5 Content Design Trends for 2024

Last year I wrote a piece around this time on what we should look for in content design. The trends reflected tactics to use around the sentiment of a lot of people coming out of their shell (and isolation) to explore the world around them again.

So, what is the sentiment as we look toward the new calendar year and a year in the middle of the decade? A year that is now 40 years beyond the iconic year of 1984?

Many approach #contentdesign by solely analyzing the tech and the technical aspects available to us. That said, there are trends on this year's list that filter into two different categories: one is sentiment or the mindset that is around us based on human emotions and feelings. The other are tactics and tools to help us respond to those mindsets. The issue with too many strategists during the 2010s was to simply approach one or the other without broaching both in a hybrid manner. When you combine all of these trends, you can get to the best endpoint of solving problems for the people around us. True design thinking even though many said that was "dead." In a world where visual bandits steal our attention using the real-world, the world, both online and offline, is truly a canvas.

The question to ask and answer: what will you paint on that canvas today?

Sentiment:

1. Postmodernism. We've gone from a world of minimalism due to the confines of a small mobile screen to maximalism because we wanted to look at shiny, bright colors to move beyond feeling depressed. But now we will begin to question everything around us based on the fact we truly live in a post-truth era. Design will play a major role in this by rejecting the limitations of thinking that was very A/B or True/False oriented. Content that rejects the universal validity of binary oppositions, stable identities, hierarchies and simple categorizations will be embraced because of the novel nature of content that cannot be categorized. "Make content for search engines" falls flat when search engines themselves can no longer be defined with their past value proposition. It's not about keywords and links. We will see much content this year that is ambiguous, vague, eclectic and intersectional. Or a better term? Weird. And most of this will make sense to those who see the larger picture that tech solutionism cannot provide. "Where's the template?" thinking will be rejected by some content designers who realize following patterns only gets you so far as the pattern. It's like comparing paint by numbers art to a Picasso. Who is more impactful? Those who make TikToks telling you how to "hack the algorithm" will look really dumb in 2024 by this new crop of underground designers who don't care about any of the rules because they are skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, and instead the focus will be on the relative truths of each person in our society. This ties nicely into other sentiment trends on this list...

2. Save the Robots. The biggest debate around AI isn't if it will be important, but how the overuse of it will lead to differentiation. The best analogy for this is DJing. DJing has changed drastically the past 30 years because of technology, but one thing is certain, we still like to dance to a human synchronizing music for us. Why haven't the robots taken over a line of work that it should have? Because part of being a DJ isn't just about skills, but about reading audiences and context and history! What two or three things fit together to create something new. Sure, DJs can just click buttons and have software do this for them, but they still need a point of reference. This is why older DJs are still loved, because they understand context. This is something AI will have trouble doing, it has no history, it has no nuance. Things that are automated and made possibly through more AI will give way to cottage industries that pride themselves in human making. When people say, content will always need the human touch even with AI, this DJ analogy explains it best.

3. Everyone's a filmmaker. Most video in the past has been made with a similar pattern. Storyboard, creation of the assets, post-editing into a final cut. But what happens when that is reshaped by text to video platforms like Pika? This reminds me of the early 1990s when samplers flooded the music scene and many who in the past would not be considered "music producers," were now music producers. The shift in what we categorized as music entirely shifted. Didn't play an instrument? No big deal. Understood how to load and truncate a sample so it looped over a beat? You were now a producer. This will change who we think is a creator in a myriad of ways. Breaking down walls of gatekeepers who had defined who is a filmmaker and who is not. Like the Save the Robots trend, people with strong storytelling skills will still matter, because you have to guide what you put into these creation engines. But anyone can produce 3D animations, live-action content, cinematic videos and even change moving objects (like an outfit), just with simple text prompts.?This gives power to many who have been overlooked or had no path to awareness in a world usually guided by who you know rather than what you know.

Tactics:

4. Tonight, the Streets are Ours. There will be a renewed interest again in street design, 25 years after the initial underground golden era explosion from artists like Invader and Shepard Fairey. Subcultures on the web won't mean much unless they also have a physical presence or "tag" of sorts. This includes one of a kind DTG t-shirt designs that mimic what appears on the web or vice versa. If you are sick of what Oatly recently did, that is only the beginning of a slippery slope.

5. Long form video. Follow the ad share revenue and you will find the future. Remember all those people who said, "short form vertical video is all people want to see?" Well, they're wrong. That's because people invest time in long form video. We always have. But this isn't why long form video will be big again. It's because platforms are pushing creators to increase the time of their videos by dangling the carrot of ad share revenue. This past year YouTube increased the amount of money creators would get if they made videos over 10 minutes long. TikTok is now moving in the same vein. As for streaming platforms? They still like programming that is 22 to 46 minutes long. If you can tell longer stories or have the ability to produce long live streaming events, demand for those skills is increasing at the same time text to video creation platforms are also exploding. The result is a perfect storm.

What are your thoughts on content trends? How will AI continue to shape and reshape the landscape of this world? And what opposing forces will come into play as a result of the over-automation of this world? Feel free to share your sentiment and tactics you think will be impactful in 2024 in the comments.

Geoffrey Colon is Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Dell Technologies and author of the 2016 book, Disruptive Marketing. All views are his own.