2025 Art Trends: What’s Inspiring Designers This Year

If you’re searching for new design trends in 2025, you’ll hear plenty about AI and how it’s reshaping the design scene. Yet in such a fast-moving world, it can be refreshing to turn to something timeless. If that resonates with you, explore vintage and its charming sub-styles. Vintage steps away from the modern technological world and offers calm, tactile nostalgia. In this article, we’ll see how these styles can breathe new life into your next project—and, of course, we’ll discuss how AI-generated content is influencing designers’ work.

Vintage Style

Vintage style continues to resonate deeply in 2025—especially when it’s applied to physical products that carry a sense of history and permanence.

This look draws from past decades, blending elements like faded florals, lace-like patterns, old book illustrations, postage stamps, and antique botanical prints. It often references 19th and early 20th-century aesthetics, including worn textures, sepia tones, and hand-drawn typography.

In modern design work, vintage themes are being reinterpreted for printed invitations, ceramic motifs, box wraps, decorative textiles, and keepsake cards. These aren’t dusty recreations—they’re thoughtful revivals, drawn by hand to preserve their warmth and authenticity.

The vintage trend today is less about being “retro” and more about adding emotional weight to everyday objects. People want designs that feel storied and intentional—things that look like they’ve been passed down, even if they’re brand new.

In a year when digital visuals are everywhere, vintage design stands out for its quiet elegance, tactile detail, and sense of permanence.

 

Classical Baroque & Rococo

Baroque and Rococo styles bring a rich, decorative feel to illustrations with lots of detail and emotion.

They’re known for their curvy shapes, gold frames, floral swirls, and balanced, detailed designs. You’ll often see cherubs, shell shapes, and leafy patterns drawn in an eye-catching way. These styles are all about elegance and bold expression—never plain or simple.

You’ll find them on printed boxes, fancy plates, and formal invitations. The colors are usually soft and luxurious: warm gold, creamy white, light pink, and pale blue, often paired with detailed ink lines.

Every line and curve is drawn on purpose, showing off texture and movement—something digital tools often can’t copy perfectly. Great for designs that want to feel romantic, royal, and full of character.

Grandmillennial

In 2025, grandmillennial design continues to rise as a warm, nostalgic response to overly modern or minimalist trends.

It brings traditional aesthetics back into focus—floral chintz, toile, embroidered borders, ribbon details—but reimagined with a fresh illustrative approach. This style celebrates comfort, pattern, and sentimentality, often drawing from vintage interiors, heirloom linens, and classic domestic objects like teacups, cameo frames, and pressed flowers.

You’ll see grandmillennial motifs showing up on printed fabrics, wrapping papers, greeting cards, and ceramics. The look is layered and cozy—rich in detail but never overwhelming. Every element is illustrated by hand, keeping the feel grounded and personal rather than mass-produced.

In a year where many are craving tactile beauty and emotional connection in the things they buy or gift, grandmillennial design feels more relevant than ever. It’s charming, decorative, and proudly unfashionable in a way that’s become distinctly fashionable.

 

Cute-Animal Themes

In 2025, the charm of cute-animal illustrations remains strong especially when they’re hand-drawn with care and personality.

This style covers whimsical scenes featuring bunnies, lambs, bears, and other gentle creatures, often dressed in tiny hats, sitting in teacups, or riding carousels. The tone is light, dreamy, and often nostalgic, making it a favorite for nursery décor, baby shower invitations, seasonal stationery, and printed textiles for children.

Unlike AI-generated arts, which can feel stiff or overly polished and come with copyright baggages, handmade illustrations in this theme bring real emotion and playfulness. There’s a subtle storytelling in the expressions, the poses, the tiny accessories. It feels like something out of a childhood book—tender, silly, and full of character.

Soft color palettes (creams, petal pinks, sky blues), delicate line work, and watercolor washes all contribute to the gentle mood. And in a world where a lot of “cute” looks generic, these hand-drawn animals feel genuinely unique.

Cute-animal themes remain deeply relevant this year for anyone creating designs that aim to feel sweet, comforting, and timelessly adorable.

 

Naïve Children’s

Naïve children’s design embraces innocence, softness, and simplicity—deliberately imperfect in a way that feels honest and playful.

This style features hand-drawn characters and shapes that often appear slightly off-proportion or loosely sketched, capturing the look of a child’s drawing but with intentional charm. Soft watercolor washes, pencil textures, and muted pastel palettes are common, giving the work a gentle, storybook quality.

Themes usually center around everyday joy and imaginative play: animals in scarves, cozy homes, alphabet blocks, friendly clouds, and bedtime scenes. The style is often applied to nursery prints, children’s invitations, ceramic dish sets, and textile patterns for baby goods.

Its appeal lies in the warmth it communicates—nothing is overdesigned or polished. It feels approachable, kind, and nostalgic. Every element is drawn by hand to preserve that light, whimsical spirit.

Ideal for projects that aim to feel comforting, sweet, and childlike in the purest sense.

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is continuing its graceful return in 2025, especially across illustration-led design for physical goods.

Known for its flowing lines, botanical motifs, and elegant composition, this style feels timeless—and in the right hands, fresh again. You’ll recognize it by its winding vines, organic curves, and intricate borders. Stylized flowers like lilies and irises, elegant female figures, and decorative typography are key features.

In current design work, Art Nouveau shows up in printed invitations, ceramic transfers, decorative paper goods, and textile patterns. It brings a refined, nature-inspired richness that feels both classic and elevated—perfect for items meant to be keepsakes.

Because of its complexity, it’s a style that really comes to life when drawn by hand. Each line is intentional, each curve deliberate. That craftsmanship gives it a depth and softness that digital shortcuts simply can’t replicate.

Art Nouveau in 2025 is less about replication and more about revival—honoring the tradition while letting it breathe again through illustration.

 

AI-Powered Design

* no example image here because i don't use AI, and all my illustrations are hand-made 🙂

Of course, this is the AI era. We'd be kidding ourselves if we said people aren’t taking AI seriously as a design trend. AI is no longer just a buzzword in the creative world — it’s a real, useful companion in the design process.

From concept generation to prototyping and even high-fidelity mockups, AI tools like Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and DALL·E are helping artists and designers speed up workflows, explore more ideas, and get through creative blocks faster. Designers aren’t using AI to replace themselves — they're using it to level up.

Where AI really shines is in the ideation stage. It helps spark unexpected directions that may not have come from traditional brainstorming. Designers use it to rough out mood boards, try out text-to-image compositions, auto-generate visual styles, or even clean up complex edits that used to take hours.

But here’s the nuance: AI is not the designer — you are. It’s a tool, not a final decision-maker. Its real value lies in how you wield it. The best use cases we’ve seen are when AI is used to speed up repetitive tasks, test alternate concepts rapidly, or push visual boundaries that can then be refined with the designer’s touch.

As a trend, AI-powered design is about hybridity — combining human creativity with machine efficiency. It’s not about choosing between the two, but fusing them to produce something unique. Expect to see more portfolios and projects that are open about using AI in their process, proudly showcasing it as a co-creator in everything from brand identity to 3D modeling to UX layouts.

 

A Note on AI in Design

While AI tools continue to make headlines in 2025, it’s important to approach them with caution.

AI-generated images can sometimes appear polished at first glance, but they often lack depth, originality, and emotional resonance. More importantly, they pose real risks. Many AI systems are trained on existing artworks without consent, raising serious questions about copyright, authorship, and creative integrity.

For artists who work by hand, AI doesn’t enhance the process; it compromises it. Automated designs can undercut the value of real craft and flood the market with mass-produced visuals that are unoriginal.

At Ekaproeka, everything is made without the use of AI. Every line, shape, and detail is drawn by hand. This commitment to craftsmanship isn’t just a stylistic choice—it’s the foundation of the store. It ensures that each piece carries intention, warmth, and originality that no machine can replicate.

In a time when it's easier than ever to generate something generic, hand-made design stands out for all the right reasons.