Titled Cultured, the festival’s new campaign reframes branding as something less authored and more grown. At a surface level, it’s a striking visual system — biomorphic typography, organic textures, and a palette that feels lifted from nature at its most saturated. But beneath that aesthetic is a concept that pushes into more uncomfortable, and arguably more necessary, territory: what if the creative community isn’t just represented in the work, but physically embedded within it?

Rather than building a brand for the festival, Uncommon constructed one from it using the creative community not as an audience, but as the medium. The resulting identity resists the polished, over-determined systems that often dominate contemporary branding. Instead, it leans into something more unstable, more alive: a visual language formed through physical traces, collective participation, and the residue of human presence.

To build the identity, Uncommon hosted a series of “Mixer” events across London and New York, inviting creatives to gather, exchange ideas, and unknowingly leave behind something more tangible. Biological traces — fibers, imprints, fragments of presence — were collected from shared surfaces and translated into a bespoke design system. What is typically invisible, the residue of participation, becomes the material language of the brand, resulting not in metaphorical authorship, but literal contribution. 

It’s a concept that sits somewhere between a heist and a magic trick, as co-founder Nils Leonard describes it. But beyond the intrigue, there’s a deeper provocation at play. In a cultural moment saturated with trend cycles, design jargon, and increasingly, AI-assisted outputs, Cultured rejects the idea of creativity as an externalized, optimized product. Instead, it insists on creativity as a living system; messy, collective, and irreducibly human. It’s a move that reframes branding not as a fixed artifact, but as a living system. One that accumulates meaning through contact, rather than control.

This is where Uncommon’s philosophy of “design with a capital D” becomes legible. The studio has long operated in the tension between quiet design craft and loud cultural impact, a space where few agencies manage to sustain credibility. In the OFFF identity, that duality is resolved not by compromise, but by expansion. The work is both aesthetically striking and conceptually generous. It doesn’t just communicate culture; it hosts it.

There are clear art-historical echoes here, particularly in the lineage of Yves Klein, whom Nils has been enamored with for a long time and has written about here, whose work explored the body as both subject and medium. But where Klein’s gestures were singular, even theatrical, Uncommon’s interpretation is communal. The campaign expands the notion of authorship outward, distributing it across a network of contributors who may never see themselves as “makers” within the final artifact, yet are fundamentally embedded within it.

The system extends this thinking across every layer. A custom typeface, Hyphae, draws from fungal networks; structures defined by growth, interconnection, and asymmetry. Visual assets developed in collaboration with artist Dasha Plesen, aka the ‘Mold Queen’ known for working with bacteria as a medium, further reinforce the idea of creativity as something that evolves rather than resolves. Even the campaign’s large-scale projection onto the Disseny Hub positions the work not as a static identity, but as a living surface that carries the traces of the community back into the public realm.

What’s most compelling, though, is the underlying assertion: that creativity, at this moment, is not something to be protected from external forces, but something to be reasserted through collective presence. As tools become more powerful and outputs more frictionless, the industry risks drifting toward a kind of creative abstraction in which ideas feel increasingly detached from the people who generate them. In a “serious and pretty dark world,” as Nils Leonard describes it, the project offers a kind of quiet optimism rooted not in technology, but in people. Uncommon’s response is not to reject that reality, but to counterbalance it with something grounded, physical, and participatory.

It’s a subtle but important shift: from branding as a declaration of identity to branding as an accumulation of presence.

For OFFF, a festival long defined by its community, this feels less like a campaign and more like a crystallization of its ethos. As director Pep Salazar notes, the work not only speaks to designers, it is built from them. And in doing so, it reframes the role of the audience entirely. Not as passive consumers of culture, but as its raw material.

For OFFF, the community has always been the core. This collaboration with Uncommon makes that idea tangible. The campaign doesn’t just speak to designers–it is literally built from them. It’s a celebration of shared authorship and the power of gathering, exchanging, and making together.”

Pep Salazar, Director of OFFF Barcelona

Which raises a larger question for the industry: if creativity is, at its core, a collective act, why have we spent so long pretending otherwise?

That question sits at the heart of Uncommon’s approach and becomes even more pointed in the context of emerging technologies that increasingly shape how, and by whom, creative work is made. Rather than positioning itself in opposition, Cultured reads as a kind of reassertion: a reminder that no matter how advanced the tools become, they are still derivative of what has already existed.

Or, as Nils Leonard puts it in a reflection that feels less like a closing statement and more like an opening challenge for the conversations ahead:

“Make no mistake we have an unwelcome guest. They have slept with our greatest poets, stolen the lyric books of our greatest musicians, they know how Kubrick likes his light set, they know what was on Nina Simone’s rider (sausages and champagne, by the way), they are backstage, in our rehearsals, in all our playing and working and they sit in every meeting that we do. But for all of this, all AI has is what has been done. And now we will never have a bigger excuse to let go and just make. Free license to be new. To be dangerous. To be hilarious. To be beautifully wrong like only humans can be. This is the culture we exist in and it is ours to make, together.”

A reminder that the creative community isn’t just the audience for culture, it is the culture.

The post OFFF x Uncommon: The Future of Creativity Isn’t Artificial; It’s Cultured appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

For the better part of the last decade, the creative industry has been preoccupied with scale: more content, faster production, broader reach. The rise of generative AI has only accelerated that trajectory, promising near-infinite output at unprecedented speed. But as that output begins to converge — visually, tonally, structurally — another priority is emerging in parallel: distinction.

It’s within this context that M+C Saatchi North America’s appointment of Naz Kasim as its first Executive Creative Director of Art and Design becomes more than a leadership update. It reads as a structural signal. A decision about where creative value will live in the next phase of the industry.

The role itself is telling. Not simply Executive Creative Director, but specifically focused on art and design, a delineation that underscores a renewed emphasis on craft as strategy, not decoration. In an era increasingly defined by what can be generated, the differentiator shifts to what can be chosen, refined, and shaped with intention.

Kasim’s appointment arrives alongside the release of the agency’s 2026 Cultural Zine, a project that offers an early articulation of this thinking. Building on last year’s “Vibepocalypse” thesis, a diagnosis of cultural overload and fragmentation, the new report introduces the concept of “Mini Worlds”: smaller, self-defined communities that individuals retreat to in order to navigate instability. Especially in today’s cultural and global landscape framed by war, economic unsteadiness, and immigration hostility. It’s a framework that reflects a broader recalibration in culture from mass reach to meaningful belonging.

For brands, this shift presents a paradox. The tools available to reach audiences have never been more expansive, yet the audiences themselves are becoming more selective, more fragmented, and more resistant to sameness. Visibility is no longer the challenge. Resonance is.

Design, in this context, becomes one of the few remaining levers for distinction.

This is not a new idea, but it is newly urgent. As Stevie Archer, Regional Chief Creative Officer at M+C Saatchi North America, points out, we are living in an “increasingly visual world,” one where AI is capable of producing polished outputs at scale. The result is not a deficit of content but a surplus, with much being indistinguishable from the next. In that environment, craft is no longer a luxury; it’s a filter.

Kasim’s career trajectory reflects this tension. With experience spanning Asia, Europe, and North America, and a portfolio that cuts across industries from FMCG to finance, his work has consistently operated at the intersection of concept and execution. Not simply making things look good, but making them meaningful.

That distinction is critical. Because if AI has exposed anything about the creative process, it’s that execution was never the most valuable part.

The industry has long mythologized production, the shoot, the build, the polish, as the locus of creativity. But as those processes become faster and more accessible, the emphasis shifts upstream. Toward taste. Toward judgment. Toward the ability to translate cultural insight into something that feels specific rather than generic.

The Cultural Zine itself functions as a case study in this translation. Rather than presenting trends as abstract observations, it materializes them through a highly considered visual system — one that uses design not just to communicate insight, but to embody it. The concept of “Mini Worlds” is not only described; it is experienced through the fragmentation and cohesion of the design language itself.

This is where the appointment and the output intersect.

It’s one thing to produce a report about culture. It’s another to demonstrate, through design, how that culture might be engaged. In that sense, Kasim’s role is less about oversight and more about ensuring that insight and execution are not treated as separate phases, but as part of the same creative act.

There is also a broader organizational implication here. As agencies expand their offerings into experience, innovation, performance, and beyond, the risk of fragmentation increases. Different teams, different outputs, different standards. A role dedicated to art and design becomes a way to maintain coherence across that complexity. To ensure that as capabilities scale, the work doesn’t dilute.

This is particularly relevant for a network like M+C Saatchi, whose positioning is built around “Cultural Power.” If culture is the terrain, then design is the interface and the point at which brands meet audiences. And in a landscape defined by choice, that interface must do more than function. It must signal.

Kasim himself frames design as a “universal language,” one that connects strategy, storytelling, and craft across markets. It’s a familiar idea, but one that takes on new weight in a fragmented media environment. If audiences are retreating into smaller, more defined communities, then the challenge for brands is not to speak louder, but to speak more precisely.

Precision, however, is not something that can be automated.

It requires context. It requires perspective. It requires a point of view that understands not just what culture looks like, but what it feels like from the inside.

That may ultimately be the clearest takeaway from this moment. Not that AI is reshaping the industry — that much is already evident — but that it is forcing a re-evaluation of what cannot be automated. And in doing so, it is elevating disciplines like art direction and design from supporting roles to central ones.

In other words, the future of creativity may not be defined by how much we can produce, but by how well we can discern. And increasingly, that discernment has a designer’s eye.

The post M+C Saatchi Bets on Design in the AI Era appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I still feel a bit like a tourist in the city. That feeling allows me to maintain a sense of wonder about things that routine usually makes disappear. Trying not to lose that sense of wonder is fundamental in photographic practice.

My favorite artists are those who find something worth their attention in the unexpected. They see potential where the rest of us don’t, and then frame it within their practice so that we suddenly see it too. This is the essence of street photography, and why I love it so dearly; photographers capturing the mundane and suddenly making it beautiful. Buenos Aires based photographer José De Rocco is a master at this art form, patrolling the streets of the city on his commute and creating graphic vignettes where others would find nothing.

This skill of De Rocco’s is flexed no better than in his “bondi” photo series, in which he takes tightly cropped photos of the backs of the buses in Buenos Aires (called bondi). He then digitally removes all of the ads, signage, and other additional markings from the image, so just the composition of the bus itself remains. The finished products become satisfying explorations of shape and color that are still identifiable as buses, yet simultaneously exist as standalone images.

De Rocco expounds upon this series and his photography practice below, his responses edited lightly for clarity and length.

When did you first start taking photos? What made you pick up a camera in the first place?

I started with a conscious search around 2007 or so. I say “conscious search” because even before that, I carried a small camera with me all the time, even when I went out with friends.

But I remember a photographer friend, Diego Medina, showed me some photos he was taking and I became hooked. I had this strong feeling that I wanted to run out and do the same thing. In some way, I needed to replicate it. This is something that still happens to me when I see works that move me: I immediately want to go out and take photographs in that style.

This was also reinforced by a practice I carried out for several years. It came from seeing in museums how art students stand in front of paintings by masters like Velázquez, Goya, and Rembrandt and literally copy the work. When I saw that, I thought: Why not do the same with my photographic practice? Take the photographers who interest me as references and copy them, or rather, try to. Study their images and go out to replicate them. Think about how they see, what they see, where they stand when making a shot, maybe even what equipment they use, and based on that, make my own photographs.

Even if the intention is to copy something, the images end up having my own imprint because not only am I an individual, but I also exist in a different set of coordinates in the world than the references. That approach not only opened up a wide field in terms of my way of seeing, but it also strengthened my interest in art history in general, and in the history of photography in particular.

What is your typical photographic process like? Where do you usually find inspiration, and what kinds of images or scenes attract your attention?

My photographic process is one of daily production. I’m someone who carries a backpack with a camera everywhere I go. That always allows me to have more material, more possibilities, more variety, and more fun.

From that material that accumulates over the years, ideas emerge; thematic lines that I pursue in parallel. Sometimes I get more excited about one and focus on it for a while, then I let it rest and move on to another idea that has been circulating in the background. And alongside all that, I always allow myself to make images without a prior idea. This is what really shaped this process that works for me and keeps me entertained at the same time.

I’m someone who carries a backpack with a camera everywhere I go. That always allows me to have more material, more possibilities, more variety, and more fun.

It seems like city streets are a constant source of inspiration for you. Can you explain what attracts you so much about urban life and the streets in your work?

I’m attracted to the urban environment because it’s where I move through every day. To get to my job, I have to pass through those spaces full of visual stimuli. But those stimuli are everywhere; what interests me most is creating images wherever I am. I move through urban spaces a lot, but if I had to stay at home for a long period of time, I would still take photographs.

I’m reminded of the book Stems by Lee Friedlander, whom many people quickly associate with urban photography. But of course, he’s someone who photographs everything, all the time. That book came out during a period when, after a leg operation I believe, he couldn’t leave his house for a while, and he ended up making a series of photographs of flower stems in vases. It’s a beautiful book.

It doesn’t matter where or what, what matters is how.

Why did you start photographing the backs of buses? What attracted you to them?

I started several years ago, during a period when my photographic interests were strongly influenced by geometry and color, and by the idea of including very few objects in the image. Over time, that idea changed radically, and the intention of cleaning up the image evolved into making it as complex as possible.

At that time, I got this idea to photograph bondis, as we call urban buses in Buenos Aires. The seed of the idea came from a school bus. School buses here are orange, and they don’t have as much information printed on their surfaces as public transit buses. When I photographed the school bus, I found an attractive design, clean and very striking. But the problem came when I tried to replicate that photograph with other buses. There was too much information competing and saturating the image: advertisements, informational text, line numbers, internal fleet numbers, and so on. Since my main idea was to highlight the base design of the buses, I decided to digitally remove any information that wasn’t purely part of that design.

This work was forgotten for several years, but last year I decided to post it on Instagram and it had a response I really didn’t expect. That push made me want to resume the project, and here we are with new things emerging (like this interview, for example!) and if everything goes well, the possibility of a photo book publication this year.

What makes the aesthetic of bondi so distinctive and striking to you?

I’ve lived and worked in Buenos Aires for 23 years, and even though that’s a long time, I still feel a bit like a tourist in the city. (I’m originally from Pinamar, a coastal city in the province of Buenos Aires.) That feeling allows me to maintain a sense of wonder about things that routine usually makes disappear. Trying not to lose that sense of wonder is fundamental in photographic practice.

The particularity of the buses has several facets. On the one hand, there is the purely visual aspect. The framing I use and the “cleaning” I apply to the image transforms something functional into something close to geometric abstraction. Not only do I find that attractive, but I’m also interested in how something can be taken out of context with a simple idea.

On the other hand, there is an emotional dimension. There is a certain attachment to specific bus lines that one feels as part of life, because they naturally accompany us in our daily activities, routes, and experiences. (It’s worth mentioning that here each bus line has its own design, and there can even be different designs within the same line.) There are moments in life when one uses a particular line a lot and develops a kind of bond with it. From that comes a nostalgia for the bondi and for certain lines in particular.

There is also a social dimension. Public transportation is mostly used by working people. We cross paths with others who live experiences similar to ours, people who feel the city not necessarily from a place of enjoyment, but often from one of subsistence.

And finally, and most importantly, the urban landscape of the city would not be the same without the presence of the buses. Those patches of color moving through the streets are a signature mark.

The post José De Rocco Brings New Meaning to “Street” Photography with a Unique Eye for the Everyday appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When platforms scale, their brands often splinter. What begins as a simple, focused identity can struggle to hold the weight of product expansion, acquisitions, new audiences, and shifting expectations. In that sense, Koto’s recent brand evolution for GoFundMe is less about reinvention and more about consolidation, about asking whether one idea can meaningfully stretch across an entire ecosystem without losing clarity.

Following its acquisition of Classy — now GoFundMe Pro — the platform has grown beyond individual fundraising into a broader network spanning personal and nonprofit giving. With new offerings including Giving Funds, Profiles, and Intelligent Ask Amounts, the organization needed a brand system capable of showing up with versatility while maintaining cohesion across audiences and products. The solution Koto and GoFundMe arrived at centers on a deceptively simple premise: help adds up.

At the heart of the new system is the Progress Circle, a graphic device inspired by the fundraiser progress indicator that has been embedded in the platform since its earliest days. Historically, it functioned as a utilitarian UI component for visualizing monetary goals. In the evolved identity, it becomes something more symbolic. The circle is segmented to represent different parts of the GoFundMe community: fundraisers, supporters, nonprofits, moving the world forward incrementally, piece by piece. What’s compelling is not the introduction of a new icon, but the elevation of an existing one. Rather than inventing symbolism from scratch, the design extracts meaning from behavior that users already recognize.

Caroline Fox, Creative Director at Koto, describes the challenge succinctly: building an entire ecosystem around a single idea is one of the hardest tasks in brand design. Simplicity, in this context, is not reductive; it is structural. The Progress Circle now scales, frames, and shifts across applications, functioning as both marketing device and product language. It even informed product design exploration, creating continuity between what users see and what they experience. That integration between brand and interface signals a broader shift in how digital identities are built today. They are no longer wrappers around products; they are embedded systems.

The logo refinement follows the same logic. Rather than overhaul the mark, the team subtly uncovered the Progress Circle already latent within its ray, strengthening curves and reinforcing the connection between symbol and system. This approach reflects a certain design maturity: evolution through excavation rather than replacement. From the same wordmark, GoFundMe Pro was articulated, creating a clearer brand architecture that distinguishes audiences while maintaining familial consistency.

Color, too, was reconsidered without abandoning equity. The palette grows more vibrant while remaining rooted in green, nodding to the platform’s grassroots origins. Supporting hues expand into a hopeful spectrum, applied through a duotone approach that improves legibility and accessibility. A custom typeface, GoFundMe Sans, echoes the circular forms of the Progress Circle, embedding warmth and clarity into the typographic voice. None of these elements shout; they reinforce.

What makes this evolution noteworthy is how it navigates a particular tension inherent to community-driven platforms: scale versus intimacy. With more than 200 million people represented in its ecosystem and over $40 billion raised to date, GoFundMe operates at an extraordinary magnitude. Yet its cultural power lies in small, individual acts of help. The new system attempts to visualize that paradox — that massive impact accrues through incremental contributions.

Art direction and imagery are guided by humanity, community, and optimism, while the verbal identity differentiates between GoFundMe as Helpful Guide and GoFundMe Pro as Helpful Partner. The distinction is subtle but significant. It acknowledges that tone must flex alongside function, especially when speaking to individuals seeking personal support versus nonprofit organizations operating at an institutional scale.

Stepping back, the broader design question is whether one graphic device can truly hold an ecosystem this expansive. Historically, brands at similar scale have leaned toward modular complexity — multiple icons, patterns, or highly flexible design systems. Here, the bet is on concentration. Everything gravitates around momentum, around the idea that progress is cumulative. It is a disciplined choice in a moment when many digital brands opt for maximal expressiveness.

In the evolving landscape of platform branding, where acquisitions and product launches can fracture coherence, Koto’s work with GoFundMe suggests an alternative path: deepen the core rather than diversify the surface. It is a reminder that sometimes the most resilient brand moves are not about adding more, but about finding the one idea strong enough to carry what already exists.

The post Koto Rebrands GoFundMe Around a Simple Truth: Help Adds Up appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The film’s narrative is striking not simply because it depicts aspects of menstruation often glossed over, from postpartum bleeding to discomfort during breastfeeding, but because it invites a broader conversation about the informational void surrounding intimate health. Creative decisions in this piece are grounded not in shock for its own sake, but in the texture of everyday life: questions that many people have silently carried; how does a tampon actually go in? Why can bleeding happen while breastfeeding? What does it mean when blood clots occur? — are voiced without shame, asking audiences to confront the absurdity of how little one is taught about their own body’s rhythms.

This campaign extends a lineage of female-focused advertising that has increasingly prioritized honesty over idealization. Bodyform’s work with Libresse and Essity has, for years, pushed back against the cultural scripts that minimize menstruation, from taboo to punchline, and repositioned intimate care as a subject worthy of nuance and narrative complexity. In Never Just a Period, the choice of creative devices — including a female-only orchestra that reacts to scenes like a kind of modern Greek chorus — is a reminder that persuasion in advertising can be cultural rather than commercial. It frames menstruation not as a problem to be solved, but as a dimension of human experience that has too often been minimized or misunderstood.

What distinguishes this work is its respect for information as an inseparable aspect of creative expression. Too many campaigns trade on vagueness; this one trades in specificity and in doing so, opens up space for audiences to feel seen rather than spoken at. Advertising, at its best, is an act of shared understanding: a way of rendering the familiar newly visible or newly acknowledged. Never Just a Period isn’t merely a call for better products or better marketing; it is a call for better knowledge, better conversation, and a richer cultural context for experiences that have long been relegated to whisper and myth. In a media environment where intimate health is still fringed in silence, the campaign suggests that creativity must not only tell stories, it must surface truths.

The post Designing Honesty: Bodyform and the Power of Informational Creativity appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

What’s your creative background? What was your inroad into photography? 

I started off by taking a film production course like 10 or 15 years ago and I enjoyed that, but I found filmmaking was too reliant on other people, and the Irish weather is unreliable. So I got a BA in visual arts in Scotland, and I couldn’t draw very well but I loved photography, so I specialized in that for the last two years. That’s where I started. I was doing street photography for a long time, and then COVID happened so I couldn’t do it anymore and I had to improvise. I started building sets in my house with my parents, so that’s how the set design came into the equation and I’ve developed that more from there.

What was it about street photography that you enjoyed so much when you first started taking pictures? 

I enjoyed capturing people in transit, unstaged— which is kind of ironic because of what I do now. But I just really liked exploring unstaged moments, it felt kind of like fishing a little bit. And I always did it in Ireland which is quite nice. It wasn’t always on the streets as well, I could have been in the countryside or anything; I just love capturing moments, slices of reality. But I didn’t enjoy the stress of photographing people without their permission. 

Obviously your current work is very calculated and highly staged, but I still see aspects of your street photography influence. It’s almost like you’re manufacturing slice of life moments within the heightened, hyper-colorful, and whimsical world you’ve built. 

Yes, there’s more control, but a lot of my inspiration still comes from something I might see on the street and I’ll make a note of it and I might incorporate it into a set. Or even just something someone’s wearing. One time I saw my friend wearing a leopard-print jumper and green trousers and I really liked it, so I researched wallpaper that looked like that. So I still get a lot of inspiration from the street and I’m taking that with me into my sets. 

Where would you say your love of vibrant color and maximalist pattern mixing comes from?

I’ve always really loved color; almost being seduced by color. Even the clothes I wear are really colorful. I can’t pinpoint where it actually came from though. My mum really loves color, she’s really into interior design and art and all that, so that probably had an influence on me. I just research wallpaper a lot. I spend hours and hours on the internet, and if I see wallpaper I like, I’ll get it and I’ll build around that. Or if I have a quirky prop, I’ll build the story and color palette around the prop, or I’ll paint the prop a certain color to go with the color scheme. But there’s definitely a science behind loving color, there’s some sort of genetic science behind it. 

Can you share more about your “Homebound With My Parents” project that you created during COVID lockdown? 

I couldn’t photograph the world outside, so I had to bring the world into my house. I missed doing street photography and I wanted to do that, but I was stuck inside with my parents and they were the only people I could coax. But it worked well because they were happy to do it. 

I could still buy stuff online, so I started researching. I only wanted to do one shoot to see how it turned out, and it went really well. It was casual, there was no pressure because it was just my parents.  If I was photographing models, it wouldn’t have worked as well. So I got some momentum, and a few weeks later my mum was helping me, she was like, “Have you seen this wallpaper?” “Have you tried this prop?” 

The whole nostalgia thing came from being in lockdown for a long time, I started to feel really nostalgic. I read there was a phenomenon for people to feel nostalgic during COVID because we couldn’t really do anything. So that’s where the retro nostalgia came into the photos, and the colors and the humor were an antidote to the gloom of the COVID lockdowns. I built the sets all over my house, to my mother’s detriment, for the first three years. Thankfully I got a studio finally. 

It also seems like you’re drawn to using animals as your subjects. What is it about the specific animals you feature that you’re drawn to? 

My friend has a rescue lurcher (I don’t know if you have lurchers in America, it’s basically a greyhound) that I photograph a lot. His name is Bobo. I just like that he’s elegant and goofy; those two things attracted me to him and made me want to photograph him. He’s a beautiful dog, so I wanted to capture his elegance, but also his goofiness, in the pictures. There’s a kind of spontaneity with animals that you get with street photography. It brings a bit more chaos into the set that you don’t usually get with most humans. The unpredictability; they can do wacky stuff which is quite fun. But you’ve got to be fast when you’re photographing them because they move fast. In a way, that’s a bit like street photography because you have to capture them doing something that wasn’t planned. 

I cold-approach people now when I see a cool dog. Like if I see a person with a Dalmatian, I’ll get out of my car and be like, “Can I photograph your dog?” 

Another motif present in a lot of your photos is religious iconography, but with a kitschy levity. Can you elaborate on why you include that imagery in so much of your work? 

It’s more about the nostalgia I feel tied to those images. Those images were everywhere when I was growing up, and I found them very perplexing. Who are these people? But they’re also kind of beautiful images. But I’m neutral on the whole religion thing. I’m not really religious, it’s more about the Irishness and the nostalgia part of it, rather than promoting religion. I don’t have a strong opinion either way, it’s just there, which is how it was growing up in Ireland in the 90s. It was omnipresent, religious iconography was everywhere. And there’s something quite beautiful about it if you take the religious aspects out of it. 

What’s your ideation and development process like for a given photograph? How are you coming up with the ideas for these scenes you’re creating and building and then bringing to life with your camera? 

It takes me almost six weeks to make one image, which is a lot of work. My ideas come from a lot of different things. I might see something on the street that I’ll make a mental note of, or I might get inspired by a movie scene. I get a lot of ideas at night time as well when I’m trying to fall asleep. Even if I’m in a charity shop (I think you guys call them thrift shops) I might find a prop that I’m really interested in and then I’ll build a story around it. So that’ll be the guts of it, and then I’ll do research for wallpaper for ages and ages and ages and then carpet. Then I’ll build the set, which will take me a week or two. Then I’ll take test shots, test shots, test shots to see what works and see what doesn’t work. I’ll paint props, take props out, try different props. Then I’ll do the main shoot which is the fastest part, it only lasts like 20 minutes. The actual photoshoot is my least favorite part of it, I don’t actually enjoy it that much, believe it or not. The editing is my favorite part of it. I’ll spend a week on editing, I treat it like a painting. 

Do you have an example of an eye-catching object you found at a charity shop that you then built a shoot around? 

I might see a 70s workout bicycle and I might get an idea to paint it purple. And I’m like, “Oh, that could be good for a shoot.” I’ll keep it in my studio and I might use it straight away or in six months it might blend with another idea, or might just build an entire set around it.

The post The Technicolor Surrealism of Enda Burke’s Photographic Worlds appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

That sensibility feels deeply embedded in Bruce Mau Design’s new identity for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, a rebrand that arrives not as a dramatic departure, but as a thoughtful recalibration of how one of Canada’s most significant art institutions presents itself to the public today. Developed in close collaboration with the McMichael team, the new identity and website reposition the gallery as a contemporary, living destination for Canadian art; one that honours its roots while acknowledging how the definition of “Canadian art” has expanded, diversified, and evolved.

For decades, the McMichael has been closely associated with the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, and Norval Morrisseau; names that carry enormous cultural weight. Yet, as Executive Director and Chief Curator Sarah Milroy notes, the institution itself has undergone a significant transformation. Its exhibitions now foreground contemporary voices, centuries of Indigenous artistic practice, and new scholarship that challenges narrow or outdated narratives of national identity. Public perception, however, had not fully kept pace with that shift. The rebrand, Milroy explains, is a visual and verbal articulation of who the McMichael has already become: vibrant, inquisitive, welcoming, and committed to championing Canadian art in all its forms.

Rather than treating branding as a surface-level refresh, Bruce Mau Design approached the project as a system, one capable of holding history and change in tension. The resulting identity includes a redrawn heritage logo, a modern typographic suite, a vibrant colour palette, and integrated motion and campaign applications that extend across exhibitions, marketing materials, and the redesigned website. Together, these elements create a framework that feels both grounded and alive, balancing institutional credibility with openness and curiosity.

One of the most telling decisions was the careful redrawing of the McMichael’s existing logo. Rather than replacing it, the team preserved its handcrafted warmth, pairing it with a clean sans-serif typeface sourced from Canadian foundries. As Laura Stein, Chief Creative Officer at Bruce Mau Design, explains, the goal was not to erase history, but to articulate a larger brand idea, one that invites dialogue across eras and cultures while remaining balanced, approachable, and timeless. It’s a choice that reflects an understanding of trust: institutions like the McMichael don’t need to prove relevance through novelty, but through clarity of voice.

The system’s visual language reinforces that balance. A structured grid provides rigour, while bold uses of colour — often drawn directly from the artworks themselves — introduce moments of surprise. Typography with Indigenous syllabic support ensures the identity can communicate inclusively with diverse audiences, embedding accessibility and respect directly into the design rather than treating them as afterthoughts. The result is an identity that feels confident without being prescriptive, expressive without becoming ornamental.

What stands out most is the way the identity positions the McMichael not as a static repository of national heritage, but as an active site of dialogue. Through artist interviews and a pop-up studio with staff, the design team uncovered what truly defines the institution: its setting, its sense of welcome, and its ability to spark conversation. That insight became central to the brand idea, an “invitation to explore”, which carries through the system’s openness and flexibility.

From a broader perspective, the McMichael rebrand feels emblematic of where Canadian cultural branding is heading. It resists spectacle in favour of substance, and treats identity as an infrastructure for meaning rather than a vehicle for promotion. As a Canadian designer, it’s encouraging to see a national institution embrace a visual language that acknowledges complexity and one that makes space for many histories, many voices, and many futures without collapsing them into a single narrative.

In an era when museum branding often leans toward global sameness, Bruce Mau Design’s work for the McMichael offers a quieter, more enduring proposition: that a brand can be contemporary without being trendy, inclusive without being vague, and confident without being loud. It is a reminder that the most effective identities, particularly those tied to culture, are not designed to shout. They are designed to hold.

Images courtesy of Bruce Mao Design, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection

The post Bruce Mau Design Reimagines the McMichael for a Changing Canada appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Not knowing who exactly was responsible for these signs at first, Anderson began taking screenshots of them, incidentally starting somewhat of an archive. In time, he identified the artist as Ron Miller, and put his collection of about 250 Google Street View screenshots of his signs dating back to 2009 on his website. He also created a virtual Ron Signs map plotting out all of them throughout the city, and published a Twitter thread to share his findings that began to amass attention around Detroit and beyond.

After the project when somewhat viral, even people like me all the way out in Los Angeles discovered Anderson’s Ron Signs archive and got exposure to the Detroit legend’s work. Obviously I needed to learn more, and was able to speak to Anderson directly about his process. Our conversation is below, edited lightly for clarity and length.

When and how did you first discover Ron Miller’s work, and what was it about his signs that captivated you so much?

I started the Ron Signs project in mid-2025. For my photography practice, I use Google Maps for location scouting with Google Street View to see what different areas and towns look like so I know what I’m getting myself into. But I also like to use Google Street View to check out what’s going on in a different part of the country or a different part of the world. Since I’m originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, outside of Detroit, I like using Google Street View to see changes to Detroit from the earliest legible photos that go back to around 2009.

I have an appreciation for vernacular art and vernacular sign painting, especially murals in places where you wouldn’t think murals would be. I like finding that stuff, so I kept collecting these screenshots from the major boulevards and streets around Detroit comparing 2009 to the present day, and I kept seeing all of these signs that looked to be made by the same person. Ron’s style is definitely identifiable— the chrome lettering, the block letters, he has his own typology. His A’s all look the same, his number 7’s all look the same. In the back of my head I was thinking it’d be interesting to know who painted all of these. Then I found a tire place that’s no longer there with a painting of Obama on it and the Detroit skyline wrapped around the side. It had everything that Ron’s work has, right down to the chrome lettering, paintings of people’s faces, a car tire with a big rim on it. Then below Obama’s head it said, “Ron” and Ron’s phone number.

I did some sleuthing online and found an Instagram post from this guy named Jordan Zielke, a sign painter in Detroit who goes by Motown Sign Co., who was a mentee of Ron’s. So I finally had a face to the name of this guy who’s done all of this amazing stuff.

I decided to call the number of Ron’s that I’d found, and Ron picked up! I talked to him very briefly, it was probably about a five to ten-minute phone call. He said he’s from Detroit, he briefly went to the University of Michigan, and he started sign painting in around 1978. At that point I had already put together this Twitter thread laying everything out, and then it really blew up. I had people from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press wanting to talk to me, I did an interview with Michigan Public Radio. Everybody was reaching out to me wanting to talk to Ron so I became Ron’s publicist there for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t want to give out Ron’s number. He doesn’t have an email address, he doesn’t have a website. He operates by word of mouth and he’s got his van that has his number on it that he drives around Detroit.

Do you and Ron still chat? Is he still working? Do you know what he’s up to now?

I haven’t talked to Ron since probably October, but we were talking every day when the Twitter thread first blew up. Some time in late 2024 he broke his leg after falling off of a ladder while he was painting. He has apprentices that work with him so he has them up on the ladders. So recently he’s been mostly airbrushing on the side of cars and T-shirts. He’s had tons of apprentices over the years, and he was seemingly an apprentice too for this group of Black Detroit sign painters. He sent me all of these photos from his archive from this barbecue of Black Detroit sign painters they had every year, pictures from his snapshot camera going back into the 80s and 90s of stuff around Detroit that’s no longer there. Part of the reason I’m going back to 2009 in Google Street View is because a lot of these buildings have either been painted over or torn down. I’m not an archivist or anything, but I think Ron’s work is so unique and so definitive of Detroit visual culture, but nobody has ever written anything on him. So that’s also what made me want to dig into this project and devote so much time to it.

In mid-August when I posted the Twitter thread originally, business owners in Detroit began reaching out to me, asking to hire Ron to do stuff on the inside of their businesses, on the outside, tons of stuff. So I think he’s taken advantage of that. The buzz helped in getting his name out there and helped get him more work after he fell off of his ladder.

What is it specifically about Ron’s painting style that you is so intriguing to you and so many others?

Everything he did is so varied. Not just numbers and letters and his chrome styling, but he painted car parts, painted people’s faces, painted food. He is clearly an incredibly talented guy, and I couldn’t believe there was no writing about him. I couldn’t believe that a writer in Detroit, someone for the Detroit Free Press or the Detroit News had never done a story on him. Even looking back on newspapers.com I couldn’t find anything on Ron.

Since this project has taken off have you traveled to Detroit to meet Ron or see his work in person yet?

I want to very, very badly. I was back in Michigan for Thanksgiving and I was going to try to go into Detroit one day, but it did’t work out (I’ve got an eight-month-old son!). But next time I go back to Detroit I want to give Ron a heads up, grab him lunch, and then take some photos. I just need to find the time, it keeps slipping away from me!

Do you see a next chapter for your Ron Signs project? I know you’ve already amassed around 250 screenshots from Google Street View, do you have any ambitions to convert this collection into a book, for example?

Right now I’m pleased where it is. I invested a lot of time into this project in a short amount of time. I have a kind of obsessive thing where I get really into something, and then go all in. This was hours and hours and hours of going down Gratiot Ave. and Seven Mile and Six Mile, and Eight Mile from 2009. And got to talk to Ron! But I would definitely love to, one, meet Ron in person, finally, and two, I’d love to take some photos of his work myself.

I feel a bit uncomfortably myself publishing any book of this project because it’s Ron’s work, even though I would be taking photos of it. A lot of his work his gone already, permanently, like I said. Easily around 50% of those images from Google Street View is of work that is no longer there. So a book would be incomplete with current day 2026 photography. But Ron has his own archive of photos, and he told me that he’s interested in doing a larger book of Black Detroit sign painters. He doesn’t just have an archive of his own work, he’s got all the guys that he did the yearly barbecue with and that apprenticed under him, and that he apprenticed under, so he’s got a huge archive. If it’s his desire, I want Ron to fulfill putting together a book of that work, and if I can be of any help in any way, I would love it. But it’s Ron’s work, so I want him to be the who decides what gets to happen with it.

What I hope is that my work here is the first step in getting his work more widely known in an archival or book form. Something a bit more steady than Google Street View images on some guy’s website.

The post Andrew Anderson Has Compiled an Online Archive of the Detroit Legend Ron Signs appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When culture grows unstable, design reveals what it values. This year, those values surfaced clearly: a return to craft, a suspicion of easy optimism, a renewed seriousness about language, systems, and responsibility. What designers made, and what people gravitated toward, formed a quiet conversation with the world beyond the studio, one shaped by politics, technology, conflict, and a growing hunger for meaning over momentum.

This was not a year of aesthetic trends so much as a year of reckoning. Politics hardened. Language fractured. Institutions wobbled. And design, whether it wanted to or not, was pulled into the middle of it all. What emerged wasn’t escapism or spectacle, but a quieter, more deliberate posture: one marked by craft, restraint, and an insistence on meaning over momentum.

The return of a Trump administration set this tone early. Whether one experienced it as déjà vu, rupture, or grim inevitability, it reinforced a feeling that many Americans already carried: that institutions are fragile, language is contested, and nothing is neutral. Design absorbed that tension. Color became charged. Typography grew heavier with meaning. Systems came under scrutiny. In politically volatile moments, design doesn’t chase novelty. It reaches for symbols that anchor, provoke, or clarify.

Across branding, typography, illustration, and print, creatives pushed back — against speed, against sameness, against the idea that efficiency is the highest virtue. Instead, they leaned into craft, research, physicality, and responsibility. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes messily. Often polarizingly.

Which is why the backlash to Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year, Cloud Dancer (aka white), matters more than the color itself. The criticism wasn’t rooted in color preference; it was cultural dissonance. Creatives bristled at what felt like emotional misalignment, an aesthetic optimism that rang hollow against economic anxiety, global conflict, and political fatigue. The response revealed a shift that’s been building all year: audiences are no longer willing to accept feel-good narratives without context. Even color has to earn its optimism now.

That same skepticism greeted moments of cultural spectacle. Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show — measured, symbolic, unapologetically dense — divided viewers precisely because it refused easy consumption. It didn’t explain itself. It demanded attention. In 2025, subtlety was no longer safe. It became confrontational. Subtlety became provocative in a culture conditioned for immediacy.

Design followed suit.

Craft reasserted itself, not as nostalgia, but as refusal. Analog processes, tactile materials, and visibly human labor carried renewed weight in a world increasingly flattened by automation. PRINT’s profile of miniature knitter Julie Steiner resonated not because it was quaint, but because it was exacting, slow, and indifferent to scale.

The resurgence of print media fits the same pattern. Book covers regained cultural gravity, not as collectibles but as editorial statements, evidenced by the continued appetite for features such as 100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 and monthly book-cover design roundups.

Packaging, too, became a fixation, particularly among Gen Alpha. Raised on screens, they gravitated toward physical design not for novelty, but for grounding. Tactility became reassurance.

Slowness, once framed as inefficiency, began to look like care.

Typography carried some of the heaviest lifting this year. Type ceased to function solely as decoration and evolved into infrastructure. Wayfinding, legibility, and research-driven systems drew outsized attention because they addressed a shared anxiety: navigating a world that feels increasingly illegible. A deep dive into the New York City subway map struck a nerve for exactly that reason.

In an era of misinformation and eroded trust, clarity itself became political. So did empathy. So did accessibility. These weren’t trends so much as responses to a world that feels increasingly difficult to navigate, literally and metaphorically.

Clarity, in 2025, was not passive. It was political.

That sense of responsibility extended into cultural legacy projects as well. A type-roots-led identity imagining a new chapter for Black Sabbath’s guitarist resonated as an act of stewardship rather than branding, especially poignant in the wake of Ozzy Osbourne’s death.

Sports design offered another mirror. Women’s sports, the Olympics, and the looming 2026 World Cup transformed visual identity into a global language of power and politics. The dissection of FIFA World Cup posters made clear that this work is no longer ornamental; it’s interpretive.

All of this unfolded under the shadow of AI, which reshaped creative labor faster than ethics could keep pace. Designers experimented, adapted, and negotiated, with unease as the dominant emotion. Efficiency collided with authorship. Automation collided with trust. 2025 didn’t produce consensus on AI, but it did produce clarity: tools are not neutral, and pretending otherwise only benefits the systems deploying them.

Global conflict sharpened that awareness. With humanitarian crises unfolding in real time, neutrality began to feel indistinguishable from avoidance. Designers asked harder questions about responsibility: when beauty comforts and when it distracts, and what it means to make work in a world that feels visibly fragile.

Perhaps the most telling shift, though, had little to do with form. Creatives wanted each other again. After years of remote work, algorithmic validation, and parasocial inspiration, there was a palpable hunger for physical presence and shared discourse. Smaller gatherings mattered more than massive platforms. Conversation mattered more than reach. PRINT’s strongest engagement followed that instinct; longer reads, deeper criticism, fewer easy answers.

So if there’s a takeaway from 2025, it isn’t a style forecast. It’s a values signal. Taken together, these signals point less to a singular aesthetic direction than to a collective recalibration.

When culture grows louder, design grows more deliberate.

When systems feel unstable, creatives reach for structure.

When speed dominates, slowness becomes a form of care.

As 2026 approaches, the question isn’t whether these patterns will continue; they will. The question is whether the industry will build frameworks strong enough to support them, or simply aestheticize them and move on.

2025 didn’t make design louder.

It held it more accountable to honesty.

And judging by what resonated most, that honesty is exactly what people sought.

What 2026 Is Likely to Bring

Looking ahead, several trajectories feel probable, though not guaranteed:

• Craft will continue to evolve, blending analog processes with selective digital augmentation rather than rejecting technology outright.
• Typography will grow even more civic-minded, particularly in public systems, accessibility, and education.
• Design criticism will sharpen, especially around AI governance, labor ethics, and environmental responsibility.
• Sports and global events will remain major cultural canvases, with designers expected to balance celebration and critique.
• Print media will persist, not as a dominant mass medium, but as a marker of care and permanence.

2025 reminded us that design is not neutral, frictionless, or purely visual. It is emotional. Political. Physical. Human.

The year’s clearest successes came when designers embraced responsibility, research, and craft with care, and spoke honestly. Its failures emerged when speed replaced thought, or when tools outpaced ethics.

If 2026 asks anything of us, it may be this: to decide what we are willing to stand behind — not just what we are capable of producing.

And if PRINT’s readership is any indication, that conversation is far from over. Here are the top ten articles of 2025:

1. Red: The Color of Power, Passion, and Populism
2. A Visual Study of the New York City Subway Map
3. 100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024
4. The White Lotus, Season Three: Opening Titles for Plains of Yonder
5. Brand Design Predictions for 2025
6. 30 Best Book Covers: April 2025
7. A Type-Roots-Led Identity for the Godfather of Heavy Metal
8. Chef Nikki Zheng on Shaping the Future of Omakase
9. 2026 FIFA World Cup Posters
10. Miniature Knitter Julie Steiner Reimagines Iconic Sweaters in Itty Bitty Form

The post 2025 Year in Review: Craft, Conflict, and Cultural Weight appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Every December, Pantone hands us a mood. Or at least, that’s the intent. The Color of the Year arrives not only as a pigment but as a cultural barometer, a collective Rorschach test for what we think, feel, fear, and hope for in the year ahead. This time, the reading is white. Or rather, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer, an “ethereal,” “billowy,” “vaporized” white introduced as 2026’s Color of the Year because it “quiet[s] the mind,” symbolizes a “fresh start,” and promises to “peel away layers of outmoded thinking” in a world desperate for peace.

Pantone frames Cloud Dancer as a whispered respite — a soft, aerated exhale in a decade defined by overstimulation. I believe Pantone is correct in diagnosing our exhaustion. But they have misread the room in prescribing white as the cure. As soon as Cloud Dancer drifted into public view, the reaction was swift: Why white? Why now? Why this gesture toward simplicity when so little about our present reality feels simple? People aren’t upset about the color. They’re upset about the symbolism.

Pantone argues that Cloud Dancer represents our “desire for a fresh start,” a conscious shift toward rest, reflection, and unity, positioning it as a calming force in a “frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration.” This is an honorable aspiration — and a necessary one. We are overwhelmed. We are craving clarity. And yes, we are overdue for collective decompression. The world is loud enough to rattle bones. A quiet color, in theory, makes sense. But here is the paradox: we are living in a time when neutrality is read as avoidance and simplicity as erasure. Cloud Dancer arrives not into a peaceful void but into a cultural moment charged with political polarization, climate grief, economic instability, global conflict, burnout, and distrust.

Pantone calls it “a conscious statement of simplification” and a hue offering “a promise of clarity.” But for many, simplicity feels like a luxury we can’t collectively afford. White, in this climate, becomes more than a hue. It becomes an invitation, whether intended or not, to step away from the complexities that urgently require our attention.

A color becomes controversial when its message clashes with lived experience.

Pantone describes Cloud Dancer as a “lofty white” centered on “peace,” “calm,” and “contentment,” but to people juggling economic precarity, fighting for rights, navigating online toxicity, or absorbing daily global crises, tonal purity can feel less like serenity and more like disregard. The frustration isn’t aesthetic, it’s psychological. Calm feels like complacency.

Pantone asks us to turn inward, step away from demands, embrace stillness, and recognize that “true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being.” Yet many communities still fight to be seen, heard, and protected. For them, rest is not a shared cultural experience; it’s a privilege unevenly distributed. Meanwhile, the symbolism of white is never neutral in public discourse. Even the idea of white as a blank slate reflects one cultural lens — a Western, minimalist framing of purity and renewal. Pantone calls Cloud Dancer “devoid of artifice,” a “natural white.”

Whiteness, symbolically, is never devoid of cultural weight. And beyond that, people want a color that acknowledges collective transformation, not an escape from it. Pantone speaks of reimagining our future and experimenting beyond boundaries, opening the door to imagination and innovation. Yet Cloud Dancer, though elegant, does not visually embody experimentation or boundary-breaking. It embodies retreat.

The deeper I sit with Cloud Dancer, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t a courageous or even particularly insightful choice; rather, it’s a privileged one. A tone-deaf gesture dressed in the language of calm. Pantone speaks of Cloud Dancer as a hue suited for those seeking serenity, spaciousness, and “true strength” in simply being. But stillness is not accessible to everyone, and framing it as a universal aspiration ignores who can afford to pause and who cannot. For many, a white so airy it “vaporizes” into nothing isn’t a balm, it’s an erasure of the urgency, inequity, and instability shaping daily life. In this context, the very softness Pantone celebrates reads as fragility, or worse, detachment.

This disconnect becomes even more pronounced when you consider the commercial machine quietly humming beneath the announcement. Pantone positions the Color of the Year as a reflection of the cultural moment, but the reveal comes bundled with a slate of highly produced partnerships — a Motorola phone finished in Cloud Dancer’s refined white adorned with Swarovski® crystals, Post-it Notes built around a “Neutrality Collection,” a Command Brand hardware line, a Play-Doh edition, Joybird furniture, even a curated global hospitality experience from Mandarin Oriental.

These collaborations require months, sometimes a full year, of development. Product design cycles, manufacturing, packaging, marketing rollouts, and global distribution — none of which happen on a whim. Which raises the question: Is Cloud Dancer truly the color that captures the emotional tenor of 2026? Or is it the color that was logistically convenient for 2025?

When a color meant to symbolize a future “fresh start” must be predetermined far in advance to align with corporate timelines, the initiative begins to feel less like cultural forecasting and more like retroactive justification — a snapshot of sentiment from a moment already gone. If the world has transformed dramatically in the past twelve months, how can a color chosen long before those shifts honestly claim to represent what is coming next? Cloud Dancer may aspire to offer clarity, but it instead exposes the limits of the Color of the Year as a predictive tool. It is not a mirror of the future. It is a time capsule assembled months before the present arrived. And in a world changing this quickly, perhaps the most telling thing about Cloud Dancer isn’t what it reveals, but what it fails to see.

The post Pantone’s White Elephant in the Room appeared first on PRINT Magazine.