Forward Thinking
This year’s Forward Thinking series is all about starting the year with clarity and intention – tidying the messy desk/Figma board inside your mind, and planting new seeds for the 12 months ahead. It’s time to cultivate fresh inspiration and unusual approaches, energise your creative process, share and connect with your fellow creative compatriots and find a new facet to your creative voice.
There are five features to dig into:
- The graphic trends you’ll want to bookmark for 2026: Five visual trends sure to influence creative work this year, featuring curated moodboards of references across trends in art direction, typography, logos and more.
- Shut your laptop! Ways to find inspiration offline: Discover fresh inputs beyond the limits of your screen via seven fun mini-briefs you can do at home, set by a range of creatives such as Tala Rae Schlossberg and From Form.
- Open your laptop! The creatives designing a more inspiring internet: Rabbit hole into the experimental and alternative internet projects making online a safe space of creativity and customisation.
- I’m not a robot: why showing your workings has never been more important: A deep-dive into the increasing ubiquity of behind-the-scenes content, and its real benefits and pitfalls for creatives.
- The future belongs to the creative generalists: advice for how, and why, to build a generalist mindset to give yourself longevity against AI and a fast-paced industry.
Enjoy! We hope it gives you some foundations and momentum for the year ahead, and we can’t wait to see what 2026 holds for the creative world.
Forward Thinking 2026 is in partnership with Residence.
Forward Thinking 2025
If the robots really are taking over, then see this year’s Forward Thinking series as a manifesto for the creative resistance. Forward Thinking 2025 explores bringing humanity into all you do as a creative person: whether that means catering to your left and right brain tendencies as you revitalise your work process, or being unashamedly more emotional about the work you do. Our trend predictions for this year are more accurately a gathering of trend rejections, highlighting creatives that can’t help but swim upstream. We explore how motion design has become so integral to how we evoke personality through screens; and how you can tailor your social media life to align with, even inspire, your creative practice.
Forward Thinking 2024
Our latest annual Forward Thinking series looks ahead to the coming 12 months, exploring seven visual trends set to shape the year, examining the rise of analogue design techniques, surveying how graphic design for sport is transforming, and seeing how emerging technology might impact creative projects, plus offering a handy creative survival guide to get the year started right.
Supported by AKQA.
Forward Thinking 2023
Our third annual Forward Thinking series looked toward to a new era of design on the horizon, to uncover the trends and topics, worries and wonders that might be in store for the creative community in 2023.
Forward Thinking 2022
As we embarked on a new year full of potential and hope in 2022, the second edition of Forward Thinking looked at the global creative industry’s ambitions and predictions for the 12 months ahead.
Forward Thinking 2021
The first edition of Forward Thinking launched after the tumultuous year that was 2020, and looked to explore how creatives might face the fresh start of 2021 with (cautious) optimism, bolstered by its strengthened community.