The Seoul-based food experience design studio creates workshops, installations and research projects that explore how cooking and eating can bring people closer together.

There's a photo in Small Batch Studio's archive of two strangers holding opposite ends of a 3.6-metre length of string, a teabag knotted along its length, both of them pulling gently until the distance between them feels right. It looks like a party game. It's actually a piece of research – and it tells you plenty about how this Seoul-based studio thinks about food, which is to say: not as something you eat, but as something you use to measure a relationship.

Founded in 2016 by Eunkyung Kang, who trained first in visual communication and fashion in Korea before moving to London – "the city of my idols: Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen" – Small Batch Studio is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, still working from the same conviction that shaped its very first projects: that food is never really the problem. "It is we humans who have problems," the founder tells us. "We forget this all the time and blame food. I always emphasise that how we eat is more important than what we eat."

After a spell working as an illustrator in London led to burnout, a visit to Laines Organic Farm in Haywards Heath changed everything for Eunkyung. "I immediately fell in love with nature, farming and cooking," Eunkyung explains. An MA in Sequential Design/Illustration at Brighton followed, alongside a farm-diary project called Frozen Fingers and Dirty Sleeves, and an internship at Dutch eating-designer Marije Vogelzang's studio-restaurant Proef in Amsterdam, which sealed the deal, showing how food experience design could be an actual job.

The Connecting Tea project, mentioned at the beginning of this article, is the studio's clearest thesis. It involves two participants pulling that length of string taut and brewing tea at whatever distance they've settled on, then measuring it against Edward Hall's theory of proxemics to reveal, quite literally, how close they are. "Connecting Tea brings people closer together physically, emotionally and socially," says Eunkyung, and having run the workshop across Korea and Japan since 2018, it's become something of an icebreaker classic.

Elsewhere, Recipes Are on the Map takes a more diaristic approach. Handwritten recipes are laid over maps to trace the wandering, unfixed nature of migrant identity – an idea sparked, fittingly, by a month spent wandering the English coast, foraging in Brighton and stumbling into human geography researchers on a field trip in Totnes. Back home in Seoul, where 40% of residents live alone, most of them migrants from elsewhere in Korea, the project takes on real weight. "I believe food can be a powerful social tool of sympathy and diversity," the founder says, "because it reflects who I am and who we live with."

When it comes to the creative process, ideation happens through hand-drawn experience journey maps and toolkits built in fluorescent colours that you won't often find in nature – a deliberate flag of "human intervention in the food experience". You see it everywhere in the imagery: a chart of Korean wheat flavours rendered in a wheel of hot, unnatural hues; heirloom tomatoes illustrated in inky reds and acid greens for a Gangwon-do farm project; a tide calendar stretched out like an EKG in cobalt blue. Even the studio's newest identity, a red hand stamped with the words 'son-mat' – a Korean phrase meaning "hand-taste", the intuitive, seasoned sense a cook develops through years at the stove – turns up as an embroidered patch and looks like a logo.

That project, launched this year, is where the studio is headed next. Alongside Foodscape Tongyeong, a residency-style programme introducing overseas audiences to the coastal city's foraging, markets, and disappearing food traditions, the founder is now researching recipes as a form of manual to teach people and develop their 'son-mat' senses. "This will not only guide us in cooking better but also awaken our senses and live with non-humans through the everyday practice of cooking." 10 years in, Small Batch Studio is still asking the same question it started with: not what we should eat, but how – and who, exactly, we're eating it with.

Through thoughtful identities, publications and digital platforms, Zahari is helping cultural organisations document themselves for future generations.

Growing up between Sofia, London and Los Angeles, and arriving in new countries without full command of the language, Zahari Dimitrov developed a way of reading spaces: how they were organised, what they were communicating and who they were for. "That instinct came before any formal education," he says, "and it's still at the core of how I approach a brief."

From there, he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK). He graduated in 2020 and returned to Sofia, where he found a cultural sector doing serious, ambitious work with almost nothing to back it up – no websites, no publications, and no accessible archives. "I kept noticing a design gap," he says. "Nobody to build the infrastructure that makes cultural work legible beyond its immediate audience."

Zahari's clients are predominantly cultural organisations such as festivals, galleries and institutions, and the process for each revolves around collaboration and future planning. "I always ask myself: in what way will this exist in one year or five years? Will it still hold value?" Budget and material constraints in Bulgaria are constant and real. "Organisations with serious ambitions and very little funding, platforms that need to be maintainable by a two-person team after you hand them over. Those constraints force decisions that a more open brief doesn't. A beautiful system that collapses six months later isn't a design success. Thinking about what's actually sustainable is as much a part of my process as any visual decision."

Recently, Zahari has worked on an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Ariane Toussaint, which began when both were graduating from KABK and produced the visual campaign for the 2021 graduation show. Since then, the collaboration has evolved into a textile book emerging from Ariane's residency in Bucharest, a hand-sewn and silkscreened publication exploring the links between textile craft, womanhood and domesticity. "Every editorial decision had to take the physical making process into account," Zahari explains. The book's cover feels knotted and textile-like, while the interior is layered with archival photographs, research and text in both French and English. "It's a favourite because the form and content are inseparable, and because it came out of a sustained dialogue between two practices rather than a single authorial vision."

Another project is the redesign of the website for the International Digital Art Festival Sofia. The brief came from the idea that visual identities and online presences in Bulgarian cultural institutions are often stuck a decade behind the actual quality of the work. "A lot of cultural organisations in Sofia are doing genuinely ambitious work, but their public presence doesn't reflect it," he says. "Archives disappear after events end, and important projects leave behind almost no accessible documentation." The DA Fest site was built to be navigable, maintainable and capable of functioning as a long-term archive.

This sparks a few questions for Zahari: "What does it mean to build cultural memory when the institution that should be doing it either doesn't yet exist or can't be trusted to persist? What forms can design take when it has to construct memory outside institutional frameworks?" He says, "The legacy of socialism in Bulgarian design culture is also something I keep thinking about. Although very distant at this point, it created a particular relationship to state institutions, collective identity and public communication that is fundamentally different from Western European or American design histories. That history is unresolved and still being negotiated: what to do with the visual language of that era, how to document it, how to build new institutions that don't simply replicate old dependencies," Zahari says.

This autumn, he begins an MFA in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art, supported by the Fulbright Bulgarian Leaders Grant. The questions he wants to pursue there are the same ones already driving his practice. After that, he will start an independent design and publishing practice in Sofia, combining commissioned work with self-initiated research and open-access workshops. Eventually, there will be a design residency in Bulgaria.

"The broader goal is to build the kind of cultural infrastructure that, in more established design communities, already exists and is taken for granted," he says, "but here has to be constructed from scratch."

We asked illustrators what they charge and how they're feeling out there. The answers were more honest than we bargained for.

Here's a number we didn't expect: £350. That's the median day rate among the illustrators who told us they're based in London. It's also the median day rate for illustrators everywhere else in the UK, pooled together. Same figure, to the pound. Whatever premium London is supposed to carry, it isn't showing up in what illustrators actually charge.

We ran a survey this month, and 403 illustrators responded, 146 of whom were based in the UK. We asked what they charge, how they price it, whether it feels fair, and what they wish clients understood. We expected the day rate to be the main story. It wasn't… It was about 20%.

It depends

That's the share of illustrators who told us, straightforwardly, that yes, they feel fairly paid for their work. One in five. Another 26% said no. And the largest group by far, 54% of them, said "it depends" – which, once you read what they wrote underneath, turns out to be quite the pain point. "Whatever their budget or fee, we are still significantly underpaid," says one illustrator in London, six to 10 years in.

We should be careful with the day rate figure, and we'll be upfront about why. Only 90 UK-based illustrators gave us a number we could read with confidence. The median is £350, with the middle half falling between £280 and £450, while more than a quarter charge under £300. Just 9% are above £500.

Experience moves it, but not as much as you'd hope. At two to five years in, the median is £425. At 11 to 20 years, it's £450. Two decades of practice buys you £125 a day.

The day rate nobody uses

Here's the odd thing about spending all this time on day rates: hardly anyone prices that way.

Of the 342 illustrators who told us how they usually price, just 41 said day rate. Half of them, 174, work for a project fee. Ninety-six use a mix, and 31 price primarily on licensing and usage. So the number the whole industry quotes is the one most illustrators don't actually run their business on.

Several of them told us why. "Day rates don't work for illustration unless it's live illustration," says an illustrator in the south of England with two to five years' experience. "Project fees protect us, the client and mean people are paid fairly for their work. Some people are quick workers; others are slow. You are paying for the artworks, not someone's time to do it."

That tension came up again and again: the faster you get, the less the clock rewards you. As an illustrator from the Midlands puts it: "30 years of experience means I work faster. You're still paying for the 30 years of getting to this speed, not the 'couple of hours' it took."

One CGI artist agrees: "Some clients think if we can do it faster, it should be cheaper, but don't understand that we can do it faster due to the 25 years of experience. So as we get better, they expect it to be cheaper. Value proposition can get lost."

And then there's what the day rate hides. "Despite a day rate that sometimes looks pretty chunky, we illustrators aren't really raking it in," says one in the north of England. "When we factor in time between projects, usage, scope overrunning and removing taxes, NI, holiday pay, it often equates to a very average income."

Or, as an illustrator in the south of England with under two years behind her puts it: "My salary is not 365 x my day rate. I sometimes wish that I could put what my actual take-home is on my price quoting so people can see the reality."

The licensing gap

We gave everyone free rein to tell us what they wished clients understood better about pricing. More than 320 people gave us their honest thoughts, which tells you something about how the industry is feeling right now. Nobody writes an essay in a survey unless they want to get something off their chest.

Just over a fifth of those answers mention licensing, usage or copyright. It's the biggest recurring theme after time itself, and the one that causes the most frustration. "Licensing, full stop," writes an illustrator with six to 10 years' experience. "Most of them think that they can pay literal peanuts for a design that will be distributed on a large scale."

"There isn't a big knowledge of usage fees in branding and advertising," says another, in London.

"That licensing fees are on top of creation fees," adds a third. "And that just because I draw something for them doesn't mean they can do whatever they want for a low fee."

One illustrator in the Midlands admitted she often gives up on the conversation entirely: "I often end up having to slide by the licensing and charge much less than I should. Some clients, even big ones, don't understand that having full copyright basically triples the final fee."

Others aren't cross about it so much as tired of being misread. "I'm not trying to scam them by offering a licence," says an illustrator with 11 to 20 years' experience. "I'm not trying to prevent them from doing anything with the image, but they need to be realistic about what their budget can get them."

Case in point on the scale question, from an illustrator of 20+ years: "The price scales to the value. Art for an indie band T-shirt should not cost the same as something driving revenue for a $1 trillion company like Apple."

The question about AI (again)

It simply couldn't be avoided. It's all anyone is talking about, despite the fatigue. But we wanted to know whether AI had affected work or income over the last 12 months, and most people answered. Around 60% said yes. Within that, a third said yes, "significantly". Only 12% said no. The remaining lot chose "not sure yet".

One relationship in the data does stand out. Of the illustrators who said AI has significantly affected their work, 16% feel fairly paid. Of those who said AI hasn't touched them at all, 38% are happy with what they get.

What that tells us is anyone's guess, despite there being a solid gap. The survey can't show exactly what's happening: whether AI is dragging rates down, or whether a thin year makes AI a scapegoat. Both scenarios fit the same numbers, and both were argued forcefully in the answers people sent us.

What we can rule out is that it's one corner of the industry taking the hit for everyone else. We checked. It's remarkably even, from 24% in publishing to 40% in motion and animation, with editorial, advertising and packaging all sitting in the low-to-mid 30s. Nobody is having a notably better time of it.

Some of it really made us wince. "It's less about what clients understand, and more that AI has decimated the industry," says an illustrator in the south of England with 11 to 20 years' experience. "My rates are lower because I am desperate for work and no one will take on £400+ anymore."

An illustrator in the north, under two years in, wrote: "Wishing I could ask for more than minimum wage, but people would rather get an AI to do it than pay a human now."

Others see it from the other end. "They're paying for taste and skills accrued before the prevalence of AI," says one. "These tastes will stand out more as the slop intensifies."

And a working note from someone using the tools rather than fearing them, in London: "Yes, you can concept and produce mid-level results from LLMs. BUT the proof is in the pudding. The years of preference and taste acquired will yield better results."

Three views, all held by working illustrators, all in the same dataset. We'd be doing you a disservice by pretending they resolve.

When did you last put your prices up?

Around 42% raised their rates in the last year. Good. But 18% have never raised them at all, and another 18% haven't touched them in more than two years.

Inflation came up unprompted in the free text, usually with a note of disbelief attached. "The rate from 2019 does not work in 2026," says one illustrator with 20+ years of experience. "If an accountant's rate goes up year by year, my rate would be the same," says another. "It's just to keep up with the inflation."

And one illustrator with more than 20 years in the business shared a sobering thought on what she wishes clients knew: "That agents still take 30% and that rates have not changed in twenty-five years."

What we'd do with this

If you take one thing from 403 people opening up about money, make it this: there's no trick to it. The illustrators who feel fairly paid are the ones charging more. A median of £425 a day, against £280 for those who say they aren't. That gap holds up.

Why? We can't say. Charging more might be what makes the work feel fairly paid. Or feeling valued might be what lets you charge more in the first place. But the comforting version, where it's all about knowing your worth and never about the number, isn't what these 403 people described.

"I educate my clients by offering a specified quote, then they can see how much each item costs," says an illustrator with under two years' experience.

And one respondent wrote something that wasn't about clients at all: "My clients seem understanding about pricing. I need to get better about asking for higher rates and explaining the value behind what I do."

There you have it. A survey can't wave a magic wand and fix the state of the industry. But it can show you what the person next to you is actually charging, and what they'd only say in an anonymous box.

And it shows something else: more than 320 people who can beautifully explain their value. The research, the licensing, and the years behind it all. Not one of them was in any doubt about what their work is worth. So if you're an illustrator reading this and you haven't raised your prices in a long time, perhaps that's overdue.

Known for his retro illustrations for big-name clients, the Argentine artist explains how he stays human in the age of AI.

Ask most illustrators to name their career highlight, and you'll get their biggest client: the global drinks brand, the broadsheet cover, the company whose logo makes other creatives sit up. But Marcos Montiel, the Argentinian illustrator behind Cinzano's picnic-and-food-truck campaign and covers for The Guardian, The Economist and The Washington Post, doesn't pick any of that. He picks a jigsaw puzzle.

It's a simple response that says a lot about how Marcos thinks about his work. His passion is less about racking up an impressive client list, more about guarding his own creative habits. And for anyone building a creative career, that's an approach worth considering.

The object beats the image

Marcos's style is instantly recognisable. Typically, his pictures are retro, warm, and dense, with small human gestures that make a scene feel lived-in, whether that's a hand reaching for a vermouth glass on the grass or a man crouched over a crate of vinyl.

His editorial illustrations may get most attention, but he's passionate about packaging and product work too. "I'm fascinated by the idea that a painting or a drawing can live alongside an object, and communicate something more than just a pretty picture," he enthuses. "The moment someone can hold a piece of work, turn it over and bring it into their daily life, it becomes something else entirely: not an image any more, but a relationship."

All of which neatly brings us back to that jigsaw puzzle for Monoblock. "It was a really fun project to make," Marcos recalls. "Because it let me see my work turned into an object that people could interact with, especially children."

In this light, it's not surprising it comes top in his list of affections. No brief, no budget line and no client logo can compete with watching a kid's hands assemble your drawing on a kitchen table.

Two cities, one voice

Marcos has built his career across two very different creative economies: Buenos Aires, where he's based, and London, where he's worked as a freelancer and is represented by Synergy. Rather than picking a side, he treats the contrast as useful friction.

Local Argentine work, he explains, tends to be rooted in custom, identity, and how a place represents itself, while the international market leans more heavily into concept and editorial thinking. Working across both, he says, gives him "a perspective that's broader and richer," letting him fuse everyday observation with something more abstract.

It's a good working model for anyone who splits their time between a home market and global clients, and a reminder that those two audiences don't actually need to compete for a fixed idea of "your style"; they can sharpen each other instead.

Pencil first, screen second

For years, Marcos worked almost entirely on a digital tablet, which sped up sketching, revisions and final production. But the rise of AI-generated imagery has led him back towards analogue.

"The arrival of artificial intelligence pushed me to reconsider the importance of the author's hand and personal gesture," he explains. Nowadays, then, his workflow starts with pencil on paper, moves to line correction and colour on an iPad, and only reaches Illustrator and Photoshop for formatting and final files.

It's a small but significant shift: not rejecting technology outright, but bringing the bit that a machine can't fake to the front of the queue. For illustrators wondering how to hold on to a distinct voice in the AI era, it's worth thinking about.

Marcos is also doubling down on personal work, such as his popular stickers. Their success stems in part from the way he treats unpaid personal work. "My method has always been based on treating every personal project as though it were a commercial commission," he explains. "I apply the same seriousness and dedication to both."

Genuine and authentic

Asked what he'd tell someone starting out, Marcos resists the urge to hand over a shortcut. "There's nothing more solid and lasting than a genuine, authentic expression of your own," he maintains. "Working hard is the key to finding and developing it."

In other words: produce constantly, share what you're genuinely proud of, and accept that identity isn't a brand exercise you complete in a weekend. Instead, it's built piece by piece, just like everything else on his desk.

As Marcos puts it: "When the mundane spirit speaks, detail is a universal language." It's as good a mission statement as any, for a career built on noticing the small stuff… whether that ends up on a bottle label, a broadsheet front page or 100 jigsaw pieces on a child's bedroom floor.

M+C Saatchi lands Boss, Mother Design opens a real, physical shop, Oliver makes a big TikTok hire, and plenty more besides.

Welcome to Booms & Shakes, our monthly round-up of the hires, launches and wins making noise across the creative world. July has arrived warm and heavy with inbox traffic, which is either a sign of a buoyant industry or a lot of people trying to get news out before the summer slowdown. Possibly both.

Either way, a lot is going on. A significant creative hire from TikTok. Two new companies spinning out of established studios. A shop has opened in LA. A Manchester animation studio has launched a whole new brand studio. And plenty more besides.

Somewhere in all of this, I think, a theme can be discerned. Agencies are investing in creative leadership at pace, particularly at the social-native and experience end of the market. New integrated models are multiplying. And the brands that used to buy broadcast are now buying social and influence in a very big way.

Hires and promotions

Oliver takes from TikTok

We'll start with the most significant creative appointment of the month. Oliver, which designs, builds and runs AI-powered marketing organisations inside the world's biggest brands, has hired Tom Skinner, a former global executive creative director at TikTok, as group ECD.

Tom spent six years at TikTok helping brands like BMW, Gucci, Samsung and Off-White rethink how they show up on social. More recently, he oversaw TikTok's global business marketing, connecting brands with the Women's World Cup and the Olympics. Before that, he held senior creative roles at BBH and CHI & Partners. He's also, somewhat randomly, written children's books and co-directed music videos.

He joins alongside a restructured creative leadership team, with Eloise Smith moving into a parallel group ECD role. Both report to global CCO Rodrigo Sobral, and Tom will also serve as creative leader for Unilever's U-Studio.

SocialChain appoints Tom Fenwick-Smith

SocialChain—the integrated social agency part of Brave Bison, with hubs in Manchester, London and New York—has appointed Tom Fenwick-Smith as executive creative director, reporting to CEO Jacinta Faul. Tom joins from VodafoneThree, where he spent five years as a senior conceptual creative and social strategy lead. His remit covers SocialChain and sister agency Engage Digital Partners.

Joint bolsters its strategy

Joint, an independent creative agency whose clients include Amazon, Google and TripAdvisor, has appointed Ayla de Moraes as head of strategy, a newly created role. Ayla brings experience across VCCP, Publicis Poke and McCann London, with clients including Nestlé, Garnier, Mercedes and O2. She also, we note with approval, launched the first sustainable concept store in the Middle East.

SYLVAIN adds two senior creatives

New York-based strategy and design consultancy SYLVAIN has made two new hires. Renwick (Ren) McAslan joins as the team's first-ever copywriting creative director. Coming from LeBron James' SpringHill Company with stints at Ogilvy, Anomaly, Translation, Fig and BBH London, he's also – fun fact! – an Emmy-nominated writer who's taking an original one-woman show to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. Meanwhile, Matthew Smith joins as design director from High Tide. He's the founder of type practice Morning Type and a partner at Tipofili, the complementary foundry to Louise Fili Ltd. Both hires are anchored in SYLVAIN's ongoing work with Etsy, Nielsen and Hinge.

Iris London makes two big appointments

Iris London has strengthened its senior team with two appointments focused squarely on making the work happen. Ali Proctor-Walsh joins as head of operations, bringing 18+ years of experience, including time as production and creator marketing lead, EMEA, at Meta Creative Shop and as executive producer at Nexus Studios, with credits across Apple, Disney, L'Oréal and LVMH. Vicci Whitlow joins as head of production, bringing more than 20 years of integrated production experience from London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, most recently at Karmarama/Accenture Song UK.

The Bloc strengthens its European leadership

Award-winning independent healthcare communications network The Bloc has appointed Jon Chapman as European ECD, expanding its presence across offices in London, Milan, Basel and Munich. Jon brings senior creative leadership from Havas Lynx, BBDO and BBH, and works alongside global CCO Stephanie Berman and CCO New York Adam Hessel. Two additional hires strengthen London: Ruarí Burgham as engagement strategy director and Ellen Bunker as account director.

Heaps + Stacks signals expansion

London experiential agency Heaps + Stacks has made two internal moves. Liam Bircham steps into a newly created director of growth role, leading across new business, marketing and product development. Hannah Swift is promoted from associate director to director, taking on elevated responsibility for senior client relationships and creative and commercial output.

Mud completes its leadership team

Bath-based creative web design agency Mud, whose clients include Warner Bros, Epic Games and National Museums Scotland, has appointed Oliver Ware as digital design director, completing its new leadership team. Oliver spent six years as lead visual designer at the FA, playing a central role in the England Football Learning project, and brings over two decades of design experience with clients including Rolls-Royce, BMW, Samsung, Sky and Universal Studios. He joins co-founders Matt Powell and Russ Back, as well as recently promoted operations director Meg West.

MFM appoints head of marketing

MFM is an integrated media agency that embeds senior media expertise directly inside creative agencies and brands, with offices in London and Amsterdam. It has now appointed Lucy Crowther as head of marketing, a newly created role. She joins from Beyond, where she was marketing and growth director, with earlier experience at Havas and TMW Unlimited. Her candid observation that "agencies are often not great at their own marketing" is precisely why this role now exists.

B7 hires Daniel Gourley

Newcastle-based video-first marketing agency B7, which helps businesses across financial services, utilities and data engineering, has appointed Daniel Gourley as social media manager. He joins from Silverbean after four years across design, copywriting, strategy and video production.

Launches and new ventures

Mother Design opens a shop

We don't normally cover retail openings in Booms & Shakes, but we're making an exception here. Mother Design—the design arm of global creative agency Mother—has opened a physical store in the West Adams neighbourhood of LA, dedicated to analogue craft and well-designed objects. Some are for sale in exchange for money. Others, apparently, in exchange for "the explicit promise of creative commissions," which is the best pricing model we've encountered in quite some time. Stock includes Teenage Engineering electronics, Tyler Warren surfboards, Filthy cocktail garnishes, Nuud plastic-free gum, Nursem skincare and a curated selection of pre-loved books.

MOX launches MOX/WORLDS

London-founded global creative agency MOX has launched MOX/WORLDS, a new division focused on the next era of brand design, innovation and experiences. It's led by Jaś Rewkiewicz as creative director, returning to MOX after a stint as chief creative officer at South Korean tech company ALTAVA, where he led immersive and interactive experiences for Roblox, LVMH and LaLiga. The division launches with a global branding and design brief from Formula E. As co-founder Matt Bolton puts it: "Everything we do is about world-building. Increasingly, it's something people can physically step into." MOX/WORLDS is the answer to what comes next.

Perfect Stranger launches from Hornet

New York multidisciplinary creative studio Hornet has launched Perfect Stranger, a full-stack sister creative company offering brand strategy, design and advertising production under one roof with a headcount of 20. Combined clients across both companies include Trimble/SketchUp, eero, Homes.com and Kodansha, the Japanese manga publisher celebrating its centenary.

Flow launches Oh Nice

Manchester animation studio Flow Creative is approaching its tenth anniversary, and has marked the moment by launching something new: Oh Nice, a specialist brand and creative communications studio dedicated exclusively to organisations making a positive impact.

Over a decade, Flow has delivered more than 300 brands, films and campaigns for more than 100 organisations, including Children in Need, WaterAid, the World Food Programme and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Oh Nice takes that experience and wraps it in a dedicated studio for branding and communications rather than animation and motion. Early clients include Greenpeace, WWF, Medical Aid for Palestinians and NICE.

Founder Karl Doran's reasoning is simple: "Even the most important organisations can struggle to communicate the value of what they do. Great work deserves great communication."

Rebrand of the month

dock10 becomes MediaCity Studios and MediaCity Post

dock10—home to productions for the BBC, ITV and Netflix, and a partner for major broadcasters and production houses for 15 years—has a new name: MediaCity Studios and MediaCity Post. The rebrand arrives under new CEO Alice Webb and owners Landsec, as part of a broader vision to build MediaCity into a creative brand in its own right.

The timing is apt. MediaCity Studios and MediaCity Post are currently serving as the nerve centre for the BBC's FIFA World Cup coverage, combining multiple tracked cameras, in-studio LED screens and virtual studio environments in a complex, high-volume, fast-turnaround setup, built on eight years of partnership with BBC Sport.

Partnerships and account wins

M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment lands Boss and Hugo

The account win of the month belongs to M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, which has been appointed global PR agency of record for both Boss and Hugo. Their remit covers the UK, US and DACH markets, spanning campaign launches, sporting partnerships, fashion shows, retail activations and major global events. Recent cultural activity by these brands gives a sense of the territory: the Australian Open, the Laver Cup, the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, The Open and Art Basel Awards. It's a rich intersection of fashion, sport and culture; precisely the space M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment has been building.

Grey London wins Synechron

Grey London, the WPP agency that won 22 Cannes Lions in 2025, has been appointed global agency partner by Synechron, a technology consulting firm with 17,000 professionals across around 60 offices in more than 20 nations. The brief is a new global brand platform across B2B channels, including OOH, digital and major industry events. Grey's integrated WPP offering, with WPP Media handling the media strategy, was central to the win; part of the wider "Greynaissance" being pushed by CEO Jai Kotecha.

Uncovered wins Weetabix

Uncovered, the social-first creative agency named Social Media Agency of the Year for 2025, is already social agency of record for KFC, Tesco, Nationwide and Rightmove. And now it's been appointed social agency of record for Weetabix and Alpen, following a competitive pitch managed by AAR. The remit covers organic and paid social for both brands, including refreshing and evolving the iconic "Have you had yours?" platform for Weetabix and amplifying the new "The grown-up thing to do" positioning for Alpen.

Allwyn appoints Coolr for influencer marketing

Allwyn UK, the National Lottery operator—which we featured in March after it launched in-house studio Studio 59—has appointed social media agency Coolr to lead influencer marketing across a series of game launches and promotions throughout 2026. Coolr has been growing at pace: 60+ new hires since the start of 2026, bringing total headcount to nearly 165. It will run influencer-led campaigns across TikTok and Instagram, starting with the relaunch of the flagship Lotto game.

Orla Kiely appoints Renowned Media Group

British design house Orla Kiely—founded by the Irish fashion and textile designer in 1995 and celebrated for its iconic Stem print—has appointed Renowned Media Group (RMG) to lead its digital PR and SEO strategy. The aim is to strengthen visibility across both traditional search and emerging AI platforms, as discovery shifts from search engines to AI-generated answers. RMG, founded by Tasha Antwi, specialises in search and AI-driven discovery for premium and luxury brands.

Spekk acquires Pablo

Spekk, a specialist digital advertising agency with an integrated creative studio, has appointed Nick Boyce as its first chief technology and AI officer, following the acquisition of Pablo, the adtech platform he founded. Pablo automates Facebook ad uploads and streamlines creative workflows, and has already been adopted by brands and agencies including Camper and Lovable. Integrated with Spekk's own proprietary ad trafficking system, the combined platform is designed to improve efficiency and performance for its clients.

Milestones and anniversaries

There's a pleasing pair of birthdays this month. KOJO—the Australian post-production and VFX studio behind more than 120 productions, including The Babadook, Talk to Me, Hotel Mumbai and Mortal Kombat—is celebrating 30 years in rude health. Founded in 1996 by Dale Roberts and Marty Pepper, the studio now derives half of its revenue from North American clients, following a 25% increase in US business over three years. The economics are compelling: US producers benefit from Australia's competitive exchange rate, government rebates of up to 45%, world-class talent and a time zone that enables near-24-hour workflows. CEO Dale Roberts calls it the "Big Triangle" model: shoot in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, post in Australia.

Closer to home, Sherbet Donkey, the Midlands SEO and digital marketing agency with, let's be honest, the most fabulous name going, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Founded by Loki Hinton-Bowen in 2021 after his own frustrating experiences with SEO services, the agency has grown from a team of five to 45, with £3.8 million in annual SEO retainers, 27 websites launched in the past year and a credible claim to the title of biggest SEO agency outside London.

Key takeaways

Step back from July, and three things stand out. First, creative leadership is being rebuilt around social and platform fluency. The hire of Tom Skinner at Oliver is the clearest signal: six years at TikTok, helping global brands figure out how to show up in a social-first world, is now the experience that lands you a top creative job at a global agency. SocialChain's ECD appointment reinforces the same point. The industry is hiring for where culture is made now, not where it used to be made.

Second, new integrated models are multiplying. Perfect Stranger, MOX/WORLDS, Oh Nice ... all of them are building structures that move across disciplines without the traditional agency handoffs. Brands want partners that can think and make in the same breath. The studios building for that are the ones with the momentum.

Thirdly, the most human note in this month's inbox: Flow Creative launched something really good. No big fanfare, no industry event, just a purpose-built studio for organisations that need help communicating what they do, and why it matters. Greenpeace. WWF. Medical Aid for Palestinians. The World Food Programme. The work that needs doing most often has the least budget to shout about it. Oh Nice is built to change that, and we think that's worth more than a footnote.

The global agency's co-founder explains why they're putting themselves on the line by launching their own font foundry, CcType.

It's a little weird when you think about it. Creative studios spend their careers building things other people put their name on. You pour years of craft into a brand system or a typeface, and then it goes out into the world wearing someone else's logo. Koto has spent a decade doing exactly that for clients including Amazon, Google, Netflix and WhatsApp, and it's been very successful at it.

So its decision to launch CcType—a foundry that puts Koto's own thinking up for sale for the first time—is in many ways a creative risk. Why would an agency this established choose to put its own name on a product that lives or dies on whether people buy it or not?

The answer, it turns out, isn't really about type at all. It's about how Koto thinks about who gets access to its knowledge.

An agency on a mission

It isn't the first time Koto has addressed this issue. In early 2025, they launched Seasoned, a free learning hub aimed at students and emerging creatives who don't have an obvious route into the industry.

Seasoned is built around plain-speaking e-books that explain how branding actually works in practice. That's the kind of insider knowledge that's usually locked inside agencies, rather than shared with people trying to get in the door.

Sam Howard, creative director at Koto, told us at the time that the studio wanted to "demystify branding and make creative careers and the industry more transparent". Crucially, Seasoned was built to be low-commitment and free to access, in contrast to the mentorship schemes and elite programmes that already exist across the industry. You don't need to apply, qualify, or commit to anything. You just read it.

Now, when Jowey Roden—chief creative officer and co-founder at Koto—speaks about the launch of CcType, he has the same mission in mind.

"CcType is broadening the audience we can serve," he says. "We've made efforts with Seasoned to democratise our knowledge for students, and CcType looks to solve a similar challenge. How can we take our knowledge, taste, and experience from the last 10 years and make them available to more people at a lower cost? The world is deserving of better design, and we have a responsibility to deliver on that, even if it's in a minimal or marginal way."

Seasoned gave away Koto's knowledge for free, and CcType is the same instinct applied to a paid product, priced so that freelancers or small studios can actually afford it. A typeface with individual styles from £60 and no renewal fees isn't how a big agency normally prices its output. It instead reflects that Koto already thinks about access.

Launching with one typeface

The other thing worth understanding is how deliberately Koto held itself back. It would have been easy to launch CcType with a big range of fonts to prove range and ambition straight away. Instead, it launched with one, CcTimeline. Why?

"This, simply put, was about approaching the project with a level of realism," says Jowey. "We asked ourselves, what was one thing we could do exceptionally well? Whilst we have a host of headline typefaces, experiments and works in progress, these didn't feel like the deeply refined and considered work we want to put into culture. We're approaching this project with a build-in public mentality."

That last phrase tells you a lot about what CcType actually is right now. Not a finished foundry with a full catalogue and a five-year plan, but a live experiment that Koto is running out in the open. Again, they do not seem afraid of taking risks.

The typeface came from giving work away

CcType, by the way, wasn't dreamt up in a strategy meeting. It grew out of something Koto had already done: releasing custom fonts it had built for clients, including Polkadot, Faculty, and Stack Overflow, through Google Fonts for free. The response told Koto something it hadn't gone looking for.

"Our typography work with clients is about making something unique and exclusive to them, a typeface that reflects their DNA and unique perspective as a brand," Jowey explains. "Polkadot and Stack Overflow chose to share their typefaces with a broader audience as it was true to their business ambitions.

"The response and usage of all of these typefaces within the Google Fonts ecosystem demonstrated a very strong demand, one that surprised us," he continues. When the market gives you a signal like this, the obvious answer is to follow it to its natural conclusion. We've got ambitions to continue to serve the creative community with further open-source projects in the future."

Giving work away for free taught Koto that there was an appetite for it. Charging for CcTimeline is simply the next step in the same line of thinking, not a change of direction.

What this means for the rest of us

The risk here is real. A big agency putting its own name on a product potentially means bad reviews, awkward comparisons and public scrutiny it wouldn't get from client work hidden behind an NDA. Jowey is honest about that tension, too.

"As creative businesses scale, headcounts grow, and clients are converted, retaining a culture of excellence often suffers," he said. "At Koto, we see every brief as an opportunity to produce our best work, to experiment and to learn, to see our craft not as a stationary standard but as a growing practice. CcType is one of many demonstrations of this attitude."

Whether CcType grows into a proper foundry or stays as a single, carefully made statement depends on how the market responds. But what's already clear is that this isn't a side project or a marketing exercise. It's the same instinct that built Seasoned, just with a price tag attached, and that makes it worth watching closely.

The Mainz designer on packaging obsession, a pseudonym that got out of hand, chocolate shaped like breasts, and why she's best in the in-between.

Ask most designers where they go looking for ideas, and you'll hear about galleries, sketchbooks, and a long walk. Ask Martina Miocevic, aka Mathilda Mutant, and she'll point you towards the frozen aisle.

She once spent an afternoon in a Whole Foods in Williamsburg photographing every shelf in the place, and she's never really stopped. These days, the pilgrimage sites have moved on a bit. "My current favourite grocery stores in New York are Happier Grocery on Canal Street and Pop Up Grocer in West Village," she says. "Both feel like museums for designers."

It's a good line and a fair description of how she works. The Mainz-based designer has spent 14 years running her own studio, and for the last two she's focused on one thing: corporate design with a particular love of packaging and print. Boxes, bottles, paper stock, Pantone hues, print finishing. The stuff you can pick up, turn over, and hey... sniff.

So what makes a really good packet worth photographing? "I think what fascinates me is seeing design that breaks away from the norm – design that goes beyond what people expect," she says. "In Germany, we're unfortunately still not as bold in many ways, or we're simply slower to embrace new ideas. And consumers are still not being challenged enough."

Which is where the suitcase comes in. Because she brings the good stuff home. "Bringing packaging back from my travels and showing clients what's actually possible has become a huge source of inspiration for my work." Cue a designer arriving at a meeting with a carrier bag of foreign shampoo, making an argument no mood board ever could.

Not actually called Mathilda Mutant

Here's the thing she'll happily admit: there is no Mathilda Mutant. "At school, everyone called me 'Mati'," she explains. "At some point, people started assuming that 'Mati' was short for Mathilda. That's how Mathilda came to be." The rest arrived later, during her studies, when she had to give a presentation on Mutants in Design and Art. The word stuck, the two halves fused, and social media did the rest.

"Over time, people began to think it was actually my real name: Mathilda Mutant. Because that's how I introduced myself on social media." She's fine with it. Better than fine, really. The only slight casualty has been the pronunciation. "A lot of people also assumed I was French and pronounced it like, 'Mathilda Müüttton.' Haha. Oui, c'est tout!"

The bit in the middle

Ask her whether she's a starter or a finisher, and she'll shake her head at both. She's best, she reckons, in the in-between. "Before every new project, I'm terrified of the blank page," she says. "I also tend to work at the last minute. 'No pressure, no diamonds.' Haha."

But once the foundation is down and the structure holds, something switches. "Once the overall bones are in place, I get to focus on all the little details that ultimately make the design. That's my favourite part. The sketch is done, and now it's all about refining it, whether it's choosing the final colour palette, perfecting the typography, selecting the right paper, or obsessing over all those tiny details. I love it."

She reaches for Eames on this, and who wouldn't: "The details are not the details. They make the design."

"This is so you"

Mathilda works as both an illustrator and a graphic designer, and merges the two so there's a bit of Frau Mutant in everything. The odd part is that she can't see it herself. "I never really recognise my own signature style," she says. "Over the years, people have often said, 'This is so you'. And I always found myself wondering, 'What does that even mean?'"

The best clue she's been given is colour. "One thing I've been hearing a lot lately is that it's the colours. Maybe it's the way I use colour and combine unexpected palettes. But still, I can't tell."

There's a lovely contradiction underneath all this. Her work is bunt und flächig – bold colour, flat shapes, volume up. Her actual taste goes the other way entirely. "When it comes to clothes, I'm actually quite restrained and minimalist," she admits. "If you described my personal style and translated it into my design work, you would probably think I only create in black and white – and boring. Haha. My work-self, however, is much more of a maximalist."

Her explanation for the gap is my favourite thing she said in this whole interview: "Somewhere inside me, there's a grown-up Pippi Longstocking who is trapped and needs to let loose with a paint pot in my work. Maybe that's the Mutant in me. The playful part that comes out through my designs."

A little pink never hurt anyone

Given a billboard and the whole world to put it on, she'd write: "a little pink never hurt anyone". This is not a whim, you understand. It's data, of a sort, gathered over years of photoshoots with her photographer, Elisa Biscotti.

"Elisa and I noticed during every shoot that, no matter what the project was, every piece looked good on pink," she says. "It's a go-to feel-good colour. It creates a sense of harmony and instantly lifts your mood. And when you think of spring and cherry trees turning pink, who could possibly feel bad?"

The dream brief

She still names Manti Manti, the children's eyewear brand, among her bravest works – an identity built with 12 Pantones, a few Aperols and an entire underwater world. But she's careful to say it wasn't a one-off. "Many more amazing clients have joined over the years, bringing the same courage and openness to new ideas that Manti Manti did."

Case in point: the ICON PAPERS project for paper company Igepa, which came with a brief most designers would frame and hang on the wall. "Here is the paper. This is the event. We want to show what can be done with our papers. Go wild."

"A dream brief," she says. "When you have all doors open, like in this case, and you're free to play and explore, it's a jackpot for any designer. That's when the fear of the blank page disappears, because you can approach a project with a completely open mind. You can experiment, combine ideas, and enter a creative flow without being limited by overly strict briefs."

How BOOB was born

Then there's the project that has no business working as well as it does. For Walter Confiserie, in partnership with Discovering Hands – a cause she'd give her last €1,000 to – Mathilda made chocolates shaped like breasts, to raise awareness of breast cancer, with a typeface called BOOB made of two letters.

It arrived, as these things do, in the middle of the night. "The idea for the BOOB chocolates actually came to me overnight," she says. "I thought, how funny would it be to have little round chocolates shaped like breasts? And then I thought: it would be even better if they could be used to raise awareness for something important."

So she took it to both parties herself and got them in the same room. "They were both instantly excited about it. And that's how BOOB was born. Sometimes humour is the best way to make people pay attention to serious issues."

The notebook

She keeps naming her own side projects as her bravest work, which tells you something about where the good stuff happens.

"My own little projects usually start with funny little ideas that somehow cross my path," she says. "I write them down in my notes and, years later, turn them into personal projects. There are always those moments when I can simply create whatever feels right to me, without having to sell an idea or design to a third party. Using colours that feel right, exploring unusual shapes and colour combinations, and getting into a playful creative process."

And then the warning, which is really for all of us: "It's something we sometimes unlearn because, in the working world, everything is often overthought and strategically analysed. We sometimes forget that little playish moments can lead to great ideas."

Nobody believes she's introverted. The colours are too loud, the internet presence too cheerful. But she is, and running a one-woman studio has turned out to be the workaround.

"I think one of the beautiful things about being self-employed is creating a bubble of clients around you where you feel comfortable," she says. "When I feel comfortable, I become extroverted. You can often sense during the first conversations whether it's a good match. Many of my clients have stayed with me for years. And that's just so nice."

Just our type (except she isn't)

One correction she wanted on the record. She draws letters; she does not design typefaces, and she'd like the distinction respected.

"I wouldn't consider myself a type designer at all. I just draw a few letters from time to time. I have the greatest respect for type designers. They are truly the heroes of our industry. A good typeface is key to good design."

That instinct – towards the people who make things by hand – shapes how she reads the AI question too, not as a fight, but as a pendulum.

"Whenever one side becomes very strong, like the digital world and artificial intelligence, a desire for the opposite naturally emerges," she says. "A longing for craftsmanship and the tactile experience."

She's watching it turn up everywhere she looks. Haute couture, and Mathieu Blazy at Chanel, where the focus is very much on craftsmanship. Music, where "the longing for live concerts feels stronger than ever this year." Books: "It feels like everyone in my bubble is reading much more again instead of watching Netflix. And when we do watch films, we seem to be returning to cinemas much more often again."

So, what's next?

If time and money were no object, she'd go and study fine art. That's still the dream, more or less – "being able to create freely and simply create for the joy of creativity itself would be a dream. I still have so many ideas in my notebook".

In the meantime, there's the studio, now 14 years old, still one woman, still busy. Focusing on packaging and print two years ago was, she says, the best decision she's made. "Haptics, paper, print finishing, Pantone colours, and seeing your work in supermarkets. This is happiness × 3000! Haha." Which brings us back to where we started: the shelves. Anyway, I digress.

As for the plan, there isn't one, and that's on purpose. "My main plan was always to have no big plans. So, what's next? We don't know."

Although. "If I had one wish, it would be to work for Beyoncé. Haha. Okay, Harry Styles too. And the Kardashians – branding machines."

The award-winning studio has given BAFTA's various ceremonies a single visual language – flowing coloured particles that gather into interesting forms. And it was all built in Cavalry.

Here's something worth remembering the next time you watch someone lift a BAFTA: every single winner started with a rough idea. A scribble or hunch, a half-formed thought that somebody then spent weeks, months, sometimes years turning into the finished piece on screen. It's a lovely notion, and it's the exact idea that Studio Kiln has built an entire identity system around.

Since last October, the London studio has been working with BAFTA on a new visual identity that pulls its four separate awards ceremonies – Film, Television, Games and Television Craft – under one creative roof, without losing what makes each of them distinct. The whole thing runs on a particle system: flowing streams of coloured particles that come together to form BAFTA's distinctive facets, tracing that journey from initial idea to finished work. Rather than hand-animate any of it, Kiln built the entire framework in Cavalry, so a single adaptable system can generate motion, digital and print assets across every award and format.

Four ceremonies, one family

The tricky part, of course, is respect. Four ceremonies, four very different worlds, one identity that has to serve them all equally – even though it would have been easy to let the glamour of Film quietly become the "main" one. "The biggest challenge was making sure every ceremony felt equally refined and crafted, just in its own way," explains Megan Mardon, one of the designers on the project. "Film naturally lends itself to something cinematic and heightened, so there was a risk of that becoming the 'main' identity, with the others feeling like variations on it rather than standing on their own. The guests should feel like every award is just as special."

Kiln's answer was to keep the underlying story identical – the particle behaviour, the movement, the type system and the overall art direction – while letting shapes and colour do the differentiating. "They had to feel part of the same family, but shift enough that Games could feel complex and kinetic while Craft felt intricate and focused, without one award ever feeling less than the other," adds Megan.

For fellow designer Edoardo Albertini, the balancing act was as much emotional as technical. "The biggest challenge for us was really figuring out how to honour BAFTA's historic prestige while leaning into its more avant-garde, creative spirit," he says. Each award got its own system of faceted shapes and an expanded palette, all tied back together by a shared texture in the particle artwork and anchored by a strict typographic system.

The genuinely hard bit, he admits, was finding the visual sweet spot: "We had to balance the raw, messy kinetic energy of our procedural particles with the sharp clarity of the artwork, making sure you could feel the energy forming those facets without one element drowning out the other."

Why Cavalry, not After Effects

Now, for the motion designers reading this, here's the obvious question: Why build all of this in Cavalry rather than in After Effects like everyone else?

"We went with Cavalry over more traditional motion software because it has this incredible ability to export versatile vectors right out of a procedural system," Edoardo explains. The team built a physics-based rig – manipulating forces and resistances – that could capture the concept's movement in a way that scaled across both screen and paper. Megan puts the appeal more simply: they wanted a system that felt alive.

"We could build our world of particles once, determining how they behaved, formed and moved, then let that same system generate everything from a 30-second film to a static poster, rather than rebuilding the idea from scratch for every touchpoint. The real joy of Cavalry is the balance it strikes between the control you have and the surprise of the outcome."

Of course, working this way means you don't fully control what comes out, which is part of the fun. Print was the hard part, though. The whole identity is built on movement, so freezing it into a single still image without losing that movement was really tricky.

Kiln's fix was rather elegant. "Central to this were the 'streams' we created," says Megan, "denser rivers of particles that felt intentional and alive." When it came to choosing the still images, the team hunted for the exact frames where those streams were at their most prominent, cutting through the linear facets and edges. Edoardo describes the same trick as capturing "all those underlying forces and the fluid nature of the motion inside a single freeze-frame". Either way, it took hours of tweaking the motion rig so that even the static moments still felt like they were breathing.

Handing over the keys

There's a lovely discipline to the ending of a job like this, too. A client the size of BAFTA needs to run this identity long after the studio has moved on, which means the handover matters as much as the work.

So Kiln provided more than a folder of finished files. Alongside usage guidelines came a curated suite of artworks for each award, "ranging from quiet to more expressive," as Megan puts it, ready to drop into all sorts of formats rather than leaving BAFTA's in-house team to generate fresh variations every time. The type system does the heavy lifting on flexibility: simple and specific enough to flex either way, so the artwork can take centre stage and the type recede, or the type can step up while the artwork stays quiet.

"That built-in flexibility from both sides meant the system could adapt to new formats and layouts without us, or the BAFTA team, …needing to rebuild anything," she says. So BAFTA's team can keep building with the system themselves, long after Kiln has gone.

It's a smart, generous piece of design thinking and a nice bit of poetry, too: an identity about turning raw energy into something refined, crafted by a brilliant studio that does just that. The new system rolls out this week.

Andy Aitchison is the UK's foremost prison photographer. In a new book from Bluecoat Press, two decades of his work find the people behind the clichés – delicate, tragic and often surprisingly ordinary.

I'll say this up front, because it determines how I read a book like this one: I'm all for reforming our prison system, and I believe people deserve a second chance. Most of us have done something we're not proud of. The difference, more often than not, is circumstance – our upbringing, who was around, what came next, whether anyone gave us the room to put it right.

I have people in my family who suffered a lifetime of crime and drugs, two of whom are now dead. I liken it to being at the bottom of a slippery well. Once you're in that deep, dark hole, it's very difficult to get out. So a body of work that looks at the people inside our prisons and sees them as actual people, rather than as a headline or a mugshot, is exactly the kind of thing I want to champion.

Which brings me to Incarcerated, a new book from Bluecoat Press collecting the work of Andy Aitchison, the UK's foremost prison photographer. Every image is taken inside Britain's Victorian-era prisons, and the whole thing has been made with real care. There's a softback first edition with a die-cut cover and silver foil, out now in a standard edition and a very limited signed one.

Andy West, Philosopher in Residence at HMP Grendon, puts the appeal better than I could. "Honest but never dreary, these images are rich with a playful storytelling that takes us beyond prison clichés, to places that are delicate, tragic and beautiful. If more people looked at prisons and the people in them the same way as Andy Aitchison, then they would surely become more humane places."

An accidental beginning

It was never the plan for Andy to spend two decades doing this. It started in 2004, when The Big Issue asked him to photograph inside HMP Wandsworth – and, as he told Time Out, the place got under his skin straight away. "As soon as I got in, the environment fascinated me. The architecture was incredible, and the prisoners were just normal people. I went on to one of the wings, and there was the usual shouting, but when I got to the radio room, it was like a bit of a sanctuary. Once the guys stepped in there, it was a work environment, and they became almost different people."

He adds, "I went 10 or 15 times over six months. I started meeting guys the same age as me, who had a kid like me – they were in the same situation in life as me, but they were in prison and I wasn't." You can see why he kept going back.

Since that first assignment, Andy has photographed in nearly 50 prisons, often returning again and again as he works on long-term projects. His images have been widely used by charities and published nationally and internationally, and he's a regular contributor to Inside Time, the UK's leading prison newspaper. This isn't a one-off visitor with a press pass. It's a photographer who has spent two decades learning how to be in these places.

Why the Victorian prisons

The choice to focus on our oldest jails isn't accidental either, and the numbers are pretty staggering. Ninety prisons were opened or significantly expanded between 1842 and 1877. More than 30 of them are still in use today, holding, between them, around a quarter of the UK's prison population. We are, in other words, still running a big part of the system out of buildings designed in the age of the penny-farthing.

That's the thread a group of academics has been pulling on, and their writing sits alongside the photographs in the book – the images and the research in conversation, rather than one illustrating the other. The project is a collaboration between Professor Dominique Moran and Professor Matt Houlbrook at the University of Birmingham, Professor Yvonne Jewkes at the University of Bath, and Professor Jennifer Turner at Trier University in Germany, all looking at the long afterlives of Britain's Victorian prison estate.

Beyond the usual tropes

What makes the work special, though, is that Andy refuses to take the easy shot. No dramatic bars-and-shadows shorthand, no misery for misery's sake.

"Andy's dedication to photographing prisons really shines through in this work," says Tom Booth Woodger, head of publishing at Bluecoat Press. "Never does he repeat himself or fall into the classic tropes of photographing prisons and incarceration – and the result is an incredible example of contemporary documentary photography."

That, for me, is the whole point. Change the way you look at a place, and you change what's possible there. If enough of us looked at prisons the way Andy Aitchison does, we might end up with more humane ones. And a second chance, for anyone who needs it.

Incarcerated is out now from Bluecoat Press in standard and limited signed editions.

The fresh identity trended on X on day one, drove Granola's biggest-ever download day, and helped the company raise $125m in funding. Here's how Ragged Edge did it.

Back in my broadcast journalism days in the early 2000s, I carried a silver dictaphone roughly the size of a house brick. It went everywhere with me around Stoke and Birmingham: council chambers, police press conferences (never fun), the odd celebrity junket. I once pointed it at Will Smith (who was charming). Then came the fun part: sitting in a corner afterwards with headphones on, scrubbing back and forth through the tape, typing out the story with one finger while my editor paced behind me, asking how long I'd be.

So you can imagine my delight when Granola turned up. Ok, it's over two decades too late. And yes, it's AI. But it's one of the few new tools I'd argue is genuinely useful, because it does the bit I never wanted to do and leaves me the bit I did... It takes the notes so I can stay in the conversation.

Which is why I was pleased to learn our friends at Ragged Edge had won the job of overhauling its branding. And what they've done with it is worth exploring.

The new identity became a trending topic on X the day it launched, and Granola recorded its highest daily downloads ever. In the month that followed, it became the world's second-fastest-growing software brand, according to Ramp. Within three months, Granola had secured $125m in funding at a $1.5bn valuation. Not bad for a logo that looks like it was scribbled on a napkin. More on that shortly.

Progress over process

Most productivity brands sell you efficiency and predictability. Granola went the other way. "We're building Granola to actually be helpful in the messiness of modern work, for people who want to be present and prepared even when there's barely a breath between meetings," says Jack Cully, founding marketer at Granola. "It should feel helpful on busy days, an AI notepad for meetings that briefs you beforehand, keeps you present while it captures the details, and helps you get more done after. This rebrand lets us say that plainly: progress over process."

Christy Madden, strategy director at Ragged Edge, puts it more bluntly. "Productivity apps fail to live up to that name. They feel like yet another arbitrary layer, in the way of the actual work. You feel the difference with Granola instantly. By taking care of the notes, it makes space for you to stay present in every meeting and focus on the ideas that matter most. It’s a beautifully designed tool for anyone ambitious about their work."

The brief, then, was to take a product already beloved by Silicon Valley's C-suite and make it a brand that knowledge workers everywhere actually know.

By humans, for humans

Here's the tension Ragged Edge had to work with. With a category renowned for having design that feels frictionless, they went looking for the opposite. The Granola identity is handcrafted, witty and warm.

Take the logo. Yes, it's a 'G', which is practical enough as a reference to the name. But it's organic and freeform, the shape of an idea jotted down fast in a notepad or on the corner of a napkin. It almost reminds me of my Teeline shorthand, which I instantly forgot after my exams.

"It's specifically designed to feel slightly imperfect and unmistakably human, an antidote to the overly sleek and impersonal identities that dominate the category," says Jessica Bong-Woon, creative director at Ragged Edge.

Then there's the type, and this is the bit I love. The identity features a bespoke script based on the actual handwriting of Sam Stephenson, Granola's co-founder. Hundreds of handwritten letters, worked up into a typeface with multiple variants of each character, so it shifts and evolves as it's used, the way real handwriting does. The voice it carries is emotionally intelligent and down-to-earth, and it doesn't mind a joke.

The colour palette evolves what Granola already had: a warm, earthy green that keeps its distance from the vibrant RGBs you see everywhere else in AI. There's also a new illustration style called "findings", which layers texture, colour and photography to capture the feeling of a working day well spent.

"The temptation in AI is to look like everyone else because the market is moving so quickly," says Max Ottignon, co-founder at Ragged Edge. "Granola chose a harder path. To build a brand with a clear point of view about the role AI should play in people's lives. That conviction is what gives the work its impact."

Granola is not for breakfast

In the weeks after launch, Ragged Edge and Granola took the brand out into the streets of San Francisco, New York and London.

The San Fran campaign spoke to tech leaders while dodging the techno-babble of every other billboard in that city: "Being present is a power move".

New York and London had more fun with the name. "Granola is not for breakfast" ran across billboards, trains, bus stops, and full-station takeovers, introducing an entirely new audience to an AI product committed to doing things differently. And it clearly worked.

I'll be honest, if a piece of software had told my 2003 self that one day it would transcribe the interview for me, I'd have hugged it. And that silver brick would've happily gone in the bin.

The London agency has created the positioning and identity for Hovis Bakeries, the new home of two of Britain's best-known loaves, and has mercifully resisted every visual cliché the bread aisle has ever baked up.

Walk down any supermarket bread aisle, and you'll see the same three things over and over: a field of wheat (thankfully without Theresa May), a sliced loaf, and a sun coming up over both of them. It's the visual shorthand of British bread, and it's been doing the rounds since roughly forever.

So it's rather refreshing that when BrandOpus was asked to build a brand for the country's largest bakery business, it binned the lot.

Allied Bakeries has completed its acquisition of Hovis Group, and from this week, the two operate as one company: Hovis Bakeries. BrandOpus was appointed to develop the positioning, identity and launch line – 'Nourishing the Nation' – for the combined business, which brings Hovis, Kingsmill, Allinson's and Sunblest under one roof.

Why this is a bigger deal than it looks

This wasn't a straightforward merger. Associated British Foods announced its plan to buy Hovis from private equity firm Endless last August, and the Competition and Markets Authority fast-tracked it straight to a phase two investigation in January. Nine months later, the regulator cleared it on the reasoning that if the deal didn't happen, Allied Bakeries would most likely have exited the bread market entirely, in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

So what's going on here? Apparently, wrapped bread has been in decline for more than a decade, and Kingsmill sales dropped by 31.5% in the 52 weeks to last September, losing its third-place ranking to Jason's Sourdough. The combined business is now estimated to be the UK's largest bread manufacturer, with something like 35% of the market.

That's quite the brief to land on your desk... Make the newly merged giant of a shrinking category look like it has a future. Ooph.

No wheat, no sunrise

"The identity was designed to carry the authority of a business that exists to lead the category," says Leo Hadden, head of strategy at BrandOpus. "That meant resisting the familiar visual language of bakery – the wheat, the loaf, the sunrise – and conceiving something with genuine stature instead."

Instead, the studio landed on nourishment as the brand idea, with an "Elemental Power" concept built around the four natural elements coming together in baking to create something vital. It's a metaphor for two organisations converging, obviously. But it also happens to be true, which is more than you can say for most brand platforms: bread really is just earth, water, air and fire. Flour from the ground, water in the dough, air in the rise, heat in the oven. Nothing else. That's the beauty of it.

Hadden says the corporate identity is designed to sit alongside the Hovis and Kingsmill consumer brands rather than compete with them – "re-establishing bakery as the food of life".

A long relationship

BrandOpus is no stranger to the client. The agency has worked with ABF for the past 15 years across Blue Dragon, Twinings, Kingsmill and SilverSpoon, so it was in a good position to help.

"This acquisition brings together two national baking institutions," says Sarah Arrowsmith, chief executive of Hovis Bakeries. "The creation of Hovis Bakeries is a huge opportunity to create a sustainable bakery business that can lead and reshape the bakery category. Partnering with BrandOpus has allowed us to translate our vision for the business into a visual identity that powerfully unites both businesses."

The identity has launched alongside a new website and will roll out further as the two companies integrate over the coming months. Whether it can talk the nation back into the wrapped loaf is a much longer proof – but as opening statements go, walking away from the wheat field is a good one.

You can see more of the studio's work on the BrandOpus website.

The Taipei-based studio turns ideas into practice, building branding and publishing systems that briefly disorient you before resolving into something familiar.

Houth was founded in Taipei in 2014 and has since become known for bold colour, experimental graphics and innovative typography – a creative team, in their own words, "specialising in brand strategy and design" and seeking solutions that "blur the line between art and business." They are members of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and their work spans branding, visual design and editorial and book design for clients across food, drink and culture.

Inspiration, for Houth, starts before a brief lands in their inbox. "We draw inspiration from wandering and observing," the studio explains. "Whether it's a walk through the city, a journey abroad, a visit to a flea market, an afternoon in an independent bookstore, or watching films, we are constantly collecting fragments of visual culture, stories and human experiences. These observations often become the starting point for our creative work." It's a method built on noticing things, holding on to them, and, of course, trusting that the right project will eventually find them.

"Our creative process varies depending on the brief we receive, whether it is branding, visual design, or editorial and book design, as each requires a different approach," they say. "However, the common starting point is always to clarify what message we want to communicate in each project, and how to effectively express that message."

Crucially, that's only half of it. "At the same time, we also consider what we hope to challenge within the market or the broader design ecosystem. These reflections guide the direction and decision-making throughout the entire creative process." Every project, in other words, is about diving into what packaging can do, what a publication can be, what design is allowed to ask of an audience.

Two recent projects show that argument in practice. From Delinquent Youth to Cool Kids: Taiwanese Tattoo Artists 1980–2020 traces the evolution of tattoo culture in Taiwan, from underground subculture to a form of personal expression today. Rather than compress four decades into a single heavy historical narrative, Houth split the project into eleven slim booklets, "creating a more everyday and accessible way to revisit this history, while giving equal weight to each era and artist."

The design starts from the idea of the body. "The slipcase features a blank arm as a reference to the body as the vessel of tattooing," the studio explains, "while semi-translucent paper, red line drawings, and tracing paper elements are used to echo the process of tattooing – from preparation to its formation on skin. We wanted tattooing to be something that is not just displayed, but felt – preserving its physicality and traces of time." Through the process, Houth says they also rethought how tattoo culture in Taiwan is perceived and sought to translate it into a more bodily, experiential way of reading.

Do Circus Autumn Issue is built around what they describe as a "salty-sweet nomadic taste". The starting image is a microwave popcorn bag, used as a metaphor for the Big Top of the circus. "The sweetness comes from the moment performances begin," the studio explains, "while the salt reflects the effort behind its construction."

Visually, the publication combines 1980s-90s supermarket aesthetics and Pop Art language, translating circus stripes into bold graphics and using slogans like "The New Nomad" to create a commercial tension. The structure mimics the packaging itself, with an outer layer of branding and instructions, and two inner volumes that separate labour from performance.

"We hope to offer audiences a design experience that is not boring – something that might even feel a little unexpected," the studio says. "We see graphic design as a way to make Taiwanese culture visible and heard, bringing it into different contexts through our work. We hope design can become a medium that carries cultural stories, gradually transforming them into a contemporary visual language."

Drawing on fashion, memory and material culture, the artist transforms jumpers, fur coats and slogan T-shirts into meticulously painted studies of identity and desire.

Growing up in Ealing with a fashion designer mother, artist Hannah Knox spent her childhood surrounded by dyed fabric drying in the bath, half-finished garments draped over chairs and trips to fashion shows. It's little wonder, then, that clothing became her lifelong obsession.

"What we wear becomes so synonymous with our lives that it's often almost impossible to separate the person from their clothing," Hannah tells Creative Boom. "Our taste reflects our attractions, desires, status, wealth, fandoms, class, and so much more." The idea that a fur coat or a slogan tee can hold an entire story without ever needing a body to fill it is what sits at the centre of her photorealistic oil paintings. In each, there's a signature close-cropped portrait of a collar, a zip, a knot of pleats, rendered in linen and turned into something that looks like real cloth.

Hannah's route here wasn't a straightforward one (but when are they ever, really?). After sixth form at Richmond Upon Thames College and a Fine Art BA at Middlesex University, she took a six-year detour through mural painting, set building, teaching and prop-making on James Cameron's Titanic, before landing at the Royal College of Art for her MA in Painting. In between, she "married, nursed my mum through cancer, divorced, lived on a boat, met a new partner, became a stepmum". Painting, she says, "was always the thing I came back to".

Her process starts from a song lyric, a catwalk look, a passer-by's jacket she glimpses on the street, followed by a scavenger hunt. "Sometimes I find what I'm looking for, and other times I trawl the internet and shops only to end up working from my imagination," she explains. Always working in oil on linen, Hannah builds her paintings up in layers, wrestling with "an internal battle of how much detail to add, and when to stop" – a tension that gives the work its curious tautness and an aesthetic that sits between hyperreal and handmade.

Take OK in Blue, a piece made for a show in Eindhoven that finally cracked a problem Hannah had been circling for years: how to fold language into paint. "I've been wanting to paint a series of slogan Tees but haven't yet found the right texts to make a full series," she says, admitting she's currently deep in a rabbit hole of badly translated printed T-shirts – "some of them are fantastically weird" – hunting for the next one-liner worth immortalising in oil. There's a looped pattern that gives the piece its texture, akin to the process of knitting itself. "The repetitive process of drawing these loops is not dissimilar to actual knitting, creating a sort of meditative space while I'm making the work."

Then there's Brown Fur, painted not long after a visit to a Beryl Cook exhibition sent Hannah thinking about fur coats – ageless things that could belong to "someone's nan or be worn by a singer in a rap video." Midway through painting it, something unplanned happened: the folds in the purple silk lining began to resemble a vulva, "surrounded by furry pubic hair". It's a moment she treasures because she didn't plan it. "This is one of my favourite things about painting," she says, "the surreal quality of turning this oily substance into shapes and forms that we recognise."

That accidental honesty runs through everything Hannah makes. Lately, she's been preoccupied with what gets left behind – "the shells we leave, all our stuff, landfill, echoes of a life lived and what we do with all these things after the people who inhabit them have gone". She adds, "I like that clothes represent eras and memories and markers of time. I'm an incredibly sentimental person and find getting rid of these things quite a challenge." She's also fascinated by the accumulation of things and the notion of desire, from shopping carts to wish-lists to the viral Asian shopping app that lets users "buy" items just to feel the thrill of it. "It's the thing without the thing," she says. "I think of my paintings as portraits without people."

Sharing a studio with her partner of 20 years, fellow painter Andrew Graves, Hannah splits her days between lunch breaks, small gestures of support, and negotiating the school run. What's next includes a summer residency, a commission for a London hotel, and a new, closer-cropped body of work leaning into 1970s archive photography – a deliberate push, she says, to "grow and shift away from that style without losing the essence of what makes your work recognisably yours."

The JAIKU Storytelling Summit lands in London this September, bringing founders, marketers and creative leaders together to ask whether narrative still has the power to change things.

In a media landscape drowning in content, the question "Can stories save us?" might sound counterintuitive. But Marianne Olaleye, founder of brand storytelling agency JAIKU, believes narrative does have the power to change things. And so on Thursday, 17 September, she's convening 60 people at Second Home Spitalfields, London E1, to find out.

She's being deliberate about every detail: the venue, the running time and, perhaps most tellingly, the size. The JAIKU Storytelling Summit runs from 9.30am to 11.30am, with speakers confirmed from Adobe, ustwo Games, YouTube, Arcadis, Digital Voices and Cassava Republic Press. It's a programme built around cross-industry collision, deliberately bringing together voices that rarely share a stage.

For Marianne, stories aren't just a communications tool: they move economies, shape culture and, in the wrong hands, put the wrong people in positions of power. The summit's premise is that they can only do good if we're willing to seek out perspectives beyond our own bubble.

It's a characteristically ambitious framing for what is, at heart, a two-hour morning event. But Marianne is unapologetic about starting small, with a longer ambition to build something on a par with SXSW or CultureCon already firmly in mind.

Two hours, no panel fatigue

The programme spans three sessions. Building New Worlds pairs game designers from ustwo Games with urban planners from Arcadis to explore how both disciplines build stories that people can literally inhabit. Get Your Story Straight features a creative director from Adobe on the process of finding the story before you try to tell it. The third session, From Griots to Influencers, may be the most provocative. It's a look at how stories travel across generations and what brands consistently miss when they obsess over younger audiences.

Just in case you were wondering, Griots are West African oral historians: the original community storytellers, carrying cultural memory long before the influencer economy existed. The panel features the co-founder of Cassava Republic Press, one of Africa's leading publishing houses, alongside voices from the creator economy.

It's a topic Marianne is emphatic about. Older generations, she argues, have enormous spending power yet remain underrepresented in mainstream advertising, and brands' fixation with Gen Z comes at a real cost. She'd like to see more aunties, grandparents and uncles in campaigns; not as a novelty, but as a reflection of where attention and money actually dominate in our society.

The core argument is that while the messengers have changed across the centuries, the underlying principles of storytelling haven't: what's shifted is who gets a voice and who gets platformed.

Small by design

The cap of 60 attendees is intentional, reflecting Marianne's belief that the most useful thinking happens when unexpected perspectives are in close proximity. JAIKU has worked with clients including Glossier, the British Library, BGF and Chatham House, and its brand storytelling workshops are rated "very useful" or "useful" by 96% of participants. The summit's format: tight, curated, and deliberately contained, is a direct extension of that approach.

The JAIKU founder has helped brands from Glossier to the British Library find their story. Now, finally, she's learned to apply the same thinking to herself.

There's a special kind of irony in being a storytelling expert who can't quite bring herself to tell her own story. Marianne Olaleye, founder of brand storytelling agency JAIKU, has spent years helping clients find and articulate their narratives, running workshops that 96% of participants rate as useful or very useful, and advising founders and CMOs on how to make their brands memorable. And yet, for two full years, she sat on her most ambitious idea without acting on it.

"I bought the website domain and planned out the entire positioning for the Storytelling Summit back in December 2024," she says. "But I was terrified because I have such big dreams for it, and it all felt too daunting."

Part of the fear stemmed from the scale she envisioned. "I imagined my first summit being a full-day gathering with hundreds of attendees, multiple talks and panels, workshops, breakout activities, brand activations: the whole works," she explains. But over time, she started to notice that the most impactful events she'd attended recently had had no more than 20 people in the room.

"I told myself, 'just make it exist first, the rest will fall into place,'" she recalls. "This year is our proof of concept: show it works, get feedback from the people who join us and build from there."

Can stories save us?

The JAIKU Storytelling Summit runs on 17 September at Second Home Spitalfields, London. It will host 60 people from 9.30am to 11.30am, with speakers confirmed from Adobe, ustwo Games, YouTube, Arcadis, Digital Voices and Cassava Republic Press.

The summit's central question, "Can stories save us?", isn't a rhetorical provocation for its own sake. Marianne quotes her favourite sociologist, Dr Tressie McMillan Cottom: "The only thing that has ever changed the world is a story."

That isn't, she admits, always a good thing. "Stories move economies, and in the wrong hands, they've put questionable people in positions of power. But stories can only save us if we're willing to seek them out beyond our own bubble, hear perspectives that challenge us and learn to disagree well. Especially at a time when the world feels increasingly fragmented and polarised."

Marianne chose a summit format, she says, because storytelling has always been a collective act. "From cave paintings to oral traditions and tales around a campfire, stories have always been a survival tool rooted in dialogue. Storytelling is dependent on people listening to each other and making sense of the world together. A summit can do that more than a single article could."

Her own instinct for unexpected learning shaped the event's structure from the start. "I've always learned best from unexpected places: small talk with an elderly woman in the park, conversations with my hairdresser's young children, the years I spent jumping between industries before starting JAIKU," she says. "These experiences taught me that anyone can tell a great story about anything, if you know how to listen."

The Gen Z obsession

If there's one topic that gets Marianne genuinely animated, it's the session she's titled From Griots to Influencers, exploring how stories travel across generations and what brands miss when they fixate on youth. The panel features the co-founder of Cassava Republic Press, one of Africa's leading publishing houses, alongside voices from the creator economy. It's a conversation she's been having with clients across industries for the past year.

"I'm not sure when we became so obsessed with Gen Z, and why so much of our culture and so many brands default to youth as the ideal," she says. "Older generations have enormous spending power, yet they're still underrepresented in mainstream advertising, especially outside products explicitly aimed at them.

"Many Western societies are obsessed with whatever is newest and coolest, but I know many cool people in their 70s, and I'd love to see more aunties, grandparents and uncles in advertising. We've seen the infamous TikTok 'bus aunty' Bemi Orojuogun in Burberry and Jacquemus campaigns, and we know Gen X have more spending power than younger audiences, so it's about time brands included older generations in their marketing."

She'd like, she says, an "Aunties Trend Report." The session title itself reaches back further than the influencer economy: griots are West African oral historians, the original community storytellers. "The messengers have changed over the centuries, but the storytelling principles haven't. What's different is who gets a voice and who we choose to platform." The implication is that most brands are making a bad choice.

Don't niche down

Marianne's own route to founding JAIKU was the product of cross-industry wandering: the kind of indirect path she now actively advocates. "I spent a long time stressing about whether JAIKU should 'niche down' and focus on one core industry, but I don't think niching down is the best way to learn and keep your mind sharp," she says.

"The best thing about the range of work we do is exactly why this summit exists: bringing together unexpected perspectives and borrowing from other industries. The most memorable brand or marketing work is often surprising. When a brand does something that isn't typical for its category, that's usually what reaches people and sticks."

That philosophy shows up directly in the summit's programme, particularly in the session pairing game designers with urban planners. "Marketers spend so much time talking about world-building and immersive brand activations, but we rarely acknowledge that game designers and urban planners have been doing exactly that for years," she says. "They both tell stories people can live in, literally and figuratively."

Her approach to JAIKU's own workshops reflects the same thinking. She caps them at 25 participants and uses a format she calls Live Marketing Ideation, where two businesses join her one at a time to have their brand challenges worked through with input from the room.

"A Michelin star Asian food founder once gave marketing advice to a compression sock company," she says. "That's the beauty of unexpected perspectives coming together: people in completely different industries finding common ground, realising they can borrow tactics from each other."

Starting small, thinking big

For now, the summit is kept deliberately lean: a Thursday morning so that everyone can be back at their desks by lunchtime, 60 people, two hours. There are practical reasons too. "I've hosted evening events, and they get expensive fast," she says. "Morning events are more cost-effective to deliver well, which is essential as I'm building something new from scratch and funding it solo."

The longer ambition, though, is anything but modest. "I know JAIKU's Storytelling Summit can grow into something on par with SXSW or CultureCon," she says. "But I have to start somewhere. So I'm keeping it tight."

Just make it exist first. The rest, she seems confident, will fall into place.

From fashion-editorial red packets to scratch-off fortunes and spring-loaded packaging, the Kuala Lumpur studio reimagines familiar rituals as immersive design experiences.

Fictionist Studio's founder, Joanne Chew, grew up in Kuala Lumpur, studied in New York City, worked there for a few years, then did a stint in Singapore. The plan to return to Malaysia crystallised during the 2013 general elections – her first time voting. "The act of voting for the first time triggered a deep desire to contribute to my own country," she says. "At the time, I felt that contribution could be as simple as a beautifully designed business card." She moved back, set up a makeshift studio in her bedroom and started from scratch. 12 years later, Fictionist is a D&AD, Type Directors Club, Art Directors Club, Dieline, Golden Pin and Dezeen Award-recognised studio with a small team working out of a light-filled space in Kuala Lumpur.

The studio's work ranges widely from identities and packaging to print, art direction and self-initiated projects – held together by an appetite for what its founder describes as "unconventional forms of expression". She adds, "It can be as simple as a slight tweak in a typical dieline for a packaging project." But when the brief allows for something bolder, it's safe to say she's excited – "I would smack my hands with glee." The process always begins with a concept, and the visual execution follows naturally from there. Fine art, fashion, architecture and literature are the key reference points for building ideas.

The Lunar New Year has become a recurring platform for the studio's most inventive self-initiated work. For the Year of the Horse, Joanne made Mane Character Energy – a reimagining of the traditional ang pow, the red packet gifted as a token of luck during the festive period. The concept pivoted from the predictable charging-horse iconography to a single evocative detail: the mane. "We used a play on words to shift the narrative from collective luck to personal identity," she explains, turning the mane into a metaphor for being the main character of your own story.

To achieve the texture and depth they wanted, the studio collaborated with a professional hairstylist to custom-style physical hairpieces, which were photographed and digitally composed onto horse imagery. The result looks like a fashion editorial for its saturated, strange aesthetic, which is unlike anything else produced for the season. We particularly love the mirror-metallic packaging, which means that whoever gets their hands on one can see their own reflection beside the mane. "It was an exercise in world-building that proved a cultural ritual could be transformed into a provocative, permanent design object."

The Year of the Snake brought Shed Off Yesteryear: Shades of Brighter Cheer, a more contemplative project centred on the snake's ability to shed its skin as a symbol of renewal. Fictionist designed a four-stack packaging system that guided the recipient through a ritual of releasing incense and striking a match – then arriving at red packets with a silver scratch-off foil.

As the foil is scratched away, mimicking the shedding process, a fortune is revealed beneath. The Year of the Snake also inspired Spring Has Arrived, a promotional kit for atmos Malaysia, the local outpost of the Japanese streetwear boutique. The title was inspired by a physical red coil spring nestled in a vibrant orange tray that greeted recipients when they lifted the lid. Beneath it, Luck Absorber cookies – a wordplay on automotive shock absorbers – and red packets are physically extendable like the coil. "It symbolises resilience," she explains, "suggesting that while the road ahead may be bumpy, we have the inner spring to bounce back."

What ties all of this together is a goal to uncover what design can actually do. "I want the work we produce to be more than just a piece of design," Joanne says. "I want it to be a physical object or a narrative that people feel is worth keeping." She says there is an obligation to bring that same richness to every project the studio works on – to let the vibrancy of Malaysia shape the visual language, wherever possible. "My hope is that we've woven ourselves into the ever-evolving creative fabric of Malaysia." Based on what they've made so far, it would be hard to argue otherwise.

The self-taught French animator makes wicked, grainy, gloriously imperfect films – and there's encouraging demand for his work. We caught up with him about taming the wrong tools, '90s hip-hop and why the grain is the whole point.

There's a lovely, naughty quality to Simon Vergély's work. A mischievous take on modern life that imagines what might happen if we could get away with it. His scenarios are wicked, surreal and often a little dark, casting a grotesque lens on our humanity. Shocking and funny in the same breath.

In one film, titled Gravity, Vergély imagines what would happen if gravity were switched off. As you can imagine, everything that normally hangs down begins to rise. A small boy licking an ice cream gets an accidental eyeful as the skirt of a towering woman in red heels drifts upward. An elderly naked man glances down to find himself... defying gravity too, his shadow on the wall staging the same revolt. In another, titled Addict, we get a bunch of male and female genitalia, served up as our wicked addictions. Cigarettes, drugs, sugar, fast food. Sex. It makes for uncomfortable viewing – in a good way.

The 2D animator and motion artist, who works as [SIC]Film, is also completely "self-taught", which certainly hasn't held him back. Learning alone, he says, means "you have to become your own teacher and your own critic". And that hard-won independence shows, as the work doesn't look like anyone else's.

It also explains the handmade quality: everything is a bit shaky and human, because Simon works on instinct rather than by following any rules. Imperfection is his north star. If everything works too perfectly, he tends to get suspicious. "Sometimes, it's imperfections that make the work feel alive," he says.

But making something look deliberately imperfect is harder than it sounds. "You need to understand how to create something clean and precise to deliberately break it, distort it, or give it a more organic and imperfect quality," he explains. "That roughness is something I consciously build. It's not the result of a lack of control."

Everything feels slightly unstable, and that's also inspired by '90s culture, when everything was analogue and physical. "The hip-hop I love from that era has this raw, gritty quality, sometimes with the subtle crackle and grain of vinyl," he explains. "It's not overly polished; it feels very textured and physical."

This is close to my heart. The shaky quality to his animations takes me back to the glory days of Beavis and Butt-Head and The Ren & Stimpy Show. When MTV ruled the world. It's nostalgic and a much-needed take on modern times, at a moment in history when everything feels homogenised.

Where did it all begin? Vergély started in product design, where he learned to draw and construct forms to solve a brief. To this day, thanks to that grounding, he approaches an image "almost as if it were an object, something to be built and resolved rather than just depicted". But whilst that early training informs the work, he says, it doesn't dictate how he builds a film.

Animation came much later. Fresh out of design school and living in Birmingham, where he spent four years, he and a friend began teaching themselves through competitions and personal projects, with no interest in returning to a classroom. "We wanted to learn by doing, on our own terms," he says. The contests handed them briefs and deadlines to actually finish things; the freedom to choose their own themes did the rest.

And the software? Whatever was to hand. He began animating in Photoshop and Premiere Pro: the latter, an editing programme never designed for the job, so he hacked his way around it until it did what he wanted. "After Effects would have been the more suitable tool," he admits, "but working around those limitations became part of my process." Which tells you plenty: the animator who builds roughness on purpose taught himself by making the wrong tools misbehave.

How did he turn animation into a paying career? Well, you'd think a look this rough would be a hard sell – especially in an industry known for its love of polished perfection. But that's not the case. "There are actually many clients who specifically come to me because they are drawn to that slightly rough, textured quality," says Vergély. Turns out the grain is the unique selling point.

It helps that he keeps his feet firmly on the ground. "I often see myself more as a craftsman than an artist," he says – someone with a specific skill set, hired to answer a brief. And the briefs are wildly varied: he's animated for the music research institute IRCAM and the audio brand Devialet, for Snapchat and Kiblind, for festivals like Fipadoc and Ciné-court animé de Roanne. Art institution one week, tech platform the next.

So how does a voice stay recognisable across briefs pulling in such different directions? "Being professional is knowing when you're serving someone else's vision," he says, "while still finding small spaces to bring your own sensibility into the work." Not raw versus polished, then, but a clear style that's flexible enough to adapt.

There's something else underneath all this, though – a reason he makes at all. Simon started animating during a difficult period, when he was dealing with a lot of anxiety. He found that losing himself in a project was a way to channel that energy somewhere good. "Creating has always been a way to enter a focused state, to disconnect from everything else, and to find a sense of balance," he says.

Which is partly why he's so relaxed about work that doesn't last. For years, he made things alone at his computer with no thought for where they'd end up. That's whether they were images, sound experiments or whole pieces that were never shared. It didn't matter. "We often focus too much on the final result," he says, "while the process itself can have its own value." He likens it to graffiti: "The worth of a piece isn't in how long it survives but in its making – the moment it occupies, the energy poured into it. Even when the thing disappears, the experience of having made it stays."

On the subject of AI, Vergély is wary. Standardisation and the slow homogenising of everything are the main concerns. But his response isn't rage; it's to keep sharpening the one thing a machine can't do: a way of seeing that's unmistakably yours. "AI is more of a reminder that what makes someone valuable is their touch on things, their way of seeing, and the consistency of their voice over time," he says. And he's already proving his point, as lately, clients have found him precisely because of the work he's put into the world, hunting for that specific, handmade feel.

As for what's next, it's still developing: "a collection of fragments, images, and intuitions", he wants to grow into something bigger. He's after a longer format, with room for ideas to breathe, and he's feeling pulled somewhere more political – the way consumerism and "late capitalism" reshape our relationship to the living world, turning both nature and human experience into things to be bought and sold. The trick, he knows, will be saying it without being preachy.

For now, there's his desk. Simon starts the moment he wakes, whatever the hour, tablet in hand, drawing while music or podcasts play in the background, the two keeping him happy until it's time to call it quits. "A good day at the desk can just as easily be a good night," he says. "I love working after dark, when everything is quieter, and it's easier to lose track of time."

The sun is shining, the type industry is buzzing, and the latest fonts are by no means playing it safe. We check out the most interesting releases of July 2026.

In mainstream journalism, July and August are often called the "silly season" because, without Parliament sitting, there's not much serious news to report. But the world of typography couldn't be more different, with new developments continuing apace despite the heat of the moment.

NaN, the foundry behind custom fonts for Deezer, Wise and Channel 4, has launched fonts.xyz a new platform for independent foundries and designers offering an 80% royalty cut, a unified all-inclusive licence, an 80% student discount, and a 1% solidarity tax. It's a direct challenge to the platform monopolies that have shaped font retail for years, and well worth keeping an eye on.

Meanwhile, creative studio Koto has launched CCType, its own type foundry, with a single debut release: CC Timeline. Rather than dropping a catalogue, Koto has done one thing properly. Its stated mission (boutique craft at scale, typefaces built for the realities of modern brand systems) is a clear-eyed response to how rapidly the landscape is changing under the pressure of AI-generated assets.

It's a rich month for individual font releases, too. Max Phillips returns from Dublin with another idiosyncratic gem. Mark Caneso releases his warmest typeface yet. A Galician designer finally publishes a project she started at Reading University eleven years ago. And a Brooklyn-based designer gives away a free typeface as a love letter to a neighbourhood. Read on to learn about these new fonts and more. 


1. Solaflare by John Roshell

Solaflare's mood is both unmistakable and timely, evoking warm evenings, hand-painted shop signs, and the particular quality of light in a California coastal town. John Roshell of Swell Type was inspired by the hand-painted signage of Santa Barbara, but rather than simply reviving that aesthetic, he built a variable font around it; one that lets designers slide between three distinct typographic personalities within a single file.

At one end of the axis sits Sans: clean, geometric, decisive. At the other is Serif: bold and sharp, with the confident weight of display type that knows it has something to say. Between them is Flare, which captures the quality that makes hand-painted signage so appealing: that gentle widening of strokes at their terminals, as if the brush held on just a moment longer.

2. Cajueira by Sofia Mohr

We featured Sofia Mohr's Autêntica Sans back in April, and she returns this month with an even more ambitious project. Cajueira takes the Brazilian cashew tree ("caju" for the fruit, "-eira" for a place of becoming), not as a visual reference but as a conceptual framework. This typeface is about growth, expansion, and maturation, and how that process changes form over time.

There are 18 styles from Thin to UltraBlack, across Normal and Display versions, plus two variable fonts. As the weights increase, counters tighten, curves expand, and the typeface shifts from clarity toward expression, each weight represents a stage in development rather than simply an increase in thickness. The project was recently selected for the 10th Bienal Tipos Latinos, one of the most important showcases of contemporary Latin American typography, which suggests the broader field has noticed what we noticed in April: Sofia Mohr is producing some of the most thoughtful and original type design currently emerging from Brazil.

3. Detail by Mark Caneso

Mark Caneso's Please, from earlier this year, was a typeface that got "delightfully strange" at heavier weights. Detail takes a different approach entirely: it has character you can get away with. Eight weights with matching italics and two variable fonts, all wrapped in a rounded sans idiom that feels warm and familiar at first glance… until you look closer.

The personality is in the deviations. A slight bend here, a small tilt there. These carefully placed departures from convention add what Caneso calls "flavour to the familiar," creating moments of distinction within an otherwise dependable system.

Stylistic sets and alternate forms reveal further layers: designers can shift the tone toward restraint or expression without losing the typeface's consistent voice. The overall effect is of a typeface with, as Caneso puts it, "a smirk hidden beneath its composed contours."

4. CoFo Robert Sans by Liza Rasskazova

Most sans serifs appeal to rationality: clean, neutral, mechanical. CoFo Robert Sans makes a different argument: what if a daily grotesque was built not from geometric abstraction, but from the warm proportions of a slab serif? Liza Rasskazova's design for Contrast Foundry takes CoFo Robert, the foundry's bestselling Clarendon-inspired slab that has been in the library since 2014, and uses it as a structural foundation, translating those traditional, calligraphically grounded proportions into a modern, clean grotesque with a human touch.

The special features are subtle but present: moderate contrast, balanced proportions, and a softness in the curves that brings warmth without compromising function. Seven weights from Light to Black, with small caps, superscript and subscript figures for both Latin and Cyrillic, make it a comprehensively specified workhorse for complex typographic needs.

5. Sastre by María Ramos

Some typefaces take years. Sastre took 11. Galician designer María Ramos began the project as a student at Reading University in 2014, and NM Type—the foundry she runs with designer Noel Pretorius—is only now releasing it to the public.

Ramos found the broken structure of Sastre's letterforms in the drawings her father made on fabric at the tailor workshop her parents had run for over 40 years. Natural patterns contributed too: the surface texture of a tree leaf, the geometry of spider webs. Beatrice Warde called fonts "the clothes that words wear"; Adrian Frutiger compared the type designer's work to a dressmaker's. Ramos took those analogies seriously and built a typeface from them.

The result is a text serif with five weights and a variable font, featuring 663 glyphs, including a collection of 25 stitches that function as geometric shapes for creating patterns and borders. Small caps are set in a monospaced font, adding a further typographic voice.

6. Differently by Elena Genova

Picture the brief: a Garamond revival that references Apple's print advertising from the 1980s and early 90s; those carefully typeset magazine ads that reminded a generation of designers how powerfully typography could carry a campaign. Elena Genova of My Creative Land has taken that specific cultural moment and used it as a lens through which to reinterpret a classical tradition. The combination is more coherent than it might sound.

Softened forms give Differently a tactile, almost printed quality; the texture and humanity of vintage magazine ads translated into contemporary letterforms. Ligatures and a true italic add rhythm and expressive character, and the result sits in that productive space between nostalgic and retro. For branding, editorial, packaging and campaigns where the audience should feel the typography before they consciously register it, Differently offers a distinctive voice.

7. Stylenoir Script by Tasos Varipatis

Stylenoir Script is a script typeface that bridges the gap between refined and raw, without compromising either quality. Designed by Tasos Varipatis for The Northern Block, under the creative direction of Donna Wearmouth, it draws on hand-painted signage, brush lettering and urban graffiti culture. It delivers both influences in two distinct styles.

Smooth is the polished version: clean lines, expressive movement, handwritten rhythm, but without any rough edges. Rough is the honest version: textured, imperfect, organic, recreating the appearance of lettering made with a dry brush or marker. Together, they give the family enough range to serve both contemporary layouts and more tactile, character-driven applications without feeling like two separate typefaces forced into the same family name.

8. Greenpoint Sans by Sasha Denisova

Sasha Denisova moved to New York and started looking at the everyday typography that rarely gets treated as design. Bodegas and brick façades. Hand-painted signs and narrow storefronts. Dense menu boards. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, became the neighbourhood she understood through observation, and after a year, she transformed that archive into a typeface.

Greenpoint Sans is a condensed sans serif that translates the local visual language into a contemporary type system without actually recreating specific signs. Instead, it distils recurring traits: tight proportions shaped by narrow façades, raw geometry, reverse-slanted lettering, dense rhythm, subtle irregularities. Alongside the typeface, Denisova created a risograph-printed specimen zine documenting the source signage, a small archive of Greenpoint's typographic ephemera as the neighbourhood changes around it.

Best of all, it's released under a Creative Commons licence, making it free for personal and commercial use. This is Sasha's way of giving something back to the place that taught her to see typography differently. It's one of the most generous gestures in this month's round-up, and one of the most charming too.

9. Rosebriar by Laura Worthington

There's a particular category of project for which Rosebriar was clearly designed: the book cover, the wedding invitation, the small-batch spirits label, the heritage brand refresh that needs to feel handcrafted and considered rather than generically "vintage." Laura Worthington's decorative display typeface occupies this space with confidence, drawing on Gothic ornamental traditions without ever tipping into pastiche.

The Roman structure is solid and readable. What makes it distinctive is the selective application of ornamental details—wedge cross strokes, splayed terminals and diamond-shaped tittles—that give the letterforms a crafted, foliate quality. Primarily designed for titling, it extends to subheads, callouts and short passages without losing composure.

10. P22 Stickley 2 by Michael Stickley

The original Stickley Pro was a well-regarded Old Style humanist serif. Stickley 2 is an expansion of that design, and the scale of the expansion is substantial. Five optical sizes (Caption, Text, Headline, Display and Banner), three weights across all sizes, and subtle variations in proportion, detail and contrast between them. Multi-script support for Cherokee, Cyrillic, Greek and Latin. The kind of comprehensive typographic specification that publishing and editorial designers who work across complex systems will recognise as genuinely useful.

P22 Type Foundry has been doing this kind of work since 1994, focusing on letterforms that would otherwise not exist in digital form, and Stickley 2 fits that mission well. It's sturdy and refined, with the "true thoroughbred" quality the foundry claims: this is a typeface that has clearly been developed with serious long-form use in mind.

11. Micronova by Michael Mischler and Nik Thoenen

Designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962, Eurostile occupies a particular place in the typographic imagination thanks to its super-elliptical letterforms, technological optimism, and a design that felt genuinely futuristic at the time. Micronova, from Zurich's Binnenland Typefaces, builds on that lineage with a rigour and systematic intelligence that honours the source without simply repeating it.

Three carefully tuned variable axes (weight, width, and x-height) are designed for precise control rather than exaggerated variation. The width axis runs from Narrow (60) to Extended (120); the x-height can be reduced from its default of 500 to 470, available as an OpenType feature or via the variable slider.

Sixteen static styles across eight weights with corresponding italics, plus three widths and twelve stylistic sets, complete a system that Mischler and Thoenen describe as offering a fresh perspective on progressive modernist principles. It is now also the corporate typeface of Binnenland itself.

12. Oratorio by Alex Chavot

What happens when a Jugendstil tenor meets a 1970s American funk band in a phototypesetting studio? Oratorio, apparently. Alex Chavot's latest release for Apex Type Foundry — launched alongside a comprehensively rebuilt foundry website — takes Halbfette Cantate, a display face released around 1910 by H. Berthold AG and designed by Johann Graf, as its starting point, then runs it through the filter of Ed Benguiat's flamboyant 1970s classics. The result is sweeping swashes, lyrical terminals, high contrast, and an unapologetically theatrical personality that Chavot describes, accurately, as ornamental excess meeting typographic swagger, with just enough restraint to keep it printable.

Single-weight display faces are increasingly rare in an era of variable families. But Oratorio makes a compelling case for a single weight, applied to the utmost expressiveness. Four sets of initial capital forms, numerous alternates, and robust OpenType features provide a wide enough range of expressive options to sustain genuine variety in use.

13. Milgram by Max Phillips

Max Phillips of Signal Type Foundry has a gift for describing typefaces, and his account of Milgram is direct. They'd always wanted to add a humanist sans to the library, and always wanted to add a rounded sans. So they decided to save time by making them the same typeface and seeing what happened. What happened was a wave of nostalgia for Frankfurter, VAG Rundschrift, and an all-caps dry-transfer face called Formula One that nobody else seems to remember.

The result is a family of 12 styles in which the lightest weights have a slightly technical air, as if engraved on a glass beaker, whilst the Black weight is (Phillips' words) "zaftig, and maybe a bit Bootsy Collins". Very open counters and low contrast make for excellent readability across the weight range, and support for 140-odd languages, including Vietnamese, is impressive.

14. CC Timeline by Koto

CC Timeline is a display serif drawing on influences across pivotal typographic epochs — early British metal type, modernist Swiss and German photo-typesetting, contemporary digital typography — without belonging exclusively to any of them.

Adjustable axes and OpenType features allow designers to tune contrast, swap alternate characters, and shift personality without losing consistency. Rather than locking brands into one expression, it gives them emotional range. For a studio whose client list includes Amazon, Google, Netflix and WhatsApp, releasing a commercially available typeface at this level of rigour feels like a real contribution to the field, rather than just a fun side project.

More broadly, Koto's decision to launch CCType with a single typeface rather than a ready-made catalogue is a considered one, and CC Timeline justifies the confidence it required. Dylan Young, senior type designer at Koto, describes it as designed to move across a huge emotional range: rigorous when it needs to be, loud when it needs to be, functional in product environments, expressive in campaigns. That breadth is the explicit ambition, and the execution backs it up.

Execution at the click of a button might not be the career crisis you think it is. You just need to shift to the skills that are in demand more than ever.

Welcome to another edition of Dear Boom, our advice series where the creative community helps solve the industry's trickiest problems. This week, an anonymous designer shares a worry that's keeping many of us awake at night.

"I've stopped being afraid of AI," they say. "But I've realised something worse. It's not that AI is coming for me. It's that the thing I've spent 15 years getting brilliant at—the making, the craft, the production—is becoming the cheap part. What still seems to matter is everything around it. Knowing what's worth making in the first place. Having taste. Understanding the client's actual problem. Direction, not just execution."

They're not wrong. But also, they're not alone in feeling stuck about what to do next. So we asked the Creative Boom community for advice. We share their best tips below, and you can read the full discussions on LinkedIn and Instagram.

1. Don't panic

The first thing to say is: don't panic! Production was always going to become automated: tools do that. But they can't replace thinking. They can't give you taste, judgment, or the ability to know what's actually worth making in the first place.

Claire McDivitt, marketing director at Lazerian, puts this in historical perspective. "Photography didn't replace painting," she points out. "Adobe didn't replace designers. CNC machines didn't replace makers. They simply changed what became valuable. AI is another step in that evolution.

"What clients will continue to value," she continues, "is something AI can't replicate: curiosity, judgement, lived experience, taste, storytelling and the ability to ask the right questions before jumping to the answer."

David Jonathan Johnston, founder at Accept & Proceed tells a similar story. "Perhaps the shift isn't from designer to creative director, but from maker to sense-maker," he ponders. "AI can produce endlessly, but it cannot feel wonder, responsibility, trust, belief or intuition. Judgment, taste and consequence will become more valuable as a result"

2. Change how you talk about your work

It's one thing to make this intellectual leap yourself; it's quite another to explain it to clients. One place this can begin, says David Sedgwick, founder of StudioDBD, is in your case studies.

"The shift starts with how you frame and talk about your work, not just how you make it," he emphasises. "Instead of only showing the final visuals, you start to make it clear what the problem was, what decisions you made along the way and what difference it actually made. You begin to move from 'I make things that look good' to 'I solve problems through design and thinking'.

"It also means learning to speak a bit more in terms of business and impact," he adds. "Not in a forced or jargon way, but in a way that shows you understand what the client is actually trying to achieve."

Designer Émilie Chen agrees. "Demonstrate that your value doesn't come only from aesthetic output but from your thinking," she urges. "Show that you have a wide frame of reference and a strong understanding of visual trends—not just design ones—and culture. Articulate that you can see the bigger picture. This mindset shift is a big one in an industry where things are siloed."

Here's a principle that Ian Paget, founder of Logo Geek, has built his entire practice on. "Creating the logo itself is rarely the hard part," he says. "The real challenge is finding the solution. The real value isn't in the final artwork. It's in the thinking that leads to it."

So what does that look like in practice? "I make it clear to every potential client that they're not buying a logo," he says. "They're investing in expertise, strategic thinking, experience, and a proven approach to solving a problem."

3. Develop your judgment

But if taste and judgement are becoming all-important, how do you actually develop these skills? "They're built through repetition, through naming what you did and why," says experience designer Nuria Quero. "Every time I make a decision, I write down the reasoning. Do this enough times, and you're not 'a designer with good instincts,' you're someone with an articulable process."

Experience design director Nural Choudhury follows the same approach. "The 'developing judgement' course does exist; it's just unglamorous," he stresses. "Try writing down every call you make and why. Six months of that and you have something no model has: a record of your own taste."

You don't have to do this alone, though. "The best way to learn is from people with experience," says Richard Pay, owner and creative director of Moksi Creative. "As a freelancer, that can be tricky, but it's definitely not impossible.

"Try to surround yourself with people who know it and love it," he advises. "Ask for some mentorship. Most people love getting asked for help. You'll quickly learn more, have a sounding board, and you might realise you've already been doing a lot of it. And start before you're ready. You've been doing it long enough to know what good and bad look like."

As part of that, brand identity designer Ben Flay recommends stepping away from the screen. "Get away from the laptop sometimes," he says. "Spend time with artists, printers, photographers, craftspeople, film photographers, sketchbooks, museums, and creative communities. Develop your creative eye and your taste. That's what gives your work depth and originality; software alone never will."

This approach also resonates with Gem Perkins. "There's a very long answer to this, and then there's a quick example," she says. "Go and spend time at an incredible independent letterpress. Tactile design and engineering, remembering the level of craft, the stories, the monumental effort that goes into all the things we use. It's the first post that made it on my Instagram grid in months."

4. Start small and experiment

All sounds like a bit much? Then don't worry: you don't have to do everything at once. "One thought is to start small with directing, and don't overwhelm yourself," says designer Anna Barton. "I've started my own work by beginning with smaller projects, for causes and small businesses I care about, with people I know and trust. This has let me test the waters on directing a project from start to finish. And then you can allow those initial trials to grow into something bigger."

Graphic artist and designer Owen Waddington emphasises experimentation. "Keep trying new things," he urges. "Constantly question what a design tool is and how you can keep learning, expanding, and evolving your practice.

"I think the best way to create meaningful change in our industry is to keep questioning how we make things," he adds. "Treat every project as a work in progress. Most experiments won't succeed, and that's okay. Many of my unsuccessful experiments become the foundations of work that eventually turns into something much stronger."

5. Remember the role craft still plays

All this is sound advice for navigating the AI era. But it's not the be-all and end-all, and it's equally important not to throw away your years of making.

As brand designer Michael Bullamore puts it: "Don't give up on the craft. Although anyone can generate something that looks finished now, fewer people can tell if it's right. Fifteen years of making still shapes your eye. It's just not the whole job any more. So instead of billing for hours spent producing, start billing for the judgment behind what gets made and the skill that turns a rough idea into something usable."

AC Seventhree, creative director at D8 Studio agrees. "There's still room for the making and the doing. I just see AI as software: another tool in the box to be used if it gets the right result. But it should never be an automatic go-to. Clients are paying for your thinking as well as your doing. As long as you've always explained the thinking, the transition should be easier."

Key takeaways

The shift from hands to eyes isn't something AI forced upon you. It's something the market has been moving toward for years. AI just accelerated it.

How to respond? Make your thinking visible through case studies and storytelling. Understand your client's actual problem, not just their stated brief. Seek mentorship and surround yourself with people doing work you respect.

Spend time away from the screen, with tactile, handmade things. Start small with directing. Document your reasoning so you can articulate it to clients. Keep the craft, but recontextualise it as grounding for your thinking.

Above, don't stress. In many ways, this is not a crisis: it's an opportunity to finally be valued for what you've actually been doing all along.

Erwin Olaf: The Biography by Mischa Cohen, published by Hannibal Books, traces the Dutch image-maker's career from Amsterdam's nightlife scene to international acclaim, activism and creating work until his final years.

Erwin Olaf Springveld – known as Erwin Olaf – was born in the Netherlands in 1959. He came of age in the buzzing, liberating Amsterdam of the late 1970s and early 80s, finding his muses in the city's nightlife scene and developing from a rebellious, provocative avant-gardist into one of the most internationally celebrated image-makers of his generation.

His work spanned fashion, portraiture, activism and fine art, earning him a place in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum and, eventually, a transfer of part of his archive to the Rijksmuseum. He photographed the Dutch royal family, and also photographed a singer regurgitating pearls, one of his most famous early black-and-white images.

He died in 2023, aged 63, of a hereditary degenerative lung disease. And now, journalist and author Mischa Cohen has written the first major biography of his life and work, published by Hannibal Books: a 392-page monumental account built from archive material, interviews with dozens of people close to Olaf, and years spent at his side in the studio and on shoots abroad.

Cohen, a former editor of the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij Nederland, had followed Olaf's career for years before the two agreed to collaborate. "We were about the same age and came of age in the same buzzing city," Cohen explains, "and shared a liberal way of looking at life." Persuading Olaf to participate wasn't entirely straightforward. "He was initially reluctant," Cohen recalls. "'I'm not that vain,' Erwin said. 'And besides, I'm still alive!'" But as Olaf's health declined and he began putting his affairs in order – the Rijksmuseum transfer was the crowning achievement of those preparations – the biography became part of what he wanted to leave behind. He agreed to fully collaborate, handing Cohen his personal diaries in exchange for nothing more than a signed receipt. An unvarnished account, he had promised. He kept his word.

What followed was years of research, conversations with friends, lovers, family, colleagues, gallerists and curators; time spent travelling with Olaf to exhibitions and shoots; hours observing how his studio operated – professionally managed, but also, Cohen notes, "a very inspiring place to watch Erwin at work and as an employer of aspiring young photographers." The biography combines a timeline of Olaf's life with a thematic approach, placing him firmly in his historical moment: Amsterdam at the turn of the millennium, the period in which he made his name as what Cohen calls "a shock and baroque photographer", working his way to a prominent position in the international art world.

One of the discoveries that stayed with Cohen most was the depth of the outsider feeling that ran through Olaf's life and shaped everything he made. "The feeling of being an outsider, partly due to a difficult childhood in which he struggled with his homosexuality, shaped his view of the world," Cohen says. "Both in his work and in his activism." Alongside the photographer, Cohen was equally determined to portray the activist – the man who spoke out repeatedly whenever he or others in the queer community faced discrimination, harassment or violence, and who threw legendary, boundary-dissolving parties at Amsterdam's Paradiso to celebrate everyone's freedom to be themselves.

The work that moves Cohen most, and the one that perhaps says the most about who Olaf was, is the Muses series – one of the last he created. Inspired by conversations during the making of the biography, Olaf re-photographed friends and models from his early career, setting their faces now alongside those then. The result is beautiful but devastating. "That series acts as a mirror," Cohen says, "and reflects, more poignantly than words can express, how Erwin and his contemporaries had aged since those early years. The sense of transience evoked by the series is all the more moving given Erwin's own untimely passing."

But the book isn't elegiac, and Cohen is clear about what he wants readers to take from it most. "The joy of creating," he says. "Even when he was already very ill, he made plans and had ideas. As the lung transplant approached – which he would survive by only two weeks – he conceived, with this book in mind, how he could create a striking image of that as well." Right until the end, Erwin Olaf was still thinking in pictures. "The need to speak out. To take action. To defend democracy," says Cohen. "Especially in this time of violence, declining tolerance, the exclusion of minorities, and the loss of achievements in the field of equality in many areas. Sadly, Erwin Olaf is no longer with us to express this in images and words. Let others carry on his legacy."

Erwin Olaf: The Biography by Mischa Cohen is published by Hannibal Books, £42.

From handmade films to woven typographic blankets, the Mother LA senior designer is interested in graphic design that refuses to stick to one format.

For Aiqi Zhang, her ideas tend to start with a question: "When I see something interesting, I often start asking 'what if,'" she says. "What if this idea lived in a different medium, what if the message changed, or what if the same execution became larger, more physical, or more interactive?" This drive to thrash between mediums and break the rules a little shows up everywhere in her work, whether that's a typeface that becomes a blanket, a logo abstracted from the memory of fish tanks or a film with handcrafted typography. "I like collecting those small observations and imagining how they could become part of a stronger or more unexpected design idea."

Aiqi Zhang is a senior designer at Mother LA, working across brand identity, campaign systems, typography and visual storytelling. Before Mother, she spent several years at TBWA\Media Arts Lab developing creative concepts for Apple's brand systems and campaigns, working closely with teams across art direction, typography, motion and production. Across both roles, what has stayed consistent is a refusal to treat format as neutral. "I find inspiration in moments where the medium becomes part of the idea," she says. "It could be a storefront installation where the scale of the image changes the way people experience the product, a printed piece where texture or production method adds meaning, or a digital experience where interaction becomes part of the storytelling. I'm drawn to work where the format is not just a container, but part of how the idea is understood."

Once Aiqi has a project bubbling away, she will sit and muse over it, taking time to indulge her ideas before putting any pen to paper (or so to speak). She needs to understand the core of the project first, identifying what it needs to say, who it's speaking to, the context in which it lives, and the emotions it's going to evoke.

"Strategy is important to me because it gives the visual work a reason to exist," she adds. Next up is the research, which forms a large chunk of her process. This includes digging into visual references, type history, cultural context, materials, and, crucially, talking to people. "I like to have conversations with clients, collaborators, people who understand the story, craft, or community behind a subject, or people who may experience the work in real life," she explains.

"Those conversations often reveal details that you cannot find just by looking at images online." Only then does she begin translating findings into form, testing and refining until the work feels grounded in strategy while carrying its own emotional weight. Her last rule, delivered with a grin: "Keep the presentation deck simple."

In 2023, Aiqi worked on Apple's holiday film Fuzzy Feelings by Anna Mantzaris, made during her time at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, where the entire design system emerged from the film's handmade felt world. Aiqi and her team developed two custom typefaces to match the vibe, built to feel like a soft, tactile and fuzzy material. "It was a strong example of how design can play a larger role in advertising," she says, "helping to shape the emotional language, narrative world, and overall memory of the work."

The second is the identity for Firstborn, a Chinese American restaurant in LA's Chinatown, which Aiqi led from logo to menus, aprons, signage and website. The goldfish logomark was "abstracted from the memory of the fish tanks at the restaurant entrance", turning a small spatial detail into the foundation of an entire brand. "I enjoyed building a system that felt contemporary and fresh, but still carried a sense of cultural warmth and specificity."

The third, Credence, is a display typeface of her own design – one that draws from classical letterforms and pushes them into a more contemporary register. Aiqi extended the thinking into the specimen's fleurons and composition, then took it further still, translating the whole piece into a woven blanket where layout had to work through texture, material and scale. "The piece became a way to express not only how the typeface looks," she says, "but where it comes from, how it is constructed, and how it should feel."

Currently, she's leading creative direction for MA·LA, Mother's Asian Employee Resource Group, building the visual language from the initial concept through to collaborative merchandise. "It feels personal," she says, "but also connected to a larger community, which makes the process very meaningful to me."

But what she wants, ultimately, is for people to look closer at her work – not just at the surface, but at what's behind it. "The story, the place, the material, the cultural reference and the way it enters someone's memory all shape the life of a project," she says. "Like land art, a piece of design can continue to evolve and shift after it is made, shaped by where it lives and by the memories, context and interpretations people bring to it."

With Aesop, Byredo and a wave of tomato-leaf-touting newcomers fighting for space in our bathrooms, Cowshed needed to stand out again. Otherway's refresh reconnects the brand with its rural Somerset beginnings.

Cowshed has always been one of those brands that feels like an indulgence. It's right up there with Wildsmith and Aesop, but it's always been the more affordable option in the category without losing any luxuriousness.

Soho House founder Nick Jones created the original Cowshed spa at Babington House in Somerset in the late '90s, later developing a line of hand soap, lotions, shower gels, shampoos, and conditioners for the hotel and the wider public. It was shaped by its rural surroundings back then. Perfumer Richard Howard developed the products using ingredients from the hotel's Victorian walled garden. Now it's in our shops and featured across the growing Soho House empire. It was that natural ingredients approach that did the brand proud; people loved the idea of using something straight from the wild. It was a differentiator that worked well.

Despite its success, it faces increasingly stiff competition. A quick browse on Liberty or Selfridges, and yes, there's Aesop and all the OGs, but new challengers I've never heard of are now also fighting for our cash. There's Commune, Bamford, Byredo – they all look appealing. Loewe, Matière Première, Frédéric Malle – all with beautiful packaging that screams wealth.

That's the whole point. I liken hair and body care packaging to wine bottles. If the label looks good, surely it's high quality, right? Basic instincts, but on that beauty and wellness shelf, when luxury buys aren't as frequent, you have to stand out. It's also about spoiling yourself or showing off. You want something that indulges your guests in your spare bathroom or downstairs loo while showing them you have impeccable taste (and deep pockets). You also want to keep the packaging when the soap runs out because it's so beautiful. When that happens, as any savvy person will secretly admit, you simply fill the same bottle with cheaper stuff.

When it comes to branding, there's the medical, ingredient-heavy approach. Or minimal typography with muted cool tones. The shape of the bottles also counts. And then there are the ingredients and product descriptions. It's become so bonkers in recent years, when you realise each hand soap has a ridiculous main ingredient like tomato leaves and an accompanying backstory that forgets it's just a nice, smelly gel. Hey, I'm northern. And don't quite understand the madness or the expense.

But as someone who appreciates great design, I do occasionally succumb to a nice hand lotion or "posh" shampoo, and Cowshed is one of those brands I'll always reach for if I'm feeling flush. In recent years, though, I've gone for other lotions and potions, admittedly because I preferred the branding. And this adds up to Otherway's recent overhaul of Cowshed.

Let's face it, Cowshed was starting to lose its distinctiveness. Its offering was getting lost among newer products, and it lacked the contrast and charm that once set it apart. (It was only last year that London branding agency Spinach was brought in for the same task and did a brilliant job – that just shows how fast-moving this market has become.)

For this latest refresh, Otherway was brought in to reconnect Cowshed with its roots while making it more appealing to modern consumers. After reviewing every aspect of the brand, Otherway leaned into a fun balance between rural life, hedonistic nights and pure indulgence. As Otherway's Ben Lewin explains: "The most powerful brands don't become something new; they lean into their DNA. For Cowshed, that meant celebrating where it all started: the cow sheds of Babington House, with a mix of muddy boots and champagne flutes. A distinctly British kind of luxury where indulgence never loses touch with authenticity."

As such, the wordmark is unchanged, but 'Somerset' now sits happily underneath. The brand palette is more vibrant against a luxury cream backdrop. And at the heart of the identity are bespoke illustrations by Helsinki artist Reeta Ek, based on her black-and-white botanical monotypes, which she says are "a printmaking technique that produces single, unrepeatable prints. Botanical in spirit, loosely referencing the plants and moods behind each fragrance family". These are seen across all the new packaging. To me, they feel inspired by Japanese calligraphy and do a great job of expressing the wildness of Cowshed's ingredients and its whole vibe across Babington House and Soho House.

"The design system is deliberately restrained," says Rhiannon Brackpool, design director at Otherway. "It uses understated typography and generous space to create room for the bespoke botanicals to feel as though they've naturally grown around the packaging. That gave us the freedom to create something a little wilder and more expressive than you typically see in the wellness category."

It's a smart rebrand. Cowshed belongs back on the shelf amongst its competitors. Would I reach for it again? Yes. Undoubtedly. I like that Otherway has leaned into its Somerset credentials and steered clear of the madness I've seen elsewhere in this space. I don't want tomato leaves. But a British brand built from the ground up with beautiful illustrations that feel wild, untamed and free? That, I'll happily display in my cloakroom.

The Venezuelan-born, London- and Rio-based artist transforms migration, spirituality and fragmented notions of home into vivid, handmade works that explore identity and belonging.

"I find inspiration in empathy, but not as something soft or passive," explains Victoria Ruiz. "For me, empathy is a form of resistance. It is a decision to stay present with another person's experience and not look away. I think art has the power to create that kind of encounter, where what is personal becomes shared and what has been kept quiet can finally be felt."

Victoria was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and migrated to Miami when she was young due to the country's politics. Growing up between places stayed with her as both a memory and a way of understanding the world. "Home becomes something you carry in fragments, and I feel that much of my work comes from trying to give those fragments a body," she says. In 2017, Victoria moved to London to study for a BA in Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martin, graduating in 2022.

This is when she really found her footing as a visual artist, understanding that her image-making is a way to reflect and communicate narratives she has experienced. In 2021, her creative partner Helena Cebrián invited Victoria to her hometown of Rio de Janeiro. "That year changed everything for me," says Victoria. "Rio gave my work a deeper relationship with my faith, nature and the possibility of finding life even in difficult circumstances."

Since this pivotal moment, Victoria has been based between Rio and London, working across photography, costume, sculpture, installation and performance. She often draws her ideas from carnival and magical realism – two forces she sees as holding life's contradictions. "Carnival holds the complexity of life in a very honest way. It can be beautiful and unsettling at the same time," she says. "It can carry grief inside celebration and give form to things that are difficult to express." The characters that emerge from her practice inhabit this in-between space – they're vivid, bodily, spiritually charged and rooted in a Latin American visual culture.

Victoria's process begins by reading, watching films, listening to stories and sitting with a subject until it starts to live inside her emotionally. "The narrative is the foundation of everything," she explains. "The message has to be clear in my heart before the work can exist physically." From there, the process is physical and intuitive, with pieces built by hand through repetition and accumulation until a costume or sculpture begins to feel like a living being. In Coexistence of Extreme Emotions, from the series We Knew the World in Fragments of Color, the piece is at once one of her most visually arresting and most personally raw images.

Against a burning orange ground, a figure in a Spider-Man mask faces an enormous, towering presence draped in yellow, blue and red – the colours of the Venezuelan flag. "I see myself in the Spider-Man character, facing this enormous presence that represents my country and everything I feel towards it. There is so much love there, but also disappointment and grief," she says. "It speaks about missing home, loving it deeply, and at the same time having to confront the pain of what it has become."

Then there is Mis Flores Para Tu Altar, from the series Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, a work that moves from grief towards something closer to gratitude. Seven figures, each dressed in elaborate hand-sewn flower garments in riotous colour, come together and form a dense amalgamation of petals. The work draws directly from Victoria's own spiritual practice and her relationship with her Orishas. "My faith has guided me through some of the darkest moments of my life," she says. "Flowers are offerings, but they are also a language. They speak to nature, to the divine, to renewal and to the balance we are always searching for."

Alongside her solo work, community and collaboration are also woven into her practice. A mask-making and photography workshop held in Rio in 2021 with Helena and their friend Hiltinho – who welcomed them into his home and neighbourhood – produced images full of play and togetherness, handmade Brazil shirts inspired by the national kit, masks and football. "I love creating spaces where people can connect through creativity," Victoria says, "especially outside of traditional art environments."

What's next? Well, Victoria is currently an artist-in-residence at Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation in London, where she is building towards her first solo exhibition – a project rooted in her response to the ongoing situation in Venezuela, a country she hasn't returned to in a decade. "Making this work has become a deeply meditative and reflective process," she says. "Because I have the privilege to speak freely through my work, I want to use that space to speak about Venezuela, about what has been happening, and about what it means to carry a country with you from a distance." It is, like everything she makes, an act of resistance – and of love.

When Nick Ellis acquired two long-standing butcher shops at opposite ends of Blackheath, Studio Blackburn faced a fun challenge: one brand, two very different crowds.

If you're not a fan of meat, look away now. Studio Blackburn has crafted the new identity for Meat Ellis Butchers, a sustainable "whole-carcass" butcher in London.

The agency was brought in earlier this year after founder Nick Ellis acquired two long-standing butcher shops in Blackheath Village and Blackheath Standard. He wanted a fresh look that would differentiate the two locations and serve their distinct local customers while still feeling like one family under a premium parent brand.

Studio Blackburn drew inspiration from the rich history and charm of each spot, mixing tradition with youthfulness to cater to these diverse demographics. I'm talking cheeky illustrations of meat characters throughout, set against a bright orange backdrop and bold typography for one shop, versus racing-green elegance where serif type takes the lead for the other.

If you're familiar with these areas, then you'll understand the contrast. The Village has been around since the 18th century; much of its stock is Georgian and early Victorian, and it has a more established, well-heeled crowd. The Standard came along later, growing around the Royal Standard pub as a shopping parade serving households spreading out from Greenwich and Charlton. It's the cheaper, younger end of the heath – estate agents treat the two as entirely different markets.

As mentioned, the heart of the visual system is a cast of meat characters, led by 'Meat Ellis' himself. These figures smile everywhere, from the signage and packaging to pricing tags and tote bags, bringing warmth and humour to both shops. Alongside the stacked parent wordmark in a confident sans serif, they're the one thread that runs through both. And they're animated, too, adding a nice bit of motion to digital channels.

For the historic Blackheath Village location, Studio Blackburn focused on tradition, honouring the establishment's century-long legacy. Nick Ellis wanted something that celebrated this heritage while giving a welcoming feel. The resulting 'Village' identity has a classic-looking logotype and a sophisticated green colour palette, while traditional green tiles and awnings dress the shopfront.

Over at Blackheath Standard, it's a contemporary, youthful identity – the fun sister brand to the Village. It's loud and playful, with vibrant orange accents and chunky typography, targeting a younger demographic with "trendy, social-first aesthetics and widespread culinary appeal", as the studio puts it. Hipsters, basically. If that word is even a thing anymore.

The tone of voice is charming. 'Nice to Meat You' features on social media graphics and on staff T-shirts. Product tags include a walking meat chop, as do the shopping receipts. It's unlike any butcher's we've seen before, and it must've been quite the fun challenge to tackle two different markets under one umbrella brand, but Studio Blackburn pulled it off brilliantly. Nice to meat you, indeed.

Gemma Phillips spent 12 years at Saatchi & Saatchi before going it alone, and her solo work has already reached the House of Commons. We explore how she gets away with saying the unsayable.

There's a particular skill in making a brand swear on a billboard and have it feel like the most reasonable thing in the world. Here's a great example. See the words "UK paternity leave is a mother f**ker" on Gemma Phillips's poster, and you don't think "how crude". You think "well, yes, actually".

It's typically brilliant work from a woman who spent over a decade as a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi. Since 2022, she's been a consultant creative director for the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, which was centred on paternity leave (specifically post-C-section) and the impact of unequal parenting on women.

Yet Gemma's not being edgy for the sake of it. It's less that she's found some answer, more that she's not afraid of the thing a lot of brands still shy away from. The rude bit isn't the risk. The risk is being boring.

As she puts it: "Brands have an instinct to sugarcoat. Maybe they think we can't handle the truth. But we're already living the truth; that's the irony. The grit is where it's at."

The streak you can't fake

Gemma says she can spot a client with the right attitude almost immediately. "I look at the work they're already doing," she says. "Who's taking risks? Who's trying to do something differently? Who's willing to say the thing that no one else is saying? Who wants to change things, rather than do more of the same but with nicer design?"

That said, clients who don't already have that instinct aren't write-offs. "You can definitely guide clients to have a greater appetite for risk," she stresses. "Especially ones with smaller budgets, as they can't afford to sit on the fence."

Often, she says, it comes down to one thing: encouraging clients to have real confidence in their brand, and sharing your belief in what it could be (not what it is now).

How motherhood made her braver

Gemma's recent work—the CV shredder, the swearing billboards, the out-there nappy adverts—all circles back to one theme: how brands talk to women, and mothers in particular. She arrived at this not as a clever positioning strategy, but from lived experience.

"Becoming a mother can be one of the most radicalising processes you'll ever go through," she notes. "Not only in one singular moment but several hundred moments that permanently change you. Fertility struggles, postpartum, returning to work, navigating how your new life fits back together, or doesn't."

That, she says, made her braver, both creatively and strategically. Yet this isn't an experience exclusive to mothers. She thinks the same shift happens to many women as they move into their 30s and 40s, whether or not they choose to have kids.

"Weirdly, brands often want to speak to women like they are these very homogeneous beings," she points out. In contrast, she says: "I'm down for the weirdness, the complexity and the messy humour."

Getting parliament to notice

The Career Shredder, a literal machine that devours the CVs of mothers pushed out of work, didn't just make an impact: it was raised in the House of Commons. But in retrospect, that shouldn't have been too surprising, because from the outset, Gemma wanted to go all-out.

"Before we even had an idea, we knew the work had to be blunt," she recalls. "It had to be as visceral as possible. It had to manifest in physical form what millions of women feel and experience in the workplace. For everyone else, it had to make visible the damage pregnancy and maternity discrimination causes, both to women themselves and the economy as a whole.

The campaign's foundations were firm. "We had a 'great' statistic: 74,000 women pushed out of work every year in the UK," Gemma recalls. "And the most shocking part: it's up from 54,000 in 2016. Everyone assumes it must be getting better, but it's actually getting worse."

Finding the funny

Big Pant Energy, her toddler-toilet-training campaign for Peachies, is the joyful flip side of the same coin. The comedy, she insists, was never something the agency had to invent.

"The funny is already there," she said. "It's being shared over WhatsApp and through conversations millions of times a day. There's always humour in the struggle: that's what I'm drawn to time and time again."

Some people might shy away from that approach when approaching a serious subject. But Gemma counters: "Humour can be incredibly respectful because it acknowledges reality. It's a sign that you genuinely understand the audience; you're one of them, not a machine hovering above them, selling them something they know isn't true."

Similarly, the "motherf**ker" paternity leave posters resonated with fathers, deliberately pulling them into a debate usually framed as a women's problem.

"If fathers don't have the opportunity to be equal carers from the start, mothers end up carrying the consequences in their careers for years afterwards," Gemma explains. And that, she argues, hits the gender pay gap and economic productivity—so whether or not you have children, your finances will be affected.

In short, the fastest way to improve outcomes for women and the economy as a whole, she believes, is to support equitable parenting.

Is the industry changing?

Gemma is a mother of three (twins, then a third), and she's refreshingly unsentimental about the challenge. "It's the age-old struggle: work like you don't parent and parent like you don't work," she says. "How can you square that maths?" Ultimately, she thinks it might be possible to excel at both for a short time, but not sustainably, even with excellent paid childcare, until there's systemic and cultural change across workplaces.

Until that happens, though, she believes it helps for women to keep their career options open and flexible. "It doesn't have to be binary: you don't have to choose one and stick to it," she believes. "I hope we can see more women, and importantly, men, pursuing and being permitted to have more squiggly-line careers. If you dig deeper into many people's career paths, it's rarely the stable trajectory we all want to project."

On whether the industry has actually changed or just got better at sounding like it has, she responds: "Both. There has been real progress: Covid and social media have definitely been accelerators of that. Conversations that would have been career-limiting ten years ago are happening more openly now." But, she warns, "a family or flexible working policy is only useful if people feel able to use it, especially those in leadership positions, without career-limiting consequences."

As for what's next, she's not changing tack. She'll keep "helping brands find the courage to say the thing everyone is thinking, but nobody has quite said yet". And who wouldn't want to see more of that?

Update: At the Creative Circle awards last Thursday evening, The Career Shredder won eight Golds, three Silvers and two Bronzes, and Mother F**ker scooped a Gold and a Bronze. Congrats to Gemma for the brilliant news!

The most overlooked beat in British photography isn't some far-flung conflict zone; it's the end of your nearest pier. A new exhibition at Bristol's Arnolfini looks behind the cliches and brings you the truth, with the active help of residents.

I am proud to be a journalist, but not always proud of my profession. For example, living in a British coastal town, I've seen how newspaper reports have a habit of swinging between two equally lazy narratives. The narrative is either about decline—boarded-up arcades, fading Victorian grandeur, a town "left behind"—or it flips into regeneration: all artisan coffee and rocketing house prices.

Both stories usually have their facts right, technically at least. But the overall picture often feels hopelessly alien to locals, myself included, largely because it's been written from the outside, by someone "looking in" for a fortnight at most.

Polly Braden's new photography exhibition Against the Tide, now open at Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, does something different. Her aim was to truly get under the skin of British seaside towns by handing some creative control to the residents themselves.

Proper research

It's all the result of more than a year of in-depth research. Polly and Guardian journalist Lisa Bachelor visited a range of traditional seaside towns, talking to 16- to 25-year-olds about what their lives are actually like.

This is neither the version that ends up in a shiny council regeneration brochure, nor the one in a doom-laden newspaper feature about the "left behind". Instead, we glimpse something closer to the muddled truth.

Polly and Lisa didn't feel the need to invent a "hook". They found one simply by asking good questions and sticking around long enough for honest answers.

Unspoken tension

The press image leading the exhibition is a gift to any picture editor: a guy in an Easter Bunny costume looking forlorn, on a misty beach in front of an ageing fairground ride. It's funny. It also points to an uncomfortable truth about seaside Britain: that the infrastructure of old-fashioned fun is still standing, even where the old-fashioned fun itself may have packed up and left.

That unspoken tension runs through the whole show. Alongside large-format portraits of youngsters, shot with the kind of clear-eyed dignity Polly has built her career on, there are images of dressing-room mirrors, empty car parks, fairground wheels against bruised skies, piers evoking grandeur through the fog.

It's the visual language that any seaside resident will recognise: gaudy signage, faded glamour, weather that refuses to cooperate. Polly understands that ironic contradiction is part of the coastal landscape, without ever slipping into forced exaggeration or lazy mockery.

Key takeaway for creatives

Here's the lesson, I think, that creatives in general can draw here. While documenting seaside towns typically descends into tiresome cliché, what rescues Against the Tide from that fate is the sense of informed collaboration that runs through it.

Polly and Lisa didn't just turn up, take some candid shots, and then run away. Instead, they held workshops in Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool, Whitehaven and Brightlingsea, where youngsters were taught to take their own photographs.

Those images now sit alongside Polly's in the show, and in a companion exhibition, Besides the Sea, in Arnolfini's Gallery 5. There's also a wall of handwritten postcards exchanged between participants in different towns: peer-to-peer correspondence between teenagers in Tendring and Scarborough, who'd otherwise have no reason to ever cross paths.

Real voices, real lives

"Co-creation" is often just an empty marketing buzzword, but here it's done for real. And the accompanying testimony backs this up. There's real ambivalence here: not poverty tourism dressed up as art, nor a regeneration puff piece.

Keane from Scarborough says, "When I leave here, there's always going to be a part of me that stays behind." Michael from Blackpool pushes back hard against the doom narrative: "So many good things are happening here, but nobody is telling those stories." Millicent, in Tendring, says it all when she says: "On one hand, there's not much here. But my house is right on the seafront. I just love that."

None of this, importantly, reads as scripted. All of it reads as the kind of nuance that takes a year of actual presence to earn.

For anyone whose work involves telling other people's stories for a living, it's worth the trip along the M4 or M5 to experience this exhibition. If only as a reminder that the best angle is sometimes the one that's been sitting on a foggy beach, waiting for someone to actually stop and look.

The Zhengzhou-based branding studio builds visual identities that evoke a fleeting sensation of seeing something familiar you can't quite make sense of.

"I hope that when viewers see my work, they don't try to 'understand' it first," says Bai Mi, founder of Cooot studio. "Instead, they feel a subtle sense of uncertainty – something feels different, but they can't quite put their finger on it – and then quickly find a familiar foothold."

Cooot Studio was founded in 2020 and is based in Zhengzhou, in central China, offering branding, packaging and event design to clients worldwide. Its founder came up through animation before a growing interest in graphic design pulled the practice in a different direction.

The work has since been picked up by BranD magazine, IdN, The Brand Identity and Dieline, with back-to-back recognition in 2022 and 2023, and is built around what the studio calls "breaking through within inertia". That means taking the habits and conventions of a visual category and pushing them just far enough to create something surprising, without losing the logic that makes the work legible.

Two recent projects show how that works. First up is PocketTAILS, a cocktail recipe booklet series featuring compact, tactile publications, each named after a classic drink. The visual system is organised around glassware. Each title corresponds to a distinct glass form: the wide, shallow coupe of a Brandy Sour; the tall, narrow silhouette of a highball. The shapes are translated into a colour and graphic language that feels exceptionally fresh yet also like something from a mid-century bar menu. Spread open, the books fan out in a muted, considered colour palette of olive, terracotta, blush and sage.

BLO*R is a coffee brand, and the starting point was the fruit before the bean. Coffee cherries – the red-skinned fruit from which coffee seeds are extracted – grow through distinct stages of colour, from green to yellow to deep red. Cooot extracted those shifting colour blocks as the graphic foundation of the whole identity, extending and reconfiguring them across packaging until the natural process of growth becomes a visual system. The result feels botanical and thoughtful, alive with colour but not chaotic.

"I aim to break inherent patterns within the inertia of habit," the studio explains, "and use that habitual awareness to restructure. The goal is to create, while breaking through, a feeling in the audience of something unfamiliar that quickly returns to a sense of familiarity – a brief sense of dislocation."

The creative process for Cooot is responsive and intuitive, meaning each project dictates its own logic. Inspiration comes from everyday moments, from films, markets and visual notes from the commercial world – the ordinary stuff that most design either mimics or reacts against. The studio is interested in neither.

The aim is to make work that makes the familiar strange for just long enough to earn a second look, then resolves into something that feels earned and inevitable. With this in mind, the studio plans to conduct more visual experiments across different media, and a small solo showcase is scheduled for later this year.

Lark Design Studio's new identity for EV cable brand Wottz proves that the best ideas sometimes hide in the smallest details.

Some rebrands are worth studying not for their scale, but for their restraint. Lark Design Studio's new identity for Wottz, a British manufacturer of customisable EV charging cables, is one of them. There's no sprawling illustration system, no 30-page brand world bible full of abstract metaphors. Just a wordmark, a colour pairing and one clever piece of letterform thinking that does most of the legwork.

In an industry that often confuses more with better, Wottz is proof that a single sharp idea, properly executed, can carry a whole brand. For a studio working with founders and marketing teams rather than blue-chip clients with bottomless budgets, that's not just good design thinking, it's good business sense too.

So what's the idea? A lightning bolt, hidden inside the crossbar of the double "tt" in Wottz. Blink, and you'd miss it. But that's kind of the point.

The old identity, with its looping green cable shapes and a fairly generic blue wordmark, told you the company made EV chargers, but not much else. It looked fine. But didn't look obsessive. And obsession is exactly what Wottz wanted to communicate.

For context: the business builds cables to order for each customer's exact setup, tested against 28 safety points, for every EV on the planet. That level of fussiness needed a brand that feels just as considered. Lark's answer was to find the personality in the name itself.

Wottz, after all, already sounds contemporary and plugged into EV energy. So rather than piling on more visual metaphor, the studio sharpened the wordmark and tucked a tiny lightning strike into the crossbar of the two Ts. It's a detail you have to look for, but—much like the hidden smile in Amazon's logo or the secret arrow in FedEx—it makes spotting it satisfying rather than gimmicky.

Designing for the parts nobody else bothers with

Around that wordmark sits a tight, disciplined palette: the existing core blue paired with an arresting neon yellow that feels ownable in a category full of safe, slightly clinical colourways. The typeface, Centra No.1, is a contemporary nod to cornerstone British fonts like Gill Sans and Johnston's New Rail Alphabet, giving the system a confident British feel without leaning on cliché.

The same cable-inspired typographic detailing turns up in custom icons, sharp little glyphs covering everything from forklifts to flexible payment options, drawn with the same minimal geometry as the logo. Packaging carries the wordmark at scale, bold enough to be read from across a delivery van. Even the connector heads, usually the most overlooked part of any charging cable, get a discreet embossed badge.

There's a good lesson here for anyone working on a visual identity project. Namely, that the strength of a brand isn't measured by its hero assets, but by how well it survives the unglamorous bits.

A logo looks easy on a yellow background in a deck; it's a different test when it has to sit on a five-metre cable coiled in the rain, on a courier's tape gun, or stitched small onto a gilet pocket. Wottz passes that test comfortably, largely because the identity was built around one robust idea rather than a pile of decorative flourishes that fall apart at small sizes.

The photography around the rebrand backs this up. Instead of the moody studio renders so many tech-adjacent brands reach for, the imagery here is bright, outdoorsy and domestic: a Honda parked on gravel, tulips in the foreground, a cable coiled casually on a doorstep. It's premium without performing premium; a deliberate response to a sector that often tips into either sterile corporate blue or over-engineered "innovation" visuals.

Key takeaway

It would have been easy to over-design this brief. EV and energy clients often invite maximalism: circuit-board patterns, gradient skies, abstract energy waves. Wottz resists all of it.

Instead, Lark understood that the most persuasive way to communicate obsessive attention to detail is to demonstrate it, not illustrate it. Hiding a lightning bolt inside two letterforms and trusting people to notice is far more confident than wrapping the whole brand in bolts and sparks.

For a studio working with founders rather than committees, that confidence matters. Smaller, faster-moving clients rarely want sprawling brand systems, and often can't afford one anyway. What they can afford—and what Wottz proves—is a single well-made idea executed with discipline across everything that matters. Packaging, web, fleet livery, even the connector itself.

The result, says the client, is a brand that "feels British and engineered, but has personality too." That's a fair summary. The bigger lesson for anyone working on identity systems is simpler still: you don't need 100 ideas to build a brand. You need one good one and the nerve to let it speak for itself.

The Los Angeles designer has turned the maths of motherhood into art, pairing sharp visuals with an essay that's funny, angry and backed by hard numbers.

There's a particular kind of maths that creative mothers do in their heads, usually at 11pm, usually while staring at a laptop in a quiet kitchen. It goes something like this: How many hours did I actually work today? How many of those were interrupted? And how much of my brain was simultaneously tracking school pickup, missing socks and the precise location of a packed lunch?

It's an invisible spreadsheet that never balances, and it rarely shows up on a payslip. Rachel Many has decided to make that spreadsheet visible.

Her new project, Mother Load, pairs striking posters with a companion essay that does something a lot of think-pieces about working motherhood fail to do: be both funny and angry, backed up with numbers that should make every agency leader wince.

The posters themselves are sharp. Price tags stuck across a woman's face like she's reduced stock at a clearance sale. A supermarket receipt itemising "maternity leave tax", "guilt" and "invisible labour" next to a total that simply reads "too much". A manila folder labelled "portfolio review" with a child's crayon family drawing tucked underneath.

It's a clever, plain-speaking design bringing attention to a subject that usually gets buried in euphemism.

The numbers behind it

Rachel's essay relies on a December 2025 analysis by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, which found that mothers working full-time, year-round earned only 74.3 cents per dollar that fathers earned. That figure becomes the running theme through the whole series: 74 cents to the dollar, printed large on a receipt, stuck to a face like a markdown sticker.

The penalty compounds with each child, resulting in an estimated 5 to 7% drop in earnings each time. And it isn't only about pay. An audit study found that childless women received more than twice as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers with identical resumes. Meanwhile, fathers tend to get the opposite treatment: a documented bump in perceived competence and authority, sometimes called the "fatherhood premium".

Same life event, completely different price tag, depending entirely on the contents of your undergarments. Not to mention that the years a creative career is supposed to accelerate are exactly the years many women start families.

There's no neat checkpoint where motherhood politely waits for a quieter moment in your CV; it arrives, as she puts it, regardless of where you've got to on the ladder.

The brutality of consolidation

However, that's just the start of the story: the first penalty isn't the new one. Rachel goes on to describe how that old bias is colliding head-on with a fresh one.

The creative industry spent 2025 in a brutal consolidation cycle. Omnicom cut over 4,000 jobs following its IPG takeover, WPP folded Ogilvy, VML and AKQA under one roof to "optimise" operations, and roughly 10,000 agency roles disappeared across the year. Teams didn't vanish so much as thin out, leaving fewer people doing the work of several, with AI fluency now an unspoken job requirement on top of everything else.

For a parent with finite hours, that's a brutal equation. There's no spare evening to mess about with AI and fail safely at it when the evening is already spoken for by dinner, bath and bedtime. The point isn't that mothers can't adapt; it's that an industry run entirely on slack is asking everyone to find time that, for some people, simply doesn't exist.

And yet, as Rachel points out, the skills leadership claims to prize most right now—juggling competing priorities, managing limited resources, staying calm under unpredictable pressure—are exactly the skills mothers practise daily, just in a different setting. Nobody runs a masterclass in prioritisation quite like someone negotiating a toddler's nap schedule against a client deadline.

Key takeaway

It would be easy to file Mother Load under "personal project, nice pictures, moving on". That would be a mistake. What Rachel has done is take a structural problem that usually lives in dry policy reports and translate it into the visual language creative people actually respond to.

For agency leaders and studio owners, Rachel's work is worth thinking about because it refuses to be either a rallying cry or a pity party. Rachel is clear that she'd choose her children again in an instant, and she's genuinely curious about the new tools reshaping the industry.

Her argument, then, isn't "anti-progress". It's that progress built entirely around speed and constant availability that will quietly filter out a particular kind of talent—and that talent happens to be disproportionately female and experienced.

This Edinburgh-based interior designer applied for hundreds of jobs after graduating and got nowhere. Eventually, he decided his "too bold" portfolio wasn't the problem—it was the brief.

Harry Matuszewicz-Milne spent 10 years as a mental health nurse before retraining as an interior designer. He graduated from UWE Bristol in 2024 with a first-class honours degree and then spent the best part of a year applying for design jobs. Close to 550 of them, by his own count, including speculative letters, branded coasters and a hand-typed cover letter on custom stationery. Not one of them led to a job.

It's a familiar story for a lot of creative graduates, but Harry's response to it is worth paying attention to. Rather than softening his work to fit what employers seemed to want, he built a studio, Acid House Designs, around the very thing he kept getting told was the problem.

"The recurring feeling was that my work was too bold, too strange or too much," he recalls. It's a line that will land uncomfortably for anyone who has sat through a portfolio review and been told to tone it down. For Harry, the rejection became the founding logic of his business rather than a reason to abandon it.

The problem with "too bold"

The disconnect, he says, began in the final year of his degree. "Throughout my studies, we were all encouraged to push the boundaries and experiment, to discover who we were as designers, finding our own design personality, etc." That encouragement produced exactly the kind of portfolio you'd expect: bold, colourful, uncompromising. What it didn't produce was a job.

He had three interviews out of hundreds of applications. He made a three-hour drive for a graphic design role where the interviewer asked what experience he had, was pointed to a CV that said "none", and ended the conversation there. Another was for an assistant interior design position on minimum wage. He pushed for feedback and was eventually told his designs were too bold.

"This was obviously upsetting, but probably more annoying than anything," he says, and that distinction matters. It's not despair driving the next part of the story, it's irritation; the kind that tends to produce decisive action.

He tried rewriting his CV six or seven times, including a deliberately dulled-down version. He made a video CV that took almost a week to produce and never got a reply. He was repeatedly steered towards kitchen and bathroom sales roles as a stepping stone, which he turned down. "The idea was that to get the job I wanted, I'd have to do a job I didn't want, to be able to do another job I didn't want, and then, hopefully, get a job I wanted," as he puts it. "No thanks."

Finding proof of concept

While the rejections piled up, Harry had already been building the portfolio piece that would define his practice: his own Bristol flat. Inspired by Manchester's Haçienda nightclub, rave culture, and pop art, he painted exposed beams with hazard chevrons, turned a living room wall into a Super Mario level with cheap decals, and built an industrial bathroom from corrugated metal and reclaimed floorboards. None of it, he's keen to point out, required a serious budget.

"The biggest thing this taught me is that good interiors don't necessarily come from massive budgets," he says. "More often they come from experimentation, personality, patience and a willingness to customise things rather than leaving them exactly as they came out the box."

The flat got picked up by Metro's property pages and featured on Zoopla's YouTube channel, where a presenter walked through rooms including a DJ booth, a leopard-print sofa, a fridge disguised as a drinks cabinet and a Mondrian-themed bedroom complete with a ladder running round the walls. It's the kind of coverage most design graduates would kill for. It changed nothing for his job applications.

That's the detail that sticks. A flat good enough for national press coverage wasn't good enough to get him hired. "These features wouldn't sway any prospective employers," he says, with the understatement of someone who's clearly made peace with the absurdity of it.

Turning the rejection into the brief

Acid House Designs now exists because the job market left Harry no other route into the industry he'd retrained for. The studio's positioning—bold, colour-led, deliberately anti-beige—is basically his old portfolio with a business plan attached. "We're not interested in looking cool; we're interested in creating spaces that scream you, your brand, or your business," reads the pitch. "This studio is for punks, misfits, weirdos and everyone in between."

There's a commercial argument underneath the bravado too, and it's one worth taking seriously if you're a creative weighing up whether boldness is a liability. Harry points to research suggesting listings with strong design personality can command a price premium of 20 to 60 per cent, and argues that in a market saturated with near-identical Scandi-neutral interiors, distinctiveness has become a competitive advantage.

"If you're a massive global chain, blending into the background probably doesn't matter," he says. "But for independent businesses, boutique hotels, bars, cafés and Airbnbs, being memorable suddenly becomes far more important."

Key takeaway

What makes this story more than just a nice anecdote is the reframing at its centre of it. Harry doesn't pretend the rejection didn't hurt. "It really did give my ego a proper kicking," he admits. But he also rejected the conclusion that the work itself was wrong. "Maybe my loudness and rule breaking mean there aren't any design firms where I would fit in," he reflects. "Maybe that was the problem all along."

For creatives stuck in a similar bind, that's a question worth considering yourself. Is the feedback you're getting about quality, or is it about fit?

Harry's answer was to stop trying to fit a market that didn't want what he made, and build a smaller one that does. It's not a comfortable route, and it's not available to everyone. But as a case study in what to do when 550 doors close in succession, it's hard to beat.