6 Trends in Design for the Food Industry from VistaCreate Art Director

Food-related design is a world of its own. Food design (when food itself becomes a designer’s tool) aside, designs for restaurants, cafes, vendors, caterers are a separate design direction with its own distinct design trends, traditions and peculiarities.

Creating a website for a restaurant or meals provider, designing a menu, creating marketing materials for events and deals is almost as much of an artform as preparing the delicious meals themselves.

To learn more about trends, we’ve turned to our own design template chef – Art Director Mykhailo Orlov for some insight on the latest trends in food design and applying them when creating visuals in VistaCreate.

Trend #1: More is More

While literally anywhere else the trend has been ‘less is more’ for a while now, in food design more is more. Well, maybe not in the sense that you thought of:) Actually, for food design, the best decision is usually placing all of the focus on the food. Think of all your other design elements as just the topping.

Trend #2: Cool Fonts for Headlines

As your focus is on the visual – your edible item(s) – the text should only be supplementary. Draw attention to the utmost essentials with a cool font though.

Trendy fonts for food right now: Rise, Brusher, Vast Shadow:

Trend #3: Highlight Your Text

In most cases, a picture of something delicious is going to be the central point of your visual. But food photos can have too many colors, patterns and shape changes in them. They also often have high contrast. This means placing your text directly on the photo to create a design is not always going to be possible.

Place a colored shape underneath your text to make it readable.

Trend #4: All Natural

The trend right now is creating authentic images that feature food that hasn’t been artificially enhanced with inedible but photogenic sauce or pinned up or down to keep the shape of, say, a burger.

Trend #5: Animation

The final trend that comes to mind is animation – it’s everywhere: in Stories, in your feed, on websites, in ads. Here at VistaCreate we’ve noticed our users really loving it for any kind of design, food included.

There are two ways one can go about animation for food designs – go small with animated text or smaller decorative elements around your central photo OR use animated food items as you focal point and add supplementary text. The latter is the trendier one, obviously, because it’s more bold.

Trend #6: Brutalism

This one is a bit of a controversial one. Thing is, brutalist, kind of primitive design that’s actually often pretty elaborate and interesting but looks like it’s just a few shapes thrown together without much thought, effort or planning. Think latest collab of Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber – their music video for ‘I Don’t Care’ is the pinnacle of brutalist trend and it’s been a viral success. Despite all the perceived visual ‘flaws’, it just works.

Getting inspired by this trend means you can use a poorly lit food photo and totally get away with it;)

Final Thoughts

We hope that our selection of trends provided you with some inspiration and while we are at it, check out our very recent project – the grand Food Calendar. It’s a collection of food holidays throughout the year complete with links to related VistaCreate templates that you can customize and use for your projects. Download and use the calendar year round for your marketing and smm activities!