The future is a promise to the human imagination, inspiring us to look beyond what the world is and envision what it could be. But if the future is so rife with possibilities, why have marketers’ ideas of what it looks like—or rather, what they believe audiences think it will look like—converged on such a monolithic aesthetic?
When we examined search and download data from our platform, we found that in 2024, users were enamored with visuals of the future. Among our Creative library of hundreds of millions of pre-shot images, videos, and illustrations, the most popular images featured sleek hologram overlays, luminous lines of code, and a notable abundance of one color: blue.
Marketing visuals have long equated technology and the future with cool tones and electric dreamscapes, largely due to the influence of science fiction films. Through their cultural dominance, these films set the aesthetic for the future as a blue, clinical, and streamlined world.
Despite recent efforts to move away from the blues, the depiction of technology and the future has changed little over the last 30 years—and in 2024, we saw a renewed embrace of blue-dominant tech imagery in response to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI is changing how we work, live, and create, and marketers are defaulting to the familiar visual codes of science fiction to capture it.
