“We’re living through one of the most thrilling creative shifts since the dawn of digital” – Brand Identity Refresh Jury President Teemu Suviala
Image of Graphite Pencil-winning Orchestre de Chambre de Paris by Landor Paris for
Orchestre de Chambre de Paris
In typical fashion, the future walked in unannounced. AI turned “what if” into “what now.” Things that sounded like science fiction at breakfast became standard operating procedure by lunch. Trends today flicker at the speed of the feed. Novelty and outrage flare and fade just as fast. The pace is wild, and so is what we can imagine and create as we surf these waves of metamodernism.
So, is creativity alive? Absolutely. It hasn’t vanished; it has just evolved. Creativity has migrated, from the storyboard to the scroll, from the logo to the living system, from the single idea to the endlessly adaptive one. It’s thriving in new spaces, powered by new tools, yet still driven by the same irrepressible human instinct to make meaning out of chaos.
In branding and design, we’re living through one of the most thrilling creative shifts since the dawn of digital. Brands once lived in a few formats. Now they are felt across thousands of moments and modalities - physical and virtual, sonic and scented, spatial and synthetic. A brand experience might be the data-sensing object in your hand, the AI-generated environment you explore, or the invisible interface that speaks back to you in the voice of Dame Judi Dench.
"The pace is wild, and so is what we can imagine and create as we surf these waves of metamodernism."
The old rulebook of static assets and rigid grids is now a relic. The brands that thrive are designed as evolving platforms, fluent languages with flexible frameworks and generative possibilities. Creativity has gone systemic. It’s no longer confined to a single department but embedded across design, data, and experience.
At Landor, we see this evolution every day. Creativity now happens in the collision of disciplines, where brand strategists work with data scientists, sound designers with roboticists, and experience architects with AI engineers. We are designing worlds that move across sight, sound, touch, and even scent - all bound by emotion. It’s a reminder that creativity’s future is not digital or physical, but deeply human.
AI, far from killing creativity, has become its newest collaborator. The best creative minds are using it not to automate execution but to accelerate imagination - generating hundreds of directions in minutes, so human judgement can focus on what truly matters: taste, empathy, and meaning. As one of our designers put it recently, “AI can give me a thousand options. Only I can choose the one that makes you feel something.”
“Creativity now happens in the collision of disciplines, where brand strategists work with data scientists, sound designers with roboticists, and experience architects with AI engineers.”
That feeling, emotion, remains creativity’s most powerful currency. In brand design, emotion is what transforms assets into meaning and moments into memory. When you create an emotion, you create value. That’s why the most resilient brands design emotional impact across every touchpoint.
But creativity, like any living system, needs care. To keep it alive, we must protect the conditions that allow it to thrive.
First, we must partner with technology, not panic over it. Creativity has always borrowed from the tools of its time, from brushes to browsers to bots. The question isn’t whether AI can create; it’s whether we’ll stay curious enough to push it somewhere surprising. When humans and machines collaborate, creativity scales.
Second, we need to design for emotion, not just efficiency. The true power of creativity lies in what can be felt. Brands that use design for storytelling and build multisensory worlds - the tone that greets you, the texture you touch, the sound that stays with you - forge deeper, longer-lasting connections.
Third, we must reclaim play. Play is creativity’s oldest engine, the space where mistakes become discoveries and curiosity becomes innovation. Too often, play is seen as indulgent, reserved for brainstorms or offsites. But it’s the daily practice that keeps creative culture alive. The weird, the absurd, the experiments that fail; these are where originality grows.
“Play is creativity’s oldest engine, the space where mistakes become discoveries and curiosity becomes innovation.”
To be human is to be creative. It’s not a credential we acquire; it’s a compulsion. We find patterns, connect dots, tell stories, and learn through both missteps and masterpieces. We play because that’s what we do, and it’s not a perk we save for when the calendar clears.
Creativity is not a fragile flame to shelter from change. It’s the opposite, a force that burns brighter when the world spins sideways. And sideways is exactly how we should look at things. Hunter S. Thompson said it best: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
These may be the strangest days yet. Which makes now the perfect moment for new experiments, new movements, and new ways of seeing. Because creativity isn’t dying. It’s just getting started.