Infographic: Shutterstock’s Global Design Trends 2014 — The Shutterstock Blog

It’s never a great idea to blindly follow trends, but it’s good to know what they are. It’s kind of similar to the old maxim that ‘you have to know the rules to break the rules’.

But in fractured and disjointed world, working out what the latest visual design trends actually are can be difficult. A trend might be big in Europe but absent in North America; yet with more demand for designs that appeal across international boundaries, how do you get a handle on what will work?

Well one way is to analyse the raw data. Image library Shutterstock is in a good position to do just that – and so for its third annual global design trends infographic it extracted details of over 350 million downloads and found some revealing patterns.

Infographic: Shutterstock’s Global Design Trends 2014 — The Shutterstock Blog.