In 2024, TikTok hardly needs an introduction. A social media platform and video hosting service operated by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., TikTok is more popular than Google and has been downloaded more than 2 billion times. It has come under scrutiny for data privacy violations and has been banned in a number of countries. It remains one of the most popular social media platforms on Earth.
A New Era of Confidence is Tiktok’s third annual trend forecast and is published by its Singapore office. These annual forecasts form part of the company’s tools for business users and are intended to assist marketers in understanding TikTok’s consumers.
TikTok’s 2023 trend report is a slim 16-page document packed to the rafters with information.
Formatted to fit phone screens vertically (of course!) the report surprises by how much information it includes in such a limited page-count. Clearly intended for a young audience, the report pulls no punches in the density of information it provides: text blocks are tiny, well-written snippets; and the palette is of primary and secondary colours with a lean toward highly saturated brights. The curve-cornered rectangle occurs as a design motif – unsurprising but effective.
The use of black sections interspersed with white helps to carve the report into distinct areas within an individual page. This is useful for packing in information and breaking up a page into easily digested chunks. It also allows colour to play a role in navigation and in drawing the eye to important information.
The report, naturally, includes links to TikToks that expand on various areas of the report, but because by their very nature these are quite short, they never feel intrusive. There is a lot in this report here that annual reports designers could learn from, among which is the careful compression of information to create a document that is a quick read and yet, informative.
