2025 Hotness! Our predictions for next year's trends

What's going to be hot, hot, hot in 2025?

We asked the D&F team what they are all thinking about as we reach 2025.

Ben

The continued rise of Apple Silicon largely came to pass.

Intel fired up and fizzled out as marketing buzz, Qualcomm arrived on the scene and got everyone excited that Windows-on-ARM might finally make the big time only for Intel to come back and rain on their parade. Yet ultimately Apple prevailed and finished the year with its M4 series of SoCs (System on Chips), guaranteeing dominance at the top end for 2025.

But when it comes to agency strategy for 2025, it’s chipmaker NVIDIA doing the real heavy lifting. AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform of choice, NVIDIA’s GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are powering 2025’s evolution of GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers).

2025 is the year that custom GPTs acting as pseudo-lawyers, accountants, human resources professionals, market analysts and complaint handlers infiltrate growing agencies.

On hand 24x7 and locked-in to specific personas, these GPTs will bring value far beyond the generic generative AI chat scenarios that most of us are familiar with thus far.

But some agencies will go further, implementing local LLMs (Large Language Models) to get a better handle on the provenance of their data and assurances that their usage of AI won’t spill out onto the Internet. The great news here is that no NVIDIA behemoths are necessary; agencies that have invested in Apple’s M-series of chips are in a great position to use local LLMs so long as they’ve spec’d up their kit with enough RAM.

Amy

Anti branding

Last year I very wrongly predicted pink would be a big trend, and despite visiting the Barbie exhibition recently, that colour was SO 2023! Even Pantone got it wrong with their colour of the year being fuzzy peach.

Instead the hue we saw everywhere was green.. a low resolution lime green to be precise (#8ACE00 if you’re interested). We all had a very BRAT summer, thanks to Charlie XCX. This bright green was seen on everything from merch at Glastonbury to Kamala Harris's presidential campaigns.

The iconic album cover, was in many ways offensive - a low res lime green with a stretched Arial font across the front in black. However, it ended up embodying an entire movement for 2024; it was chaotic, brash and jarring and I absolutely love it! The purposefully awkward kerning, the pixelated font and the slime green should give me a headache, however, I’m still going to celebrate it. Having an album being instantly recognisable from just a colour is pretty amazing. Will it carry on into 2025? Our Brat summer ended and the season was replaced by a very demure, very mindful Autumn, so I guess sadly not.

However, I do wonder if this type of anti-branding might carry on into 2025. It’s grungy, but simple and authentic and quite reminiscent of the 90’s. It shouldn’t work, but there’s something exciting about seeing design that clashes with conventional design standards and I’m hoping to see more of it in 2025.

Manjil

Beyond Traditional User Interaction

The way we use digital platforms is changing as a result of technological advancements.

By 2025, I think user interactions will transcend today's conventional clicks and taps and usher in a new era of natural, immersive, and intuitive engagement. At the forefront of this change are voice commands, gesture control, and immersive experiences. These technologies promise to enhance how we consume and interact with content, but they also challenge developers to rethink design principles and approaches.

By embracing immersive experiences, developers have the opportunity to craft engaging, meaningful interactions that redefine how users connect with digital content. The key lies in thoughtful design that anticipates and adapts to these emerging trends, ensuring no user is left behind in this exciting evolution.

Tony

AI will continue its rise

AI will creep into all aspects of the creative process. Currently it’s been used in iterations/sketch and conceptual phases of projects but a shift could happen that puts it into the final output stages.

Human imperfection

With the rise of AI there are anti trends occurring.

Designers will embrace the human touch, organic forms and imperfect elements that feel handmade, personal, authentic and emotional. Everything that makes us human.

AI is part of our workflow, but I still want my designs to feel like they were made by human hands. Could we even see “human made” tags on creative and ads?

Pushback against sans serifs

Sans serifs have dominated over recent years, with major brands taking the shift. The oversimplification of typography has led to a ‘sea of sameness’. Leading to clean, minimal brands that can be indistinguishable, often lacking distinct personality and character.

Typographical expression will take centre stage, where individual character, craftsmanship and personalities shine. We’ll see more contemporary serif typefaces rise up with creatives exploring unique letterforms and pushing the boundaries of type design. Connecting with their audiences in the brand's authentic and personal voice.

Andrea

2025 is going to be the year of ’less’, in terms of the web world, that's headless, serverless and cookieless.

Headless

Headless architecture has been growing with momentum this year. Headless separates out the frontend and backend, delivering an omnichannel experience across various channels and making it easier to scale a website.

We adopted the headless API architecture this year, it offers more flexibility, seamless content delivery and increased security, it's the future.

Serverless

Serveless dynamically manages the allocations of resources, this can be servers, storage, and networking, that are required to run an application. "serverless" doesn't mean there are no servers; it just means you don’t have to manage the underlying server infrastructure.

Serverless is something we are working with as it scales automatically to demand its ideal for microservices, APIs and real-time data processing. As we are using headless API’s, serverless is a no brainer, they go hand in hand.

Cookieless

Cookie banners have gotten a bit out of hand recently, the list of third party cookies you have to un-tick on websites is just crazy. I’m all for the cookieless world, it doesn't mean cookies go away completely, it just means using only first-party cookies, which in turn increases trust with your users.

We have been implementing cookieless websites for the past few years, by using server-side analytics Plausible rather than GA and using different Captcha's such as Altcha instead of re-captcha. Implementing measures to limit the use of cookies and enhance user privacy is going to be hot in 2025.

Michael

Major advancements to website styling - CSS Level 6
The technology which gives designers the power to make websites look amazing has been getting some significant upgrades lately. CSS6 will give designers lots of exciting additional features including custom properties, scoping and content visibility. The new features should improve the performance, visual appear and accessibility of the web!

Keeping track of all the new abilities will be a challenge, CSS frameworks like TailwindCSS will continue to be an invaluable tool to give easy access to the latest CSS features.

The rise of better, simpler and faster
Headless / Jamstack based development processes have shown significant advantages over traditional CMS solutions like Wordpress.

NextJS combined with Wagtail has proven to be a powerful tool to provide ultrafast headless CMS websites, and advanced lightweight frameworks like Svelte are now mature enough to use in Production. W3C Standard Web Components are beginning to gain popularity too.

These approaches have an additional advantage, the headless CMS can become the “Single source of Truth” for the business. Website, mobile and desktop apps can all use the same headless CMS, using frontend code to extract and format content in the way that best suits the customer.

Bloated complex systems like Wordpress are finally beginning to be replaced with cleaner, more flexible and lightweight solutions. Part of this can be attributed to the WP-Engine vs Wordpress drama that is still ongoing, which has led some companies to ask - is Wordpress still the right solution for us?

Non traditional Search
LLM based AI chatbots will become an increasingly popular alternative to traditional services, any may even become the default way to search for most. ChatGPT by OpenAI and Gemini by Google have proven that there are many advantages of being able to receive answers directly to a question rather than having to browse multiple pages to find information. Data accuracy is still an issue for LLM based platforms, but if these issues can be solved traditional search could be in trouble. This creates challenges for all website owners as SEO for LLM based services can be very different to traditional SEO approaches.

Marianne

Sustainability
Sustainability has been a prominent focus in design since the early 2000s, but by 2025, it will become an even more defining aspect. Designers will increasingly embrace eco-conscious principles to align with the growing demand for environmental awareness and corporate social responsibility.

Key Characteristics of Sustainable Design
Simplicity will prevail, emphasising designs that are both visually appealing and resource efficient.Biophilic design, demonstrated as organic, flowing forms inspired by nature will dominate, creating a sense of harmony and connection to the environment. Sustainable packaging, featuring recyclable materials, and messaging that highlights a brand's commitment to reducing waste.

Katie

As we step into 2025, it’s clear that the marketing world is evolving at lightning speed. New technologies, shifting customer expectations, an increasingly complex SaaS landscape and, of course AI.. all that together can make it tempting to try and do everything and NOW! It can all get a bit too overwhelming, especially when you're a small team trying to make a difference.

I've been reflecting on this for a while now, but for me, 2025 isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing better. I’m all about the power of focus! This year I’ve had to learn it’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things and doing them exceptionally well.

Yes, I can use right tools to enhance or speed up my output, plan the grow the business, hit the targets, but it can be from the position of being realistic!

Is your business ready for the challenges of 2025? Let Dodgems and Floss help you elevate your strategy with expert design, development, and marketing solutions. Let’s talk!