Emerging Design Trends for 2025
Written By Darragh Dandurand for LE BOOK
2025’s design moodboard is easily summed up in one word: contrast. The year to date has seen the embrace of trends in clash and conflict with one another: tactile, textured elements countered by polished, sleek shapes; colorful, popping palettes pitted against dark moody modes; a penchant to return to organic, natured-filled inspiration seemingly contradicts imagery that looks and feels and is ultimately artificially generated.
These trends are not monoliths unto themselves. Easily blended and folded back into each other, 2025 finds the uptick of contrasting styles to even be its own style. As is always the goal of design, the trends being fueled this year each tell the story of brands, of identities, of people, of this moment in time. Together, they offer a diverse understanding of our culture at large—suspended between new and old, nature versus machine, standing out or fitting in, muted expression against loud, bold voices.
We’re in flux in 2025 and LE BOOK explores some of the design trends have gotten us this far into the year:
Tactile Minimalism — Texture Speaks Loudly
Prizing texture combined within a traditional minimalistic aesthetic, this “trend” is actually more of a standard across formats like furniture and lighting design, apparent often in Scandinavian or New Nordic style. Adjacent to Soft Minimalism, which references texture, warm tones and organic material, both styles navigate space and graphic design with an emphasis on natural elements and simple structural lines, without the cold, often glossy and flat ways of traditional minimalism.
This year we see Tactile Minimalism dominate mostly in interior design, allowing stylists and designers to bring visual intrigue and warmth into spaces through both less objects and more meaningfully placed pieces. It is a nod and wink of curating imperfection in all its unintentional irony.
Packaging has continued to lean into Tactile Minimalism, using embossed materials as a way to leave a textural branded memory contrasted with minimal graphic elements that speak to the ongoing trend of Quiet Luxury. Delicate details dictate refined taste. In a rejection of a busy, cluttered world, simple yet controlled natural elements reflect an elegance.
Regenerative Aesthetics — Natural is the New Black
The more technologically integrated our world becomes, the more we imagine ourselves pulled back toward our organic origins. Style sparked from flora and fauna, not only in graphic rendering, but also in shape and feel, permeate our technopresent landscape.
As both a design and philosophical trend, Regenerative Aesthetics are reminiscent of a larger cultural push for sustainability as both a best practice and a status symbol. Brands want to be seen as good—good for the consumer, good for the environment. Pushing that agenda through design promotes the vision of a product as a way of life, as a thoughtful way to consume, as the right choice.
Though inherently “unnatural,” Regenerative Aesthetics is a concocted sense of being organic, aiming to seamlessly integrate into a circular reimagining of ecology as a trend; it’s style inspired by nature, a figment of nature itself.
We see health and wellness branding synonymous with subversive tones lending themselves to hues and forms of the environment. Brands within these spaces may blend Regenerative Aesthetics of their packaging or identity with Earthen palettes and viney vectors. Copy lends itself too with softened language that feels hopeful and reminiscent of “cycles” rather than “processes,” with “harmony” rather than “optimization.”
Cross-Disciplinary Storytelling — Bridging Narratives Across Fashion, Art and Tech
There is the expectation that brands create consistency across their products, their platforms, their ecosystem. The story each brand tells is reliant both upon their strategy and design, as much as it is within the confines of the formats they must, in 2025, live and breathe across.
This year, brands like Gentle Monster, Pangaia and Moncler Genius all embrace a 360 experience of storytelling, talking to consumers through game-like interfaces or elevating educating buyers through transparent information about manufacturing, or immersive exhibitions and partnerships to give life to their products.
It is now standard that brands have personality, not simply functionality. Products are becoming personified, expected to resonate and fast-track relationships with consumers. Consistent narratives are a strong factor in founding and maintaining those connections as wearable, interactive and beautifully aesthetic stories.
These trends were already established before this year and continue to be solidified as strong contenders to stay and play within design. Among other styles thriving in 2025, the contrast we see at LE BOOK provides a sandbox for mixing and matching, pushing and pulling at brand identities and consumer expression.
In 2025 we celebrate creatives exploring and thriving through the trends and innovations they use in their work and self-expression. Join LE BOOK in supporting our creative community this week at Copenhagen Fashion Week on August 5. We’ll be hosting a talk — The Evolving Language of Scandinavian Aesthetics Exploring the Forces Shaping Tomorrow's Creative Landscape — featuring Cecile Bahnsen, Mads Pedersen, Bjørg Finsen and Andreas Bjorn Ibsen, moderated by Fatine Layt.