Leveraging 2024 trends: How to minimize risks when experimenting with booming aesthetics

Consistency in visual solutions makes your brand memorable and helps customers recognize you easily; this results in them option for your product or service over others

In recent years, social media users have been setting various aesthetics or –cores in motion by sharing content of the same style, often with hashtags highlighting the aesthetics. In 2024, this phenomenon became a global trend, with cottagecore, Barbiecore, retrofuturism, Y2K, and animecore as bright examples.

Core Wave is one of the 7 Creative Trends for 2024 featured by Depositphotos in its annual trend report. Here, the platform’s team explains how to leverage the trend in brand communication and avoid popular mistakes when experimenting with emerging aesthetics.

What you should know about the modern culture of –cores

There is no universal dominant aesthetic online anymore. In turn, internet users tend to form small and big informal communities based on their interests in certain historical periods, lifestyles, movies, books, and other similar subjects. They manifest their belonging to them by sharing content of a certain style, palette, and set of featured attributes.

So, what is a –core? The term is used to describe a visually definable aesthetic, often with some ideas and values behind it. For example, cottagecore is about simple country life idealization. Visuals in line with the –core often feature people in light-colored linen clothes over a backdrop of blossoming gardens or golden wheat fields. On the contrary, retrofuturism, which you can recognized by dark-sky and neon color palettes, flying cars, and silver fabrics bring up the question of whether science and technology can make humanity happier.

5 principles of safe experiments with aesthetics

#1. Set goals and KPIs

Regardless of the way you transform your brand communication, it is critical to understand purpose and indicators to evaluate whether your campaign is successful or not. Leveraging a trending aesthetic that is significantly different from how you visually represented your brand before may serve the following goals:

• Draw extra attention from customers that are used to your previous visual style;
• Reach new audiences and test if your products can be popular among them;
• Get better PR coverage by declaring a shift in your branding (for example, you became eco-friendly, created products for new audiences, or started supporting local artists or the LGBTQ+ community);
• Test design ideas you are considering for further full-scale branding adjustments.

#2. Find customers on TikTok and Instagram

So which aesthetics should you start from? Today, the list of the trendiest –cores globally include cottagecore, Barbiecore, old money aesthetics, and animecore.

However, there’s also adventurecore, dreamcore, fairycore, and many others the Depositphotos team described in its big online aesthetics guide. Along with –cores that have been around for months or even years, there are dozens of others emerging at the moment.

A good strategy is to check what –core is booming at the moment in the community of your customers. To study this, follow them on visual-based social media such as Instagram (for Millennials) and TikTok (for GenZ), and look at the hashtags they are using, as well as aesthetics they share. If it is hard to define what –cores resonates with them, check the influencers they are following.

At this stage, compose a long list of aesthetics you might leverage in your campaigns.

#3. Consider your brand values

The rule of thumb while playing with brand image adjustments is that any visual shift should strengthen your initial message to customers and your brand’s positioning. In other words, your aesthetic needs to match the values declared by your brand before (example: royalcore is about heritage and quite luxury, and weirdcore—about the playful perception of modern reality).

The most frequent mistakes are using royalcore for goods with an extremely low price and a short life cycle, combining Barbiecore with products with male targeting, and applying devil– or angelcore for religious audiences.

#4. Choose 2—5 aesthetics to test

Treat leveraging new aesthetics as an experiment and don’t expect it to work from the first attempt. Instead, focus on an idea to collect data for your next campaigns. Minimize the scale of an experiment and play with as many –cores as possible in your ongoing social media communication, short-term creative projects, and seasonal campaigns. Then, study which –core helped you achieve the best results.

Take seasons and wider social media context into consideration. Vacationcore will work best before or during summer or the winter holiday season, and anime aesthetics become more relevant when a new season of a trending series is out.

#5. Learn by doing and be –core-ready in 2024!

Most online aesthetics emerge and vanish fast. That’s why it’s more important to learn how to adapt to changeable trends fast, not nail a particular trending style. To stay ahead of the curve, use your first experiments with –cores to understand how to optimize the process.

First, come up with the best tools to look for promising aesthetics (keep an eye on your followers on social media; analyze competitors; and review magazines on design, art, and fashion, etc.).

Second, build a design workflow that allows you to easily integrate new aesthetics into existing layouts or react to emerging trends with situational content. We recommend using approaches that help you save both time and money; check out curated image and video collections dedicated to trending aesthetics by Depositphotos: 16 –core-specific collections for 2024 can be a good start.

Wrapping up

Planning and designing creative projects takes time, which makes it tricky to align with new aesthetics emerging online. Moreover, –cores that your customers are fond of are most often built on ideas and concepts. To use aesthetics right, you need to study a certain historical period, music or movie genre, or a particular piece of art.

At the same time, leveraging booming –cores in brand communication can lead to new audiences, significant sale boosts, and strengthening your brand community. Moreover, the approach teaches you to be flexible and adapt to a changing reality faster than competitors.

To get a stressless and low-risk start, add a flavor of aesthetics that are the most popular among your current audiences and are relevant to your brand values. Test the approach on a smaller scale (social media posts or short-term campaigns) and opt for stock content to make your experiments budget-friendly. Remember, learning how to work with trending styles is your primary goal. Focus on polishing your design workflow regardless of the results of a particular campaign.