With the ever-growing demand to stand out from the crowd, building products such as brick slips can be a solution that enables a successful, yet unique, build. By using glazed brick slips when designing your project, you have the ability to hit the right criteria. But how do you use them effectively?
Whether it’s using colour to make an impact, or varying the shape of the bricks to achieve your vision, exploring the latest trends will help you to be as innovative as you can while using brick slips.
Let’s take a look at the latest trends using glazed brick slips and how they can help your building come to life!
Brick Slips Colour Trends 2023
Ultimately, colour is used to make your project unique, as incorporating colour into a building’s façade creates an immediate impact. Whether you’re looking to differentiate between buildings, or designing a whole structure around colour choice, using glazed brick slips to do so can really give your building a high impact visually.
Some of the most popular colours for glazed bricks in the UK this year include:
• Racing Car Green
• Shades of blue
• White
• Grey
• Brown
These colours are trending in many locations within the UK due to their artistic diversity. For example, in heavily built-up areas, glazed brick slips are used for aesthetic purposes, providing architects and specifiers a material that can easily create bespoke designs on buildings, whilst also boasting a range of other benefits to urban-areas, such as durability, ease-of-maintenance, longevity and speed of construction.
Alternatively, in more rural areas, brick slips can provide a more conservative or traditional aesthetic, such as using green brick slips to sit within natural surroundings.
But, are bespoke colours and colour-matching the only reason architects are choosing to use brick slips in 2023?
Creating Texture With Bespoke Brick Slips
Although colour is a key feature of aesthetically pleasing projects, architects are also placing focus on the benefits a change in texture can have on a building.
Both the colour and shape of brick slips can be used to achieve a unique look and to create texture and dimension on a façade. For example, design features such as using projecting headers or a sawtooth detail can be striking when added to large structures.
Specifically, architects in the UK are using glazed brick slips shapes to create texture and depth in their projects.

POINTE / EPAISSEUR – Batignolles, LOT 04A – brisac & gonzales / Jared Chulski
Detailing using a range of shapes and sizes in your cladding, adds a whole new dimension to the structure of a building. Here are some of the most popular shapes architects are specifying within their projects in 2023:
• Waves
• Projecting Headers
• Sawtooth
• Diamonds
By adding different shapes to the façade of your building, you can create eye-catching designs. Using brick slips over traditional brick construction when using special shapes is more cost effective and simple to install, as they can be incorporated into a brick cladding system. This makes special shapes on high rise building a popular trend, such as creating texture above windows.
- Delta, Siège social Podeliha, Angers / Rolland & Associés
By utilizing different shaped glazed brick slips to your build, you can catch the attention of passers-by with not only colour, but the depth and distinction of your building against others around it.
Brick Bonds And Laying Patterns
Over the past few years one of the biggest trends we’ve seen from using brick slips is a more varied approach to brick bonds and laying patterns. After all, brick slips and cladding systems allow flexibility of laying patterns without increasing the cost dramatically like traditional brickwork.
For example, creating lines with long format brick slips can completely change the character of a build. Laying brick slips vertically elongates a structure, which is beneficial to those creating high-rise buildings that need to protrude from the buildings surrounding it.
When thinking of brick bonding patterns, here are some of the most popular:
• Random bond
• Stack bond
• English bond
• Flemish bond
By utilizing brick slips for these patterns, you can create striking designs for any building by marrying the perfect colour, shape and laying pattern to really make your build unique.
- Projet 15, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Loci Anima
- Risoux, Lausanne, Suisse – BIOLLEY-POLLINI Archiectes M. AUFFRET-POSTEL
Summarising Brick Slips Trends For 2023
These are just three of the features of brick slips which are allowing architects to deliver stunning projects in 2023 – from colours to shapes, and the incorporation of brick bonds and laying patterns.
Before deciding on which aesthetic you think best suits your vision, contact a brick expert like those at Creative Brick Solutions to share your plans and help them come to life.
Creative Brick Solutions are an independent company that help architects to deliver their vision, from choosing the right brick to delivering them. Make sure to get in touch with any ideas or queries you might have.