We find and feel Asian touches in many segments of today’s society. This oriental style has conveyed their time-honored and rich history of cultural heritage, making them distinct and even captivating. The influence goes to the realm of graphic design as well.
We witness Asian-driven visuals like arts, literature, movies, movie posters, restaurant or company logos, fabric and garment, architecture, furniture pieces, and more. Their designs have shown the oriental aesthetic that brings with them their inherited tales and values.
You can check out several inspiring ideas of Asian-style graphic design later in this article. But before that, let’s talk a little about the upcoming trends in this creative field.
The Recent and Upcoming Graphic Design Trends
As this year’s holiday season is coming, it means that the year 2022 is just around the corner. Everything is continually changing, including the trends in the creative world of graphic design. Some say the upcoming year is the time to raise the game, while others say that everything is allowed.
Let’s look at several graphic design trends for the coming year of 2022 and maybe the following years.
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Nostalgic 1990s
The gothic serifs, neon colors, and vaporwave landscapes successfully brought us back to the 1980s nostalgia. They have been so significant culturally even for decades. The hits TV series like Stranger Things and It are some of the influential examples.
As for 2022, it is the time for the successor. The retro style will make a comeback with the nostalgia of the 1990s. One of the recent examples is Netflix’s Fear Street that has romanticized it more to the mainstream.
June Frange, a design director who works for CPB London, calls this trend “the 90’s MTV nostalgia.” The feeling that will take us back to couch surfing of home entertainment.
We will re-experience the 90’s nostalgia in the sense of comfort through an old-school cool touch. There are, for example, simple emojis, Memphis graphic design patterns, primeval internet frames, and more. Also, bring back the supremacy of loving childhood memories in the forms of bright-colored blocks and dripping slime.
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Vibrant and Playful Typography
Chris Algar, one of the senior designers at Design Bridge London, has predicted this. Typographic styles will tap into letterforms that are “really exaggerated characterful, dialing up the contrast between flowing lines and sharp angular shapes.”
He continues that playful colors and vibrancy will play a significant role in the typographic. Citing from the recent campaign of Nike “Play New”, the trend will rejoice the typography character “with wonderful flowing forms while providing a contemporary twist through vivid colors and sharp contrasting shapes.”
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Ukiyo-e Flat-Style Design
This graphic design trend has an Asian style from the beginning.
Ukiyo-e is a Japanese printed art genre by uses hand-carved woodblocks. This style flourished from the Japan Edo time (the 17th – the 19th centuries). Ukiyo-e means picture(s) of the floating world.
The artists painted different subjects like humans, landscapes, historical scenes, and more in bold outlines, often with flat colors and restricted perspective techniques. They rendered everything in flat style, often exaggerating the human poses and facial expressions with fluidity touch.
Today’s vector designers are familiar with those techniques to add an extraordinary effect to ordinary flat vector scenes. Therefore, they look up to the inspiring pioneer Ukiyo-e to look for methods to revive the flat vector graphic design as enacted by digital design standards.
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Social Media Slide Decks
Slide decks are step-by-step presentations in multiple slide forms. This innovation is a trend in social media networks since many people share them in messages and social media.
LinkedIn and Instagram are two of the most popular examples where slide decks can work most efficiently and appealingly. Why? Because these two platforms allow them to manage images by default. Also, it seems that both platforms prefer the users to use slide decks more frequently.
For designers, they can employ sliders to convert the most significant content of a blog post or make an article summary. Slide decks can make users or followers more active or even take action, without the need for a direct link.
For B2C companies, they can use slide decks at the time of launching their products as they can deliver messages equally in simple visual effect graphic design. You can increase audience engagement through videos or images with their help.
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Expressive and Experimental Typography
This might-be risky trend will be lettering that goes beyond easy readability and creates expressive forms in experimental ways. It will challenge the difference between abstract shapes and legible letters.
The design will highly depend on personal expression and experimentation. Accordingly, there will be a lot of incompatible letter styles, mind-blowing shapes, amorphous dashes, and the like.
Let’s cite what designer Tang Shi Yang said about this trend, “I think the state of graphic design has slowly changed into more expressive while trying to be functional at the same time.”
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Classic Serif Fonts
Dated back to the 15th century, serif font is one of the oldest typeface styles people still use in daily life.
Classic serif fonts show only a little embellishment at the top and bottom (or on both) parts. They tend to immediately bring about the feeling of melancholic reminiscence. Also, they are prone to radiate elegance in each word string.
Many companies or organizations have used this type of font and benefit from the design in their landing pages. For entrepreneurs, serif font helps them promote their brands, setting a particular tone to their web pages and placing themselves with creative graphic design.
In addition to elegance, this classic serif typeface gives an aura of authenticity to any website. It is also attractively versatile since it is applicable for social networks and blogs.
Classic serif fonts can be surprisingly eye-catching and attention-grabbing.
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Doodles
Doodles are not only personal meaningless meandering shapes or drawings. They actually can say a lot about you or anything. You can turn them into professional work too.
The upcoming trend will be combing digital design tools and human doodling touch. Doodles offer more organic and simple hand-drawn work, resulting in distinct characters. This style is simply perfect for product design and branding. You can attract a more potential audience by incorporating personalities and relatable words.
10 Inspiring Asian-Style Graphic Design Ideas
Based on the above graphic design 2022 trends, we are going to narrow them down into those posing more particular Asian-style touches. The most prominent one is perhaps Chines and Japanese design styles. You can find this influence in Asian patterns, typefaces, visual elements, abstract shapes, vector arts, graphics, icons, web elements, and more.
#1 – Money Game
Looking for something that is Korean-based in theme and the latest one? Money Game is one of the awesome choices for any of your creative design works.
Taking inspiration from the popular Korean TV series with the same name, Money Game, this creative template offers a display letter style that looks like Korean characters.
You can get or add the Asian touch, especially Korean-themed emotion, to your personal and commercial projects. It is applicable for YouTube videos, movie posters, social media content, greeting cards, logo designs, and more.
#2 – Doodlebic
This fun graphic design typeface is an Arab faux one, highly suitable for any content related to Islamic or Middle East themes or purposes. You can add it to complete your creative works, such as logos, apps, posters, flyers, book covers, videos, banners, apps, TVCs, kid products, etc.
This pack consists of multilingual support, alternate glyphs, numbers, punctuations, and the like.
Available with Open Type features, allowing you to access numerous style choices from designing software. It has an open-type panel for graphics software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
#3 – Okashi シ Typeface
If you want the touch of Japanese themes or cultures to your personal blogs or other business graphic design projects, Okashi is one of the best options. It is a unique yet pleasing Japanese-styled typeface designed in true and brush-style characters. Okashi means “sweets” in Japanese.
Okashi is one of the fonts that support the Japanese language, featuring full Hiragana and Katakana plus eighty-two Kanjis.
If you get the full version, the pack will offer symbols, numbers, and other country language support.
#4 – Empire of Persia
Bring the atmosphere of southwestern Asia to your creative graphic design projects with this distinct Arabic-styled typeface. Took inspiration from the time-honored and beautiful Arabian calligraphy, this font is impeccable for any personal or commercial purposes.
The Open Type features allow you to access various style options from the open type panel in specified design software. The pack offers Empire of Persia fonts in otf and ttf file formats that come with available help files.
Perfect for the Middle East or Islamic content ideas, this font is applicable for wedding invitations, logos, posters, branding, flyers, videos, book covers, and more.
#5 – Asia Tiger
This graphic design character set is not only fresh in handwritten brush font style but also elegant in look with the vintage feel.
This set offers a full collection of letters in capital and lowercase options, currency figures, numbers, punctuations, symbols, multilingual support, and other glyphs.
The set is available in TTF, OTF, and WOFF file formats.
#6 – Asian Patterns Element and Border
We can see Asian ornamental patterns in every single work like ceramics, pottery, textiles, architecture, graphic design, and more. Most of those patterns are centuries old. Each pattern carries rich, deep-rooted cultural heritage, meaning, and symbolism.
This pack is a collection of 100 contemporary Asian patterns – elements and borders – that have strong style influences of Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia.
The seat features pattern swatches (100) in AI, PAT, and PSD file formats. All shapes are in vector in 300ppi high resolution (1080 x1080 pixels). There are some bonuses of illustrations and pattern borders too.
#7 – Asian Cuisine – Colorful Flat Design Style Banners
Bring cheerful effect to your banner graphic design with these colorful Asian cuisines in flat design graphics.
It is a horizontal set, showing several popular Japanese and Chinese dishes like sushi, ramen, dumplings, and more. The template provides a copy space feature for text.
Compatible with the Adobe Illustrator application, the ZIP set consists of editable vector graphics in EPS10 file format and high-quality JPG.
#8 – Asian Food Icons
Needing Asian food icon to elevate your marketing efforts? Check out this collection of fifty popular dishes from Asia regions. You can find your favorite Asian cuisine from China, Japan, Korea, India, Turkey, Indonesia, and more.
The following are the complete downloadable files of the collection.
- An easy-to-customize AI file (1) in Adobe Illustrator. It is suitable for all image programs and printing. You can edit the color, text, size, etc.
- An easy-to-customize EPS file (1) in any design program
- SVG (1) you can easily open in Sketch, Inkscape, or other vector editing programs.
- Separate icons in EPS files (50)
- Separate icons in SVG files (50)
- Separate icons in PNG files (50)
#9 – Asian Culture Vector Set
This pack is perfect for making your graphic design projects more appealing. It is a collection of full vector illustrations of Asian culture characters.
You will get high-resolution JPG files with editable vector in AI and EPS file formats, plus a transparent PNG file. You can resize the AI vector into any size without quality loss.
These character illustrations are perfect for web graphics, social media, landing pages, icons, banners, books, infographics, and more.
#10 – Asian Food Menu Template
This menu graphic design template is available in two versions, dark and light (EPS and PSD). This A4-size template has the Asian theme of popular Japanese cuisine.
You can easily edit the text with the available free fonts of Fresco Stamp, Cardenio Modern, and Steelfish. This template is compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator programs. You can find a PDF of the help file and a link to download fonts too.
Generally speaking, the trends in graphic design will always change constantly to follow the customer’s preferences and needs. Fortunately, many have seen that the Asian style continues to dominate every segment in our today’s life, including the creative design world.
For more oriental graphic design touches, go to resourceful design webs to look for inspiring templates, fonts, graphics, and more.