From the course: Earn Money as a Stock Contributor
Evaluating trends
- One of the pieces of advice that I've heard repeatedly when talking to successful contributors is to evaluate trends. That it's important to try to be ahead of the curve. Rather than publishing images after the fact, watch as things are emerging. Whether that be the world of politics, fashion, music or others. When you go to evaluate trends, do things like watch and read the news. What's popping up, what issues are starting to be talked about and how quickly can you respond to those. Take a look at retail, what's coming? Can you see previews of lineups that are coming or start to look at fashions and trends and how things are evolving. Look at pop culture. A lot of times you'll see innovations starting with musicians or artists and then trickling down to others. Be mindful of trends. For example, during economic recession, retro and really, nostalgia comes back. So, having content that's really mindful of the human condition, is going to help you. Also, there's a great thing published by Adobe called the Visual Trend Forecast and Pantone also publishes a color trend survey. Both of these are useful when you're creating content or when you're gonna be designing content. Let's take a quick look at each. The Adobe Visual Trends forecast takes a look at things that are emerging and you'll notice here different things that they're seeing about content. It's not just photography or video. For example, they've identified the fluid self. Which is, we're starting to see, new ways of understanding ourself, such as, gender, abilities and age. That a lot of the traditional definitions are changing and people are looking for more flexibility. Multiculturalism with relationships. That things are becoming more stylized. So, during times of uncertainty, people like to see things that are a little bit more outlandish. And that history, memory and nostalgia are coming back. Now, this is an interesting report and each of these then have links to galleries to help you see more, as well as, Adobe has continued to do an ongoing series of blog posts, speeches and things that you can read up more on each of these. Just go to Adobe's blog and take a look at some of the references or search on visual trend forecast, Adobe Stock. Similarly, colors go in and out of popularity and Pantone is the world leader when it comes to color. Pantone offers several different trends. Some that are for sale, as well as others that they just discuss at a high level, in blog posts. You'll see here that they have different sections talking about color in general, color as it relates to real estate. Color for planning, color for fashion, et cetera, and if you take a look at some of these here, for example, color planner for winter, well this is almost a year away, yet they are forecasting what type of colors they expect to be popular. Part of this is that Pantone is regarded as the authority, so they can pick colors this far out because just by picking them, they're going to influence where color goes. But you'll see here that they have a wide range and if you take a look at their blog, you'll also find additional articles. Just do a quick search on the phrase, color trends and you'll find some interesting articles that help you explore. You'll see here, for example, they took a look at colors that were emerging tied to fashion. Which colors were designers using a lot? And they identified the top color palette for spring, as well as the emotions associated with this. Here's another blog post when they take a look at color in their color book and again, this is a for sale product, but it does take a look at different color combinations and products and trends that are becoming very popular. Pantone is clearly regarded as the world leader here and if you are a graphic designer or going to be putting together color palettes for your shoots, I would strongly encourage you to keep an eye on what they're doing. This will help you get ahead of the curve and allow you to pick colors or palettes that are gonna likely appeal to folks. And in the case of graphic design, you can even go back to things you've built before and adjust the color pallette with the recolor command to make them match what's trending now or what's expected to trend in the future so you can update your designs.
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