The 7 biggest design trends of 2025

0:09This is By Design from the Fast Company Podcast Network. I'm Liz Stinson. And I'm Mark Wilson. Today on the show, we're doing something a little different for our final episode of 2025. That's right. It is the end of the year. It's a time for reflection, if you're inclined to do that sort of thing, Mark. And at By Design, we very much are. So we are going to spend this episode looking back at the biggest moments in design from 2025. Mark and I have our lists, of course. But we're also going to do this with the help of a few friends. We've asked a handful of today's most influential design voices to share their biggest moments of the year.

0:43So we'll play some of their takes as we go down our own lists.

0:50I was just thinking, like, we're doing all this reflection for 2025 as if I'm not up every night at 3 a.m. reflecting on everything. But no, by all means, let's do a recap. This is the fun stuff. This is the fun stuff. This is the fun stuff, though. Yeah. So why don't you get us started, Mark? What's first on our list? Okay. So 2025 was the year Kraft died. Tell me more. It's a big idea. And it really comes down to one moment for me, which was the kerning on Pope Francis's tomb. This is one that kind of set Reddit on fire early on in the cycle. And then eventually I was in my calligraphy group where for two months people were ranting about it.

1:31But essentially, Pope Francis passes away. He has a really, really lovely tomb made from marble, sourced from his hometown. And on it, his name is printed in the worst kerned possible type. And it's absolutely awful. I think a lot of people learned what kerning was in this very moment. It was a really good year for kerning and a really bad year for papal tombs. What's so wild about this is, obviously, this is one of the most significant figures in the world. You know, being buried in a place that you would think has a really incredible understanding of sort of craft. And they completely messed up this work.

2:11And it really, I think, speaks to a larger trend about just like a loss of competency, right? Like, how is it that in the middle of Rome, you can't find someone who can like properly carve in a few letters and a name into a Pavel tomb? Do we know how this happened? We still don't exactly know how it happened. We do know that they use Times New Roman, which is kind of strange to various type historians I spoke with, you know, because there are all sorts of actually like legitimate, non-interpretative sort of typefaces they could have used. But they just went full Times New Roman, like they pulled it up on Canva or something, and then they just carved it in with bad spacing.

2:49We do know what happened, which was that rather than sort of kerning it by eye, somebody used a logic that each letter should have a similar amount of space between the other letters. And that's not actually how you arrange letters. We don't have to get, like, too deep into this, but I still kind of can't believe that this happened, and I still can't believe that, like, nobody fixed it. What I think is interesting is that this sort of reads as an AI error in my mind. It does. But really, it was just done by a human who simply made a mistake. But when you see the kerning on the Pope's tomb, your mind kind of goes to AI because, you know, it's just like this little glitch of an error that makes you second guess if something was created by the human hand.

3:33And that's like such a distinctly 2025 thought that I just had. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it totally is. And it's actually pretty charming that a human messed up in this way. Yeah, it's really nice when we fail one another rather than our automated systems, I guess. Yes. And, you know, it does tie directly into AI slop. Like, you know, slop did become sort of Webster's word of the year. We saw slop sort of in a big Christmas mural in London. You have meta launching its Vibes app. And, you know, I think in this space, we all have become a little slopped out. And now we're seeing this maybe not equal, but opposite reaction, right, where this counterpoint where we see hopefully a resurgence of craft later in the year.

4:16We're seeing that within ads and sort of other spaces. Totally. I think that there has been a real shift. People are really interested in how something is being made to show that proof point that it was actually created by a human. And, you know, that's exactly what our first guest sent in for his biggest moment of the year. So, Cody, can we roll that clip now? I'm Forrest Young, and I'm a designer at Young Studio and a design and AI resident at Wolfholens. My biggest moment in design for 2025 was the debut of the new Apple TV by TBWA Media Arts Lab, using only practical effects. By employing 19th century film techniques, more akin to a zoetrope than a 2025 MoGraph workflow, the final mnemonics have a cut-through quality, as I experienced both the widely shared BTS footage and the final artifact as a single transmission.

5:08This layering of BTS and mnemonic, where the audience is brought through a laborious process to the final artifact, is reminiscent of an OK Go video and touches upon the more haunting qualities of a Thomas Demand scene meticulously crafted from paper. The color space intentionally conjures the rainbow strip apple from 1977 designed by Rob Janov, stretching time markers and semiotics between the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. The design serves as a herald for slow craft. As studios work to perfect their ratio of an acceptable equilibrium between Gen.A.I. and real subjects in media, more practitioners will relish in this art of slow making.

5:50The conviction to defy the brisk pace of technological acceleration emits an aura of courage. As deepfakes and slop will soon pervade all surfaces, the value of real or IRL will become more pronounced. Premium will become more closely aligned to time-intensive endeavors than sleek but instantaneous content. Slow will be a surprising conduit of value creation. So I just have to say that that was an extremely poetic explanation of what is essentially like, you know, a marketing material from Apple TV. Forrest, you're hired. Great job on that. What I hate most about Forrest is that he speaks better than I write to this day.

6:36Yeah. I mean, look, it's a really good point because there is this stark divide in the ad world right now where you've got startups that are using AI to create as many videos as possible. Our marketing writer, Jeff Beer, recently described these ads as sort of like the banner ads of the AI age. And he's totally right. You know, he came up with this cute phrase that he's calling the shut the fuck up brand strategy, which, you know, the idea more or less is that the most interesting brands in the future are going to be much more strategic about how and when they speak to their audience. And I think in the case of Apple, Apple really nailed this idea.

7:13They're on the front end of this idea that craft is going to be the differentiator going forward. I thought that this was a really cool use of practical effects. And so I was happy to see it. I was too. I mean, I think this was one of the first things that Apple's done in a while that was sort of universally beloved, right? Even through an external agency. Yeah. Where I find some point of tension, and I'm curious how brands like Apple respond to this. You know, Apple also had another ad, full ad this year that, you know, used puppetry and sort of, you know, a lot more practical effect. Yeah, the Winter Wonderland ad.

7:45Is that one? Yeah, the Winter Wonderland ad. And what's interesting is that, like, Apple is sort of the opposite of all that. Apple ushered in the touchscreen age. They create products that are finely crafted, for sure, but also essentially slabs that offer you digital information. And so I actually think like how that reconciles and sort of that relationship between them pushing these fuzzy, glowy type crafts with their own crafts and actually how they translate that to be more than marketing, I think is a challenge and will be interesting to see. Yeah, but, you know, you contrast that to all the other shit that is currently out there.

8:22I mean, I don't think that they have to work for that argument too much. I mean, I just want to talk really quickly about something that you mentioned earlier, Mark. These AI ads that have stirred up a lot of controversy just this month, right? So we have the McDonald's ad that was created entirely with AI. McDonald's has been thoroughly raked over the goals for it. Their defense being that we spent more on this or as much time on this as we would have a real ad, right? Right. Coincidentally, it was made by another specialized agency in the TBWA network. Not that that means anything, but, you know, I think it just shows that these brands are going to be trying a lot of different things, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.

9:04And I'm not so worried about how Apple reconciles its reason of being with creating something beautiful. That's fine. I also think, though, it can just become, you know, if you're sort of marketing is an extension of your brand and really truly what you are, then I think they have to make sure that it's all sort of one cohesive message. But I think that also falls back on everyone. So I think this is interesting where now it feels like it's more of a liability to run an AI ad than not, right? Like it is definitely a low risk to make a plain old commercial. And so I am curious how many people are going to see Rewind.

9:42And then obviously we are in for a heavy 2026 craft year. And I also am wondering, like, how you stand out with that. Will craft become, feel like a tired trope because you have brands like Apple presenting puppeted commercials that don't feel one-on-one with their brand? It just feels like a trend, like a counter trend to a trend. So that's what I'm curious about. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. This actually sort of segues into our next big moment of the year. And what is this one? We're talking about rage bait ads here. You know what I'm talking about. Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.

10:27My jeans are blue. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. So how is a rage bait ad different than your normal ad? Okay. So in my mind, rage bait marketing is really about intent, which is why I'm not sure that the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad is really considered rage baiting. It's not entirely clear to me that that's what that was because American Eagle, they claimed that they did not do this intentionally. You know, people really pissed off about this ad. And it was mostly because American Eagle was just casually promoting eugenics and didn't seem to realize it. But the CEO told the Wall Street Journal after people got really upset about it, he said something like, you can't run from fear.

11:13We stand behind what we did. And more or less said that people misinterpreted the ad. So, you know, to me, the most telling characteristic of rage bait is that intentionality. And while Sidney Sweeney might not, that whole episode might not have been textbook rage bait, I do think that it became like a real source of inspiration for companies, for some startups who engaged in some pretty effective trolling this year. I mean, we firmly disagree on this. This is like perfect rage bait. I feel like it is the textbook dictionary of it. And I hear what you're saying on intent. But look, somebody knew somebody within the stack of creative that I think very much understood that they were sort of poking the hive.

11:56And I think that's been a lot of sort of the interpretation on it. It's like, you know, bullshit when you see it. And I feel like this is along those lines. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're probably right. It's not just a room of people who, I mean, maybe it was just people who were idly sitting by, right? With a slightly, you know, not slightly, a fully provocative idea. But I think it's a different playbook than what we've seen subsequently. If we compare it to some other rage bait. Right. Let's talk about Friend, the AI gadget, that company that spent a million dollars plastering the New York City subway with ads that were custom designed, basically to piss people off.

12:34Friends founder Avi Schiffman, who you've talked to and who you've written about, Mark, told our reporter Grace Snelling that he intentionally left a lot of white space on the ad so people could graffiti them. I'm not entirely, I don't believe that. I think it was sort of like an opposite effect of the Sidney Sweeney thing. I think it started happening and he was like, oh, actually, this white space, I meant to do that. That's why ads have white space. That's why all ads have white space. It's not about readability. It's about offering up a canvas for defacement. It's the original social media comment.

13:09Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do think that's an interesting critique. You know, no matter what, the copywriting was absolutely rage bait. And sort of the presentation was rage bait. And sort of the in-your-face nature of saying the future is the sort of automated friend was clearly rage bait. And why do you think we are in a moment right now where we're seeing this bubble up as a trend and people like Avi are not denying it, like you have your American Eagle sort of conveniently denying it, but fully embracing it, right? Like fully saying like, no, this is a valid strategy today. I think it's a valid strategy, particularly for these kinds of companies, because the technology itself is really divisive, right?

13:52So it lends itself to this divided take on whether or not it's good or it's bad. You sort of automatically know when you put these ads out into the world that you're going to be speaking to two groups of people, either people who are with you or people who are automatically against you. And when you do that, I think it just is a perfect recipe for rage bait marketing. And we're going to I do think we're going to see a lot more of this. After the friend ads went up, there was another company called Nucleus, which covered a Soho subway station with ads suggesting that people should be choosing their unborn child's genetic traits to give them an advantage.

14:32So, you know, I guess eugenics 2.0. They said that they were directly inspired by the Sydney Sweeney ad. Good genes breed good genes, Liz. Exactly. Exactly. I think companies are going to continue to use this playbook in the coming year, though I do believe that once you're really forthcoming about your strategy around this, it loses some of its effectiveness, right? Like you lose that surprise factor once you are transparent about your intent to piss people off. Right. I'm being provocative to be provocative. I mean, Grace wrote about this trend really wonderfully for us this year. And, you know, I think one really simple observation, but very true, is that one reason RageBate is working is also just that it cuts through too much noise of everything, right?

15:18Like in a world where everything is sort of upsetting you a little bit, this advertising just leans full in, turns the knob up a couple decibels, and gets your attention. It's viral marketing 2025 version. I also think it works leading into the next trend we're really seeing. And that's around just the general polarization of branding and sort of brand response. And this is something you and I have both seen growing for, I think, a few years, where once upon a time, I feel like you defined your relationship with a brand by what you bought. So like if you liked Gap stuff, you'd buy a Gap, right?

15:55Like maybe you have Gap big on your shirt. If you like Louis Vuitton, you do that. But now I feel like it's not just what you buy. It's actually your sort of reaction to a brand that is becoming more of your identity. And we saw this with sort of Jaguar in 2024 being a really polarizing brand. And I think this year we saw it with Cracker Barrel, right? Yes, we did. So Cracker Barrel, you know, rebrands and, you know, I don't exactly know the best way to describe it at this very moment. Not really modernist, but sort of modernized. They took away the old timer. They took away the old timer. They assassinated the icons.

16:32And they gave us, you know, a really nice wordmark that was relatively welcoming. Completely serviceable for our current moment. Completely serviceable and absolutely pissed everybody off in a slightly different way depending on the outcome. Right. And I do think it's important to add to this that at that time, Cracker Barrel was undergoing a bigger transformation. They were changing their restaurants from being, you know, this knick-knack laden, kitschy, like very down-home design to something that was much more sterile. The, you know, gray walls, white accents, something that resembled just like— Yeah, that goop makeover, that Middle America goop makeover.

17:14Yeah, exactly. Middle America goop. That's a great way to describe it. But yeah, so, you know, I think people cumulatively who really cared about this brand or purported to care about this brand latched on to both of those things. And for whatever it's worth, I do think that brands can sometimes be a prism for your view of the world, for better or for worse. I feel like that's like an extremely capitalist thing that's happening these days. But the politicization of Cracker Barrel was definitely not something I saw coming, although I probably should have because of Jaguar. But it's really, it was divided between red and blue.

17:55Exactly. Once you have the president commenting on a rebrand, it has left the realm of branding and entered the realm of politics. Which also happened with Sidney Sweeney, which happened with Cracker Barrel. And then now here we are, which is probably our next big topic where everything is freaking political and design now. I mean, I look back at our last year, our first year of podcasts, right, our half year we've done, and I can't say how many political stories we've had. And that's interesting because it's only because we're covering the biggest design stories sort of objectively each month.

18:32You should hear Mark during our brainstorms. Mark's like, I don't want to do another political story. And I say, we have to do it. It's the news, Mark. Yeah, it's actually true. And, you know, to some extent, that is very much our job to be reporting on whatever it is, even if every single episode has become a little bit political. But here we are. We are going into a growing trend where everyone cares about brands. Everyone feels like they have to have an opinion on everything that's happening. And now that it's sort of expanding, I think, to all of design increasingly. Yeah, totally. I do think the biggest story by far in this arena is Trump's official sanctioning of design, if you will, with his America by Design initiative.

19:14Mark, you have been reporting on this story, so I'm going to let you take this one. Tell us a little bit about what that is and what's going on. Yeah, I mean, America by design, look, it's been a pretty complicated year within government design structures, period, I would say. When Trump came in, he rapidly started remaking sort of digitally terraforming many, many resources for Americans, and that comes down to all sorts of things. But really what we saw early in the year was obviously Elon Musk stepping with Doge. And what he did with Doge was really wipe out a lot of the internal governmental design firms that have been built up sort of, or design agencies, pardon me, that have been built up over the last decade.

19:58And so hundreds of really carefully recruited government designers, many from the private sector, were wiped out in its place. Elon sort of steps away. Joe Gebbia from Airbnb sort of steps in, and they launch America by Design, being essentially a new sort of call executive order, truly, for the prioritization of sort of aesthetics and of functionality across government design services. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge story. We can get into that more. But your point that this was issued via executive order is it's reflective of what Trump has done since he's come into office. He issued an executive order around architecture as well.

20:43You know, the Trump administration has really, in my mind, become a bunch of like pseudo creative directors since stepping into power. Like, and I think that's interesting because so much of the visual world, to our point about branding, is a reflection of your own view, right? So if you can make the world look like your point of view, then maybe they think it might persuade other people to think like them. I'm not sure. But yeah, I mean, you know, the America by design is one thing. I think the most recent topic that comes to mind when we're talking about politics and design is the A1 news that the State Department swapped out Times New Roman with Calibri?

21:27Calibri? How am I saying this? I say Calibri in my head, which I'm sure is. No, I think you're right. I call it Calibri, which feels very like flat Midwestern. Calibri. Calibri. Let's call it Calibri. It's a little more fun to say. But this to me is the most and the biggest indication of where the administration is at. And it's just a tiny little thing. Right. So Marco Rubio, just to give you a sense of how this like what the news is here, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently sent a memo to his staff saying that the State Department would be switching from Calibri to Times New Roman. There is a lot of history to this beef, and I'm going to spare us all of the details.

22:11But in short, the State Department had been using Times New Roman for a very long time until 2023 when former Secretary of State Antony Blinken replaced it with Calibri. So Calibri is a sans-serif font that is probably best known as the former default font in Microsoft Word. And, you know, this was a really big deal a few years ago. Some people were not happy that this was happening, but the idea was that the State Department needed to have a typeface that was more accessible. And Calibri apparently is a font that is much easier to read on screens for people with low vision or who are dyslexic.

22:50And the Trump administration did not like that because it was part of the DEI and Accessibility Initiative. So, you know, you fast forward to 2025, and Rubio decided that he wanted to get rid of what is being called the woke font. So we switched back to Times New Roman because it looked more professional. It was quite the drama. It's quite the drama. I mean, even Times New Roman has, you can look at the serifs at the ends of the T's and Times New Roman and everything else as accessibility tools too, right? Like, this is something, an object. Every letter is an object meant to be read. But yes, it is an extension of those efforts and a very sort of high-profile public story that can be told.

23:33Right. So the point here is that this administration has politicized everything down to the most minute detail of how it is sending memos. And, you know, I think it cues up our next guest who has something to say about this very topic. I'm Paola Antonaglia. I'm Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA. The demolition of the East Wing of the White House is what really did it for me. That was the design metaphor that brought the whole year home. So back and forth in time since that October 20th, the whole year has been about demolition, mostly senseless and even when not senseless, likely to be replaced by worse.

24:15from Doge to vaccination policies, scientific academic research, rainbow crosswalks, good taste, press independence, public radio and television, international aid, all the way to the recent Calibri versus Stein's New Roman War. I sometimes feel that I am in a despicable me movie in which the villain's goal is just to stomp and crush and eat everything. let's blow it all up, grew just because. And with all the real destruction that is going on in regions at war like Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia, or under the strain of environmental catastrophes from Los Angeles to Sri Lanka, it feels really wasteful, petty, petty, petty, but also extremely dangerous.

24:59I cannot wait to start rebuilding. And we will start here in New York on January 1st. I mean, petty, petty, petty is and dangerous is exactly the right word for what she's describing here. I mean, Paola is obviously one of the great documenters of design and culture. And so, you know, I think I think hearing her say that this was her biggest moment really underscores that idea for me. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think we said this on an earlier podcast, you know, seeing that image of, you know, the White House demolition. And I do think it's one of those images that we're going to be talking about 10, 20, 30 years.

25:37It's just indicative of this moment. So we're going to switch gears for our next one a little bit. But we're going to turn away from politics and just toward hardcore tech. I think this year, though, has brought us something we've all known was coming, but we're really actually seeing it play out now, which is not just better and better AI models, but the commoditized AI models. That in a time of sort of impossible spending going on where everybody was racing to build the next great LLM or other, you know, AI technology, we're really seeing a lot of people doing great work, all in tandem, driving down prices and sort of blurring the lines between one company and another.

26:22In February, we saw DeepSeek R1 come out of China. This was, you know, it feels like eons ago, but this kind of rocked the world because for the first time, someone who was completely off the map came in and challenged OpenAI's just dominance in this space, just how well they were doing. R1 performed about as well as OpenAI models at the time for 3 % of the price. They absolutely forced OpenAI to sort of counter, bring out new models they'd been working on, also drove down OpenAI's pricing. But again, this just sort of illustrated the moment of sort of the commodity model. Then, you know, toward the end of this year, I think we saw another pretty big shift in power, which was Google with its latest Nano Banana and Gemini coming and really leveling the playing field in a big way, potentially even cutting in front of the line.