I used to think a good designer should never look at what was trending. Or perhaps, more accurately, I thought a good designer should be able to look at what was trending and resist it. In college, I was taught to admire work that felt timeless. Timelessness, as I understood it then, was not simply about making something that would remain beautiful for a long time. It had a kind of restraint to it. It was less rather than more. It resisted excessive personality. It seemed sophisticated without announcing itself as sophisticated. The best examples of timeless design appeared almost undesigned, as if they had found their place in the world naturally rather than trying to occupy a particular cultural moment. Trends, by comparison, felt temporary, derivative and therefore somehow less serious. They were something to observe, but not something to participate in.
I internalized that distinction more deeply than I realized. When I began working professionally, I noticed that my design work often existed at one of two extremes. It could be extremely successful or horribly misunderstood. Rarely did it land somewhere comfortably in the middle. At first, I thought this was simply the natural consequence of making unconventional work. I believed that being different necessarily meant asking people to stretch. Looking back, however, I can see that there were moments when I was not asking people to stretch; I was asking them to abandon the context they already had. I became so determined to make something that had not been seen before that I sometimes stopped paying attention to what the person on the other side of the product already knew, wanted or expected. I was creating my own utopias and convincing myself that, through enough persuasion and enough explanation, I could eventually convince consumers to join me there.
Sometimes you can. But it is a much harder equation to solve.
What they often encountered instead was risk. They had questions where I wanted recognition. They had uncertainty where I wanted excitement. They were looking for some indication that the product belonged in their world, and I had become so focused on creating something outside of the existing world that I had removed some of the cues that could have helped them get there. There were fewer moments of "I understand," "I've seen something like this before," or even the simple psychological relief of knowing what kind of thing they were looking at. I had treated familiarity almost as the enemy of originality without fully understanding what familiarity was doing for the consumer.
That is what has made my recent interest in mimicry and mirror neurons so compelling. While reading V. S. Ramachandran's The Tell-Tale Brain, I found myself thinking less about mirror neurons as a specific neuroscientific explanation and more about the broader question they raise: how much of being human depends upon our ability to observe other people, interpret what they are doing, and learn from them? The original discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys was fascinating precisely because certain neurons responded both when the animal performed an action and when it observed another individual performing a similar action. The implications have since been widely debated, particularly when extending these findings to claims about human cognition, but the larger phenomenon of social learning is much less controversial. Humans learn an enormous amount not by independently discovering every behavior, but by watching, imitating, modifying and transmitting what other people have already learned.
That distinction matters to me because it changes the way I think about imitation. We tend to use imitation as a derogatory word. To imitate someone sounds like a failure to produce something original. But if imitation is also one of the ways knowledge travels between people, then perhaps copying and learning are not as easily separated as we have made them out to be. A child learns by imitation. Skills are transmitted through imitation. Cultural behaviors spread through observation and repetition. Techniques evolve because one person sees what another person has done and then changes it. Culture does not have to be reinvented by every generation. It accumulates.
A trend may simply be what this process looks like when it becomes visible.
We usually define a trend by its most obvious layer. A typeface becomes a trend. A color becomes a trend. A certain kind of packaging becomes a trend. A particular way of photographing food becomes a trend. Suddenly everyone seems to be doing the same thing and we conclude that everyone is copying everyone else. But that interpretation focuses almost entirely on the artifact and not on the conditions that caused the artifact to become attractive in the first place. It is the equivalent of looking at the surface of a phenomenon and assuming the surface is the phenomenon itself.
I have started to think about trends differently because of this. A trend can certainly be aesthetic, but it can also be behavioral, technological, social or psychological. The visual expression is often simply the most visible evidence of something happening underneath. When a certain package structure becomes popular, there may be a reason beyond the fact that designers suddenly like that structure. When a particular color begins appearing everywhere, it may be responding to a larger cultural mood. When consumers begin asking brands to speak differently, reveal more of themselves or behave with greater transparency, the resulting visual language may eventually become recognizable as a trend, but the trend is not really the font or the color or the tone of voice. Those are its expressions.
The more interesting question is why those expressions became useful.
This is where I think designers and strategists sometimes misunderstand the value of trends. We look at them as if they are primarily visual references. We ask what is coming next. We ask what colors are in. We ask what packaging styles are emerging. We ask what everyone will be doing six months from now. But a trend is also information about consumers. It tells us that a certain behavior, idea, aesthetic or expectation has become sufficiently familiar that people can recognize it. And familiarity itself has value.
I have become particularly interested in the idea that familiarity is leverage. I don't mean that consumers always prefer familiar things. Clearly they don't. People seek novelty constantly, and some categories are built around the pursuit of it. What I mean is that familiarity gives consumers somewhere to stand. When we encounter something unfamiliar, we have to do more interpretive work. We have to figure out what it is, what it means, whether we trust it, whether it belongs to us and whether we understand how to interact with it. Familiarity gives us a mental starting point from which novelty can be evaluated.
This seems particularly important when thinking about consumer packaged goods. Food, beverage and other consumable products do not simply need to communicate an aesthetic proposition. They have to enter people's routines. They are opened, consumed, put away, replenished and purchased again. In the case of food and beverage, they also cross an unusually intimate threshold: they enter the body. There is an inherited logic around consumption that makes trust, recognition and familiarity particularly consequential. We do not want to be poisoned. We do not want to put something into our bodies that feels fundamentally foreign or unsafe. Even when we are seeking novelty, we tend to seek it within some kind of comprehensible framework.
That is why I now think it is a very risky move to introduce a twist into a category without understanding the history of that category first. This is true aesthetically, but it is also true behaviorally. Categories accumulate conventions for a reason. Some are arbitrary. Some are outdated. Some are waiting to be challenged. But others represent accumulated consumer knowledge. A particular vessel might communicate freshness. A certain color might communicate indulgence. A familiar format might tell someone immediately how a product is meant to be used. A particular phrase might have become shorthand for a benefit that consumers already understand.
To disregard all of that in the name of originality can create a much more difficult equation.
And I don't think the answer is that consumers don't want originality. I think they want originality on a spectrum.
There are categories in which people are willing, and sometimes eager, to experience extreme departures from what they know. There are other categories where novelty has to be introduced much more carefully. Food and beverage, to me, have historically occupied a more cautious part of that spectrum. That doesn't mean these consumers are boring or unwilling to experiment. It means that the product has to answer a different set of questions. What is this? What does it taste like? Is it for me? Can I trust it? How does it fit into what I already do?
This is where familiarity becomes interesting. Familiarity doesn't have to be the thing that keeps a product from becoming new. It can be the thing that allows the product to become new without becoming unrecognizable.
The distinction is subtle but important. A brand can preserve enough of the familiar for a consumer to understand the category while changing the things that need to change. It can retain a recognizable ritual while introducing a new product. It can use a familiar format but give it a new cultural meaning. It can communicate something completely different without requiring the consumer to relearn everything at once.
In other words, originality does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in relation to what already exists.
This has changed how I look at the visual trends currently moving through CPG. Take the large, chunky, expressive, slightly psychedelic typography that has appeared across portions of food, beverage and wellness. It is tempting to look at it as a style and decide whether you like it. You can reproduce the oversized letters, the unusual colors, the irreverence, the sense of movement and the visual loudness. And if enough brands do it, you can certainly identify the style as a trend.
But I am much more interested in asking why that visual language became desirable.
Perhaps it is a rejection of the clinical minimalism that dominated many consumer categories for years. Perhaps it represents a desire for products to feel more playful and culturally alive. Perhaps it is a reaction against an increasingly homogeneous definition of premium, in which everything became beige, quiet, sparse and perfectly considered. Perhaps consumers simply wanted brands to behave less like institutions and more like participants in culture.
I don't think the important question is which of these explanations is correct. The important question is that there are explanations. The typeface is not the trend. The typeface is evidence of something.
That distinction is incredibly useful to a designer. If I copy the typeface, I have copied the surface of a cultural phenomenon. If I understand why that visual language became resonant, I have gained information that I can use somewhere else. I might arrive at a completely different design because I am no longer trying to reproduce the appearance of the trend. I am trying to respond to the condition that created it.
This is where I have started to think about the difference between trend-following and trend literacy.
Trend-following asks, "What does this look like?"
Trend literacy asks, "Why is this working?"
The second question is much more interesting to me.
It also brings me back to a project I worked on for a tea company. We created a beautiful canister. People loved it. The clients loved it, customers loved how it looked, and from a traditional design perspective it was successful. It had object quality. It felt special. It was the kind of packaging that could make someone stop and admire it.
But the problem was people didn't want to use it. They kept it…somewhat preciously. The canister became almost like a trophy. It sat on a shelf instead of participating in the consumption of the tea inside it.
At the time, I could have described that as an unfortunate packaging outcome. I now think it was a research failure. We had designed the object beautifully but had not gone far enough into the behavior surrounding the object. We had understood what the package was supposed to communicate, but not fully understood what the package was supposed to do in someone's life.
Tea is not only an object. It is a ritual. It is something people prepare repeatedly. It has habits around it. It has storage behaviors, consumption behaviors and replenishment behaviors. The package participates in all of those things.
Our beautiful object had accidentally communicated that it was too precious to use.
That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about CPG. A product can be aesthetically successful and behaviorally unsuccessful. It can communicate quality while making the consumer less likely to engage with the thing it was designed to contain. It can win admiration while losing utility.
And this is another reason I think trends have to be understood beyond their physical appearance. There are trends in consumption. There are trends in rituals. There are trends in how people discover products, where they store them, how they share them, what they expect them to do and how they talk about them. There are trends in lifestyles that eventually become trends in packaging because the packaging is responding to the lifestyle.
If we only study what things look like, we miss the behavior that made the thing successful.
This is becoming especially apparent in the way social media has changed how trends form and spread. We often talk about social media as though it creates one enormous mass culture, but my experience of it feels almost opposite. There are increasingly many small cultural pools forming at once. People gather around particular interests, aesthetics, rituals, identities and ideas. They follow one another, respond to one another, borrow from one another and eventually influence the businesses watching them.
A consumer posts something because they like it. Someone else sees it. A founder notices the response. A brand adopts the language. Consumers respond to that adoption. Someone criticizes it. Someone else modifies it. Another group rejects it. The cycle continues.
Culture is learning in public.
That is part of what makes contemporary trends feel so fast. The process of imitation and modification is visible almost immediately. We can watch something move from one person to another and then observe the resulting mutations in real time. What used to take years to become culturally recognizable can sometimes happen within months, weeks or even days.
But I don’t necessarily think this speed makes trends less meaningful. If anything, it makes them more observable. We have an unusually visible view into people learning from one another, adopting things, rejecting them, modifying them and deciding collectively what becomes worth carrying forward. For a designer, that is an extraordinary amount of information. To deliberately look away from it in pursuit of something “timeless” now feels almost counterproductive to me. The point isn’t to watch culture so that we can reproduce whatever is currently popular. The point is to watch closely enough to understand what is changing in the people we are designing for.
This is where my relationship with trends has changed most. I no longer think the useful question is whether something is trending or whether I should participate in it. I want to know why it became desirable in the first place. What changed in the consumer before the visual language changed? What behavior became newly acceptable? What expectation is being rewritten? What are people rejecting? What are they beginning to trust? What was already familiar enough that the new thing could make sense? These questions require us to look beyond the artifact and into the person. And that distinction matters because design, unlike art, ultimately has someone on the other side of it. There may be moments in the creative process when a designer needs to disengage from the audience, play, experiment and push an idea somewhere unreasonable. But we have to come back. The work has to enter someone else’s life.
This is why I now think familiarity is enormous leverage. Familiarity reduces risk. It reduces the number of assumptions we ask a person to make at once. Before someone can be delighted by what is different about a product, they have to notice it, understand enough about it to remain interested and feel comfortable getting closer. Familiarity gives them that entry point. Once they recognize something, we have earned a little room to move them. That room is where novelty becomes useful. It is where we can surprise them, challenge an expectation, introduce a new ritual or make something feel unlike the other things around it. The familiar and the original are not necessarily opposing forces. In good design, I think they depend on one another.
This has also made me question something I once considered almost foundational to good design: timelessness. I’m no longer sure I believe in timeless design, at least not in the way I once did. Every object enters a cultural moment. Every typeface carries associations. Every package inherits expectations from the category around it. Even the restrained visual languages we tend to describe as timeless came from somewhere. They became so familiar that we eventually stopped noticing their relationship to a particular moment. The oversized typography will change. The beige interiors will change. The bespoke scripts will change. The visual codes we currently use to communicate premium, natural, playful or rebellious will change too. Maybe asking an object to escape time was never the most useful ambition.
What I am more interested in now is continuity. A business should be recognizable enough to earn trust and different enough to be remembered, but the visual system is only the beginning of that relationship. What ultimately has to endure is the quality of the relationship itself. People remember beginnings. We remember our first experience with something much like we remember meeting a person, and every interaction afterward either reinforces that impression, complicates it or changes it. Perhaps that is why there is something so compelling about watching the founder of a young company openly share the uncertainty and messiness of building it. We are being invited into the beginning of the relationship. And perhaps it is also why legacy brands continually return to their heritage. They are reminding us of the beginning. They are saying, in one form or another, that although we have changed, the thing you trusted about us is still here.
That, to me, is much more interesting than making something timeless. The design should be allowed to change because the people it serves will change. Culture will change. Technology will change. Expectations will change. The challenge is understanding what cannot change without breaking the relationship. That requires knowing people extraordinarily well: what they recognize, what they trust, what they expect and what they are ready to reconsider. A designer cannot learn those things by standing outside of culture in pursuit of originality. We have to participate in it. We have to watch people learn from one another and understand what their collective behavior is telling us.
So I don’t want to become better at following trends. I want to become better at reading them. A trend is rarely just a trend. It is a visible record of people responding to one another and collectively negotiating what feels relevant, useful, trustworthy or worth adopting. Copying its surface tells me very little. Understanding why people wanted to copy it in the first place tells me much more. That is where imitation becomes information, and where information can become something new.
I used to think originality required me to move far enough away from what already existed. Now I think the harder and more useful task is knowing what to preserve and what to change. Familiarity gives the consumer somewhere to stand. Our job is to understand that ground well enough to know how far we can ask them to move, and to create something worth remembering when they get there.