Adobe's top four visual trends for 2020

Adobe has identified visual trends for 2020. In a blog post the company shared the top four visual trends that brands should take note of:

All ages welcome 

Mature audiences are not only active but relevant social figures and inspirations – giving rise to the expansion of focus from youth-centric (18-35 years) to wider audiences. Industries have begun to realise the importance of representing mature crowds as relevant figures, full of unique, vibrant, high-energy people, the company said.

Express yourself 

Consumers are eager to see themselves represented authentically – their raw, honest life experiences online and in public — and demanding the same from brands, politicians, and other public figures.

Makeup is not a mask 

Contemporary grooming focuses on celebrating a person’s unique looks and style – one way people are celebrating the genuine is through expressive reimaginings of what “beauty” can be. The use of makeup as a tool for self-exploration and creative experimentation is one facet of this, Adobe said.

From 'me' to 'we'

Consumers of all ages are exercising their growing influence. As such, brands are increasingly finding that images presenting a strong sense of community and meaningful lifestyle choices resonate best.

In 2020, Adobe will also be releasing its inaugural Design Trends and Motion Trends. These will include:

Handmade humanism

Artists are craving a natural touch and creating an emotionally-approachable style that is notable "through its simplicity and handcrafted tone", Adobe stated, predicting that the digital world would see an increase in DIY-influenced elements for the personal touch.

Semi-surreal

Artists will be using new tools and techniques to create the impossible and alter viewers' vision, inspiring creativity with fantastical imagery.

Environmental documentary

The discussion of climate, based on science and real policy ideas, will be a prominent part of many industries’ narratives in 2020. More brands and programmes will be using a documentary film style to portray the challenges and possible future the world faces due to climate change.

Qlik offers visual analytics in the cloud for business

Qlik, a visual analytics provider, has announced Qlik Sense Cloud Business. Qlik Sense Cloud Business enables users to create, manage, and collaborate with visual analytics in the cloud. The subscription-based cloud offering extends the power of data-driven insights to users and groups throughout an organisation.

Qlik Sense Cloud Business has an intuitive design that enables users of all technical skill levels to quickly and easily create, manage, and collaborate with meaningful analytic apps. Responsive design capabilities offer analysis on-the-go from any device – regardless of device size – including touch, drill, and interact features, with no additional development necessary. In addition, data management capabilities empower users to combine data from diverse sources, including in the cloud, uploaded from on-premise, and third-party apps, to quickly create rich, interactive apps. This user experience is underpinned by Qlik’s Associative Model, which enables users to probe all the possible associations that exist across all of their data.

Deliver value faster

The existing Qlik Sense Cloud Basic and Plus offerings provide individuals with all the advantages of Qlik Sense combined with the ability to easily share analysis and insights. Qlik Sense Cloud Business adds additional security and governance features, with a focus on empowerment. The cloud-based model allows organisations to add new users and apps as requirements change, with the elasticity to support current and future needs. 

Qlik Sense Cloud Business includes: 

A group work area allowing users to collaboratively create, edit, and access group content and apps, enhancing collaboration without limiting flexibility.
Group data space enabling all users to contribute data that contains reusable and consistent definitions, expediting the process of creating new apps and eliminating the guesswork in maintaining apps as business requirements evolve over time.
Group shared networks that offers multiple shared networks or streams that users may be invited to follow, enabling control for which users have access to which apps.

“Our cloud strategy encompasses more than just an infrastructure or software-as-a-service play,” said Anthony Deighton, Qlik CTO and SVP of Products. “At Qlik we see an exciting opportunity for cloud-based value-added services to optimise the visual analytics experience. Likewise, because people do not make decisions alone, sharing in the cloud will always be an important part of our collaboration strategy.”

The company has also previewed Qlik Sense Enterprise 3.0, the newest release of its business intelligence (BI) and analytics solution that will be available in June 2016. Qlik Sense Enterprise 3.0 combines enterprise readiness and governance with visualisation and data preparation capabilities, allowing organisations to meet a broad range of BI use cases from a single platform. 

With this latest release, Qlik has improved its management and administration capabilities to support IT with more effective auditing, configuration, and governance for broad multi-geography deployments. New user interface enhancements in the Qlik Management Console (QMC) provide configuration options for content and resources. In addition, Qlik Sense Enterprise is now available in Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.

Developers are empowered with a new development hub. This includes new developer APIs and capabilities, including an app integration API, a visualisation API for programmatic creation of analytics, and a new integrated developer environment (IDE) plugin for Visual Studio.

“Qlik built the category for user-driven, self-service BI. With Qlik Sense, we continue to expand the market by creating a scalable, secure, and extensible platform that organisations can consider the centrepiece of their enterprise-wide BI deployment,” said Deighton.

"Our platform approach allows us to address such a breadth of use cases with more depth than other offerings. The openness of our platform expands opportunities for custom analytics apps, embedded BI, and developer innovation. With our industry-leading global partner network at the ready to bring these solutions to market and our rapidly growing community of developers, we’ve hit an exciting point in the next phase of industry leadership, extending beyond visual analytics.”

More intuitive app creation, visual analysis, and collaboration

Users will benefit from new visual search capabilities that allow them to search across charts and data. In addition, visual exploration capabilities now allow users to explore and discover insights in analyses using governed metrics and dimensions. Additional functionality improves business user app creation, including time aware charts, automatic detection of geographic data, and improved application of data-driven colour palettes.

Several new features facilitate sharing and collaboration, including storytelling that allows data stories to be directly published to Microsoft Office and PDF. In addition, Qlik Nprinting, which previously supported only QlikView, now supports Qlik Sense. This enables organisations with legacy reporting environments to move aggressively to a modern BI architecture while maintaining their requirement for statutory or compliance reporting and extending more interactive analysis to business leaders. 

Interested?

Qlik Sense Cloud Business will be available in the second half of 2016.

MotionElements adds visual search technology to

MotionElements, a Singapore-based online marketplace for royalty-free* stock animation, video footage, After Effects and Apple Motion templates, has launched an improved search engine featuring visual similarity search technology in partnership with Pixolution, a visual image search technology provider, to help stock media buyers find relevant content more easily.

Speaking of Pixolution, Joanne Chua, Co-Founder of MotionElements said, “We saw a lot of potential in the amount of utility and ease of use it provides to both buyers and sellers of stock video content, which led to our decision to invest and implement the technology to MotionElements as part of our efforts to improve our site.”

The VisualSearch feature complements existing text searches through helping to locate video content through using visual cues. Text-based searches are limited by how well video content has been described with keywords, whereas VisualSearch is able to recognise the images themselves, providing users with more accurate search results for video content libraries. 

The challenge is compounded when users search in Japanese, Korean or Chinese, all of which are supported by the site. Keywords are often only in a single language, and while they are translated, may not fully capture the semantics in different languages. “What sets us apart is that, on top of our extensive video footage library, we also have a huge selection of stock animation and After Effects templates. This often places a heavy burden on having the correct keywords to describe, for example, animated video backgrounds with keywords like 'Swirly Lines' or 'Curvy Wave',” Mark Sun, Co-Founder of MotionElements elaborated.

"The visual nature of the search overcomes the various language and semantic limitations inherent to keyword searches. This effectively globalises search for all languages, which in turn gives our Artists** confidence that their content can be found by buyers with less emphasis on the keywords”.

The company further clarified that text-based searches for content to fit subjective criteria like mood can be unsuccessful as it is impossible to guess if the keyword combination used to search with matches the keywords provided for relevant content. VisualSearch can use a reference image to come up with a list of all content that has similar images, for example.

MotionElements says users should be able to locate content in fewer steps compared to a standard keyword search. VisualSearch in MotionElements is currently a beta*** feature. More improvements are expected to be implemented as more users become familiar with the new search feature.

The company receives about 10,000 pageviews a day, with more than half of the traffic coming from Asia, MotionElements said.

*All images from MotionElements.

*Royalty-free content may be free or may require payment. If it is royalty-free, royalties do not have to be paid thereafter.

**Artists provide content for sale on MotionElements.

***Beta software is close to the final version but may not work exactly as expected.