By 
I recently took on the role of design director for Anchorage, Alaska-based magazine True North. This has put me on a journey to discover magazine design trends, and as usual, there is no solid answer.
Magazine design is not that different from other graphic design, especially advertising/promotions. Essentially, your magazine is your product that you’re trying to sell, which makes the similarities between product promotion design and magazine design very understandable. As we are seeing more and more, advertising is the new art. The creators of the latest Nike campaign are the Da Vinci of today. Just don’t tell that to hardcore artists. So most of these types of design that promote something or another move along general design trends. I sat down and looked at the hottest designs of 2012 and decided that the two biggest trends are fresh typography and simplicity.
Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. -Leonardo da Vinci
Typography, being a font style, has become a big deal in recent years. There are literally entire companies that all they do is design fonts or consult which fonts a company should use. Finding the right font is absolutely critical to good design. The downside to this is that it can be time consuming and not particularly interesting. I recently had a dream (or more accurately a nightmare) in which I was choosing fonts all night. All night I scrolled through a list of sources! I woke up exhausted and ready to break. So if you ever see a font you like, write down the name and save it for later so you don’t have to search for it again.
Simplicity. Cleaning. purity. Blank space.
All of these have become increasingly fashionable in recent years. Just look at the can of Pepsi. Six years ago it was a mess of bubbles, swirls and writing, today it’s nothing more than a solid blue logo. Leaving space is absolutely essential for good design.
A final detail that I leave you is that gray and white are the colors of the year, if you can call them color. Apple Computers has pushed gray as far as it can be pushed and I love it. Of course, you can only keep someone interested in gray and white for so long, so a single bright color used sparingly can be very affecting and fun.