate this style in a poster format and I gave it lots of ideas. Let’s see how it did.
It has layers, check. It has texture with the ripped paper, check. It has proper balance and hierarchy, check. This is really not as terrible as I was anticipating. It is missing something though. While technically it checks all the boxes, it still looks generic. There is nothing eye catching with this piece.
The originality factor is missing. The expressive design style you have seen earlier in this article is not there.
In the past, I handcrafted the numbers for each years trends for my blog and video cover photos. I would use Adobe Photoshop, 3d programs like Adobe dimensions but this year is a bit different.
Because so many 2026 trends are heavily influenced by AI (or countering AI), I decided to create this year’s design using ChatGPT (ironic, huh!).
So how does it compare to my hand-made work from the past? It took just as much effort. I still spent over an hour in Photoshop cleaning things up, and I went through 20+ prompt variations before I got something usable.
I like doing experiments like this not to support or be a champion of AI (I am still neutral but curious, legal issues etc.) but to understand how it is changing the designers game.
See image below. The process wasn’t glamorous either. The early renders were rough: random glitches, strange artifacts, and at one point the number six looked like it was made of human skin. Terrifying.
That is why prompt engineering is a good skill to hone and why incorporating your own creative direction for all interactions with AI is critical. I teach a little bit about that in my latest AI for Designers Skillshare class here and for those not on Skillshare I plan on posting it to my YouTube Channel in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Originality will still win but we need to have a talk about what that means in the future.
I hope you enjoyed this dive into 2026 trends. This is really just the start…
I hope to do a more extensive video on my Youtube Channel and in my classes in the coming months. I am looking forward to the 2026 Photoshop and Illustrator updates and will keep you up to date with the latest changes!
Speaking of YouTube. After 17 years of having a YouTube channel I have finally been accepted into the YouTube Partner Program. (long story to why it took so freakin long! I might talk about it in detail in another article)
That means I am finally a REAL YouTuber! I am hoping to add more casual video uploads there (different than my courses) so you can see me go over the latest news, software, trends in graphic design. As not to sound like everyone else in the world right now (Ha!) please subscribe!
Lastly, make sure to check out the discount on my Design Theory PDF book just for Substack readers here! And discounts on all my design courses here!
What are some trends in 2026 that you see? Leave a comment below, I promise to answer back to ALL COMMENTS!
This was an amazing article. Thank you for sharing, explaining, and showing the trends. Really helpful. I don't use Midjourney or any other AI art tool. I tried using the built-in one in Canva, and the output was ridiculous. Never again. I'm still figuring out my feelings about AI "creating" art, so... there's that too.