Creative Boom

When everyone has access to the same AI tools, what actually sets you apart? Your taste. 👀

On the Creative Boom Podcast, Aporva Baxi — co-founder of branding agency DixonBaxi — talks originality, the risk of everything starting to look the same, and how to hold onto your voice when the world's moving fast.

An optimistic one about possibility, making things, and not waiting for permission.

Full episode on Creative Boom 👇

A cherry suspended in a brandy glass. A flower shot through a wet, blurring surface. A grid of sweets arranged like a scientific sample 👀

London-based Polish photographer Karolina Burlikowska works across still life, collage and mixed media, drawn to the details most of us walk straight past — anything that feels "slightly off, slightly magical". Around 90% of her work is physically manipulated prints, surreal little worlds rebuilt from her own photographs.

Her hope for it all? "At least one person will find joy looking at it."

Full feature on Creative Boom.

What if you could own your brand's headline font outright – no licence fees, ever? 👀

That's exactly what Newspaper Club has done. Tired of font licence fees "rising and rising", CEO Anne Ward commissioned a bespoke all-caps typeface, NC HEADLINE, from long-time collaborators D8 – drawn from the tabloid heyday and the wonderful St Bride print archives.

It also launches abcD8, D8's new foundry that designs typefaces clients own outright, with no ongoing licences. NC HEADLINE debuts this week at Birmingham Design Festival, complete with a printed specimen and a behind-the-scenes film.

Full feature on Creative Boom.

Malika Favre became an illustrator at 28 — and she says those "late-start" years are the reason she survived freelancing 👀

On the new Creative Boom Podcast, she talks about leaving London for Barcelona, refusing to be put in a box, and why anything handmade and personal will only matter more in the age of AI.

Honest, funny and full of hard-won wisdom.

Full episode on Creative Boom 👇
https://www.creativeboom.com/podcast/malika-favre/

Some studios chase trends. Studio Patten goes digging through 1940s French activity books and vintage cigarette cards instead 👀

Madrid duo Aida Novoa and Carlos Egan call themselves visual archaeologists — hunting through secondhand bookshops and old print culture for a "timeless honesty" you can't fake. Limited palettes, charmingly imperfect printing, typography first, and plenty of time away from the desk to let ideas breathe.

A lovely look at building a practice on curiosity rather than hype.

Full feature on Creative Boom.

He lost almost everything — then started drawing on coffee cups, and it changed his life 👀

Lettering artist Rob Draper's story, from redundancy to Nike, the Golden Globes and NASA, is one of the most honest and moving talks we've heard. "When it's all you've got, starting small is absolutely enough."

Full feature on Creative Boom (link in comments).

Clients now arrive at shoots with AI-generated mockups — expectations set before the camera even comes out 👀

On the Creative Boom Podcast, photographer Liz Seabrook talks about image-making in a world that feels increasingly artificial: AI, beauty standards, and the strange visual sameness both push us toward.

Honest about the industry shake-up, but ultimately optimistic.

Full episode on Creative Boom 👇

What if you could sit down with 25 years of an agency's thinking and ask it anything? 👀

DixonBaxi — the London studio behind Formula 1, AC Milan and TikTok's brand systems — has built exactly that: an AI called AskUs, trained on its own archive. And refreshingly, it'll happily admit when it hasn't a clue.

Full feature on Creative Boom (link in comments).

How do you give one of the world's busiest airport terminals a brand that actually feels like home? 👀

Applied Design reimagined JFK's Terminal 8 with a plane-window palette of blues, a figure-eight motif hidden in plain sight, and a voice that speaks fluent Queens. We're rather taken with it.

Vanilla Chi on the death of the ego and making books that resist being read 👀

Drawing on folklore, anthropology and Buddhist philosophy, the New York and New Haven-based artist and independent publisher creates publications that ask readers to slow down and breathe.