"Graphic Design as well as fashion design or music is influenced by contemporary tendencies. Even more in a world where information is transmitted with speed of light. Trend List's task is to search, name and sorts these tendencies in graphic design. It is trying to spot when and where they rise, in which countries they are most extended or you can see their evolution in time.

Selection of works mainly focuses on posters, books, catalogs, magazines, album covers, and invitations for cultural sphere. It is because these publications usualy provides large space for experiments and the "most current" graphic design.
(...)
Trend List is not a criticism of contemporary graphic design. It just points to the fact that graphic design as well as everything else, is affected by certain trends, and today is not exception. But a lot of designers do not agree and still insist on the originality of their work that is based on pure concept. Wim Crouwel says: “You are always a child of your time, you can not step out of that!"

So why close our eyes to the rules and styles around us? We are always looking for something unique and new, even at the cost of incomprehension? After all, if someone is able to create a modern design it just means that he is able to express the spirit of our time!"

"As the year draws to a close, we asked some A List Apart readers to tell us what they learned about the web in 2011. Together their responses summarize the joys and challenges of this magical place we call the internet. We need to continue to iterate, to embrace change, and challenge complexity to keep shipping. Above all, we must continue to reach out to one another, to teach, to support, to help, and to build the community that sustains us."

"We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-­reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output."

"If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time. Of course, this is exactly what is possible now that so many of us — via credit cards, cellphones, online social networks, blogs and so on — leave just such digital breadcrumbs as we move through our lives."

"Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underlie sharing activity on the web.

This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared."

I-V-VI-IV. Enough said.

Lauren Adams notes the overuse of Hoefler&Frere-Jones' Archer typeface.