The future is a promise to human imagination, inspiring us to look beyond what the world is and to consider what it could be. But if the future is so rigorous of possibilities, why have the ideas of marketing specialists in what it looks like – or rather what they believe that the public thinks It will look like – converged on such a monolithic aesthetic?
When we examined the search and download data of our platform, we found that in 2024, users were in love with the visuals of the future. Among our creative library of hundreds of millions of pre-shot images, videos and illustrations, the most popular images included elegant hologram overlays, lines of light code and a notable abundance of a color: blue.
Marketing visuals have long assimilated technology and the future with coolness and electric dream landscapes, largely due to the influence of science fiction films. Thanks to their cultural domination, these films have put aesthetics for the future as a blue, clinical and rationalized world.
Despite recent efforts to move away from the blues, the representation of technology and the future has changed little over the past 30 years – and in 2024, we have seen a renewed embrace of dominant technological imagery in response to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI changes the way we work, live and create, and faulty marketing specialists with the familiar visual codes of science fiction to capture it.