Shutterstock's 2014 Trends include Blurry Backgrounds, Selfies & Zentangle

In Shutterstock’s 2014 Creative Trends Infographic, selfies, quirky music, and blurred backgrounds all emerged (or continued) as trends in the advertising, film, and media industries worldwide. However, the list doesn’t stop just there! This is just a sample from the various areas that the report covers.
Each year, Shutterstock, a company that provides digital imagery licensing from its collection of over 47 million images, video clips, and music tracks, produces an annual interactive infographic to report the global visual, design, video, cultural, and social trends, as well as the tendencies for music. The data for the report is based on downloads and searches of their collection in a given year. The report is produced in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Japanese, making it accessible to audiences across the globe. This aspect is pretty helpful, if they seek to see through their predictions of what will rule the creative world in the coming year.
The team at Shutterstock expressed some surprise in some of the trends, notably the zentangle under design trends, but others were more predictable, such as the trends in culture, the move towards wearable technology, the internet of things, and of course, the selfie.
Personally, I loved the presentation of the report. It is very well organized, and allows you to actually sample things like the trends in music (I listened to the quirky and optimistic track while writing this, just to figure out what their definition of it was) as well as view pictures, such as all of the food images trending in Italy. It definitely is useful for those looking to keep up with trends in the industry, to make sure they are not falling behind. Many people in the realm of social networking would find the hints of social trends helpful as well, such knowing that videos and images boost retweets. Use of the report with past reports could also help those in the creative industries what trends just really aren’t successful as they plan out strategies for the coming months.
The report is quite the representation of Big Data at its finest! I recommend giving it a look, if anything just figure out what a zentangle is.