Improvements in computer simulation, materials characterization and lowering of design safety margins leads to significant decrease of components mass. In order to maintain functions and increase components service reliability while reducing their mass, new approaches describing closer material behaviour and in service component properties are applied. The current paper is shoving recent trends contributing to improvement of the forming technology and components design thanks to improved material models and local properties measurements for flat and bulk components. Complex material models taking into account multiaxial loading conditions together with approaches considering load path history influence on material deformation behaviour are presented here. Additionally, local properties measurement with the use of miniaturized tensile specimens is presented here that provides data for anisotropy and local properties assessment that are applied to models tuning and verification.