With social media activity intensifying, building brand awareness and bringing in leads has never been more challenging. Stay tuned if you’re wondering how to dominate your target customers’ feeds this year. Kae Neskovic, Superside’s Executive Creative Director, and Juan Cistoldi, Sr. Creative Strategist, weigh in on this year’s top social media design trends.
In a content-saturated world, brands must keep up with social media graphic design trends to stand out and remain relevant. As converting followers into customers grows more challenging, creating distinctive, scroll-stopping content can help your brand cut through the noise.
Collaborating with a fully managed team of creatives who understand the latest social media design trends is an excellent place to start.
And who better to guide us through this year’s key trends than Superside’s Executive Creative Director, Kae Neskovic, and Juan Cistoldi, Sr. Creative Strategist.
Let's dive in:
Why is good social media creative key for enterprises
Picture a social media landscape crowded with competing brands, each vying for attention through kaleidoscopic color and bold design. In this vibrant digital space, distinctive creative can help your brand get noticed.
For enterprises in particular, strong social media creative does more than just attract attention: It builds consistency across multiple channels and reinforces brand recognition.
But how does a brand achieve memorability with galaxies full of content nowadays? How do you come through?
We get asked this a lot, and the answer is simple: you’ll be memorable if you have something interesting to say. If your assets make people laugh, teach them something or feel relatable, they’ll click. But if it’s the same old generic stuff? They won’t.
At Superside, we say, ‘We don’t have the budget to be boring.’
That mindset is what keeps branded assets fresh, bold and unforgettable.
Last year, enterprises leveraged social media to convert more leads, tapping into several strategies:
- Many capitalized on short, vertical videos for efficient storytelling, tapping into consumers’ preference for viewing entertaining social media content on their mobile devices.
- Businesses prioritized maintaining a strong, always-on presence, ensuring their brands stay top of mind among target customers.
- Enterprises developed more high-quality visual content to sway customers. Instead of using stock photos, more brands created authentic visuals to set them apart from competitors.
While these social media trends will remain influential throughout 2026, new patterns are already taking shape:
- Social is becoming the new search. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram will increasingly shape content discovery.
- More sophisticated images, thanks to AI. AI will help brands tailor their social media content, creating drool-worthy, sophisticated visuals that capture attention.
- The rise of social commerce. Shopping will gain momentum on social platforms with fewer redirections to third-party apps and platforms.
- More design writing. The ability to articulate ideas effectively is becoming the guiding force behind creative content creation. The world’s AI whisperers will start to dominate.
- Minimaximalism. Sleek and simple designs will be infused with vibrant colors, oversized typography and eclectic elements to get brands noticed this year and beyond.
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6 social media design trends for 2026
Understanding and applying emerging social media design trends can help your content stand out and resonate with audiences. Let's take a closer look at each of these trends:
Search engines like Google and Bing—and search engine optimization (SEO)—continue to matter. Search engines are still key for big-picture brand visibility and driving traffic to online properties. However, social platforms like TikTok or Snapchat are shaking up how younger audiences discover content.
For Gen Z, TikTok isn’t just for entertainment—it’s now their preferred platform for searching and learning about topics. As much as 72% of Gen Z consumers now equate ”googling" with searching on TikTok. 79% say they’ve learned something new—about cooking, music, hobbies or travel—through the popular social media platform.
It’s non-negotiable: Brands hoping to reach younger audiences require a strong social media presence. This year, success will come from partnering with creative teams that can blend search strategies with excellent social media storytelling.
Superside and Suzanne Kalan: Double the Love on TikTok
Luxury jewelry label Suzanne Kalan partnered with Superside to enhance the brand’s TikTok presence through its “Double the Love” campaign. Designed for Mother’s Day, the campaign celebrated Gen Z daughters and Gen X mothers, highlighting the strength of family connections.
Superside handled all creative aspects, from market research to production. We delivered 18 heartfelt videos in just over a month (well ahead of schedule). The impressive results demonstrate how high-quality social media videos capture audiences’ attention and boost conversions.
2. More sophisticated images, thanks to AI
AI technology is enabling more sophisticated, polished Instagram visuals. For example, creators like @joshuavermillion use AI tools like MidJourney to challenge architectural norms and create incredible futuristic designs.
In the foodie realm, accounts like @ai.food.creations are whipping up fantastical dishes that look almost too good to eat. Creators also use nifty tools like Pic2Recipe to transform AI visual food fantasies into authentic recipes. Salivate at your peril.
To keep AI-generated visuals authentic and on-brand, treat them like you would traditional imagery. Build clear AI brand guidelines and a solid image library to keep things consistent.
Superside and OPA!: Flavorful brand refresh
Superside created a new brand identity for OPA!, modernizing the food company’s visual approach. We re-energized their brand visuals with bright colors, playful shapes and bold typography, using Midjourney and Photoshop to create mouthwatering food shots and enticing animations.
Our advice? Use custom GPT models for re-generating images from your existing library and use your original data points, real people and brand assets, which helps both with consistency and copyright.
Combining AI with human creativity can yield drool-worthy results for your brand. Interested in more AI-enhanced design examples? Look below.
The real story behind GenAI’s impact on creative
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3. The rise of social commerce
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are turning into virtual shopping malls.
By the end of 2023, more than 500,000 merchants were selling to TikTok Shop users in the United States. This number rose in 2024, delivering $17.5 billion in eCommerce sales. Instagram isn’t far behind, with 130 million users engaging with shoppable social media posts monthly.
These numbers reveal why compelling visuals and strategic platform presence are no longer just marketing choices—they’re essential business investments for retailers.
Note that success in the social commerce space requires partnering with marketing vendors who understand creative excellence and the complexities of omnichannel commerce. Superside is your ideal partner. Making us an extension of your creative team can drive brand consistency—and results—across all customer touchpoints, from TikTok and Instagram to your online shop and beyond.
Superside and Shopify: Ad creative at speed and scale
Shopify Ads
When Shopify faced overwhelming requests and needed to increase its ad production, Superside stepped in to serve as its dedicated design team.
This collaboration enabled Shopify to produce thousands of tailor-made creative assets across all its social media channels in a remarkable 24-hour time frame.
4. Design writing
In a world increasingly dominated by AI, 2026 will rely a lot more on design writing (a.k.a. intelligent prompts). The ability to articulate ideas effectively through powerful language is becoming the guiding force behind creative content creation.
Writing effective AI prompts is becoming as important as traditional design skills. Rather than accepting generic AI-generated visuals, brands must craft precise prompts that capture their unique identity and vision.
Success lies in combining human creativity and strategic thinking with AI’s capabilities—using clear, purposeful language to guide the technology toward truly distinctive designs.
Superside and you: AI humanizer
With AI tools now commonplace, brands face a new challenge: Making their content stand out in an increasingly uniform landscape.
Mastering something that changes every second requires people to be open and committed to a state of continuous learning. AI tools can craft tons of images in real time, but we still need real people to check if the results present an acceptable degree of correlation with what happens in real life.
At Superside, we use strong tone-of-voice guidelines crafted by humans to ensure our voice remains distinctive. Integrating these guidelines into our AI tools ensures our content strikes the perfect balance between personality and professionalism.
For example, using AI to produce long-form content is a game changer. It speeds up the writing process, enhances ideas and can help teams maintain a steady flow of engaging content.
Articulate what you do before you do it. Craft sentences and use the words as a guide rather than visual references. It’s time-consuming and challenging, but it opens new worlds and shifts the outcome away from the formulaic.
—Perniclas Bedow, Creative Director at Bedow.
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5. Minimaximalism
For years, clean lines and white space reigned supreme on digital platforms. This year, expect a bold twist: The fusion of minimalism and maximalism. Sleek and simple designs will be infused with vibrant colors, oversized typography and eclectic elements. Remember Charli XCX's latest record 'Brat'? Well, yes, something like that.
According to Accenture’s Life Trends 2024 report, 35% of respondents feel all apps look the same, which rises to nearly 40% among Gen Z consumers—all the more reason to invest in standout minimaximalist design.
“It’s been estimated that of the $4 trillion-plus spent yearly on marketing globally, 85% is wasted on branded assets that will likely go unnoticed. On average, £10m extra in paid media is required for a ‘dull’ ad to meet the effectiveness of an interesting one.”
—Sairah Ashman, Global CEO, Wolff Olins.
Brands no longer have the luxury of slow storytelling. With attention spans diminishing, the objective is to capture target customers’ attention and encourage them to engage with your marketing materials.
The key is to invest in building distinctive, memorable brand assets. Think Airbnb’s coral color or Uber’s custom typeface—when you see those, you instantly know the brand, even without a logo.
When your brand elements are that strong, you don’t need to overload your ads with tons of images or text. Superside helps brands find that balance, creating design languages that feel bold yet simple, standing out while staying true to their identity.
Be maximal and loud with those unique attributes that make your brand stand out. Be simple with the small print about how your products technically work on a daily basis. To achieve this, first tap into those things that motivate or drag people away from using your brand. Once you know what they value, then make those parts more expressive, while keeping the ‘less’ interesting more simple.
Superside and Reddit: Bold, quirky minimalism
When Reddit needed to scale ad production, our creative services combined minimalist simplicity with playfulness, delivering standout assets in 36 hours. We used a vibrant, maximalist color palette of oranges and yellows with bold typography to enhance brand recognition. Quirky animations brought the platform to life.
In another Reddit campaign using the same straightforward yet striking approach, Superside leveraged the power of memes in advertising, resulting in a 50% increase in click-through rate (CTR).
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6. AI takes center stage
67% of marketers now recognize AI as transformative, marking its evolution from a brainstorming aid to a comprehensive design partner. AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.ai are now crafting polished content, helping creative teams to generate creative assets faster than you can say “Superside.”
Consider Cadbury’s “The Story of Us” campaign, where AI helped consumers curate unique love stories with personalized avatars. In another example, Fiverr’s “Nobody Cares” campaign creatively incorporated AI in a Broadway-style musical advert with jazz hands and a catchy tune. The campaign’s results show audiences connect with authentic creative work as AI tools become more prevalent.
Superside and Goettl: AI-powered visual storytelling
Goettl, a well-known heating and air-conditioning (HVAC) brand, required an extensive library of high-quality, family-friendly images for use across multiple platforms. They turned to Superside for design assistance.
Every creative stage incorporated AI, from concept to final output: Interesting ideas were generated with ChatGPT, MidJourney helped our team create eye-catching visuals and Photoshop’s AI-enhanced features helped refine the creative assets. Our team created over 200 magnetic visuals by blending AI capabilities with human creative insight.
“AI will transition from being a behind-the-scenes tool for processes and sketches to an actual execution tool, creating brand assets and content in real-time. AI’s role in design will become more direct, moving beyond ideation to final output.”
—Kiser Barnes, Partner and CCO, Red Antler.
How Superside skyrockets customers with social media design
This year’s social media design trends reflect three key priorities for brands: Rapid asset creation, scalable production and distinctive creative.
Superside already excels in these areas. In fact, our unlimited design services are conveniently packaged in a single creative subscription to help our customers produce unique, scalable assets at unprecedented speed.
Our social media services include:
- Social media creative and ad creative
- Organic social media content
- Social media video content
- Social media post design
- Social media response guidelines
- Social media concept design
And more graphic design services, including:
- Brand design
- AI creative and AI consulting services
- Video production and motion design services
- Illustration design
- Web design and Webflow development
- Email design
- Print design services
- Packaging and merch design
- Digital marketing strategy & consulting
- Presentation design and concept creation
- Design systems and product design services
- Immersive design services for AR / 3D solutions
- eBook and digital report design and copywriting services
Superside's features include:
- Dedicated creative teams
- Quick turnaround times
- AI-powered workflows
- Capacity to produce high-volume social media creative, branding assets and more
- A team that specializes in managing large-scale creative projects for enterprises, maintaining quality while adapting to changing needs
The company called on Superside to help build a knockout visual brand and boost its creative performance. We delivered a 200% increase in CTR for the brand and a 20-40% reduction in Cost-Per-Result (CPR) for their Facebook ads.
Superside: Your ideal social media partner for 2026
Choosing the right design partner is critical when brands pull out all the stops to win customers via social media platforms. Don’t fade into obscurity: Energize your marketing efforts with on-trend social media posts and standout visual storytelling that get you noticed.
Book a call with Superside to drive growth via your target audience’s social media feeds.
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