Tokyo-based artist Yuna Akabane is featured for her hazy gouache still-life paintings, which use pastel tones and layered, scratchy brushwork to evoke intimate childhood memories. Her recent series, Forgetting to Remember, explores ambiguous but emotionally preserved domestic scenes, finding nostalgia in mundane objects, flowers and table settings.
London-based studio Accept & Proceed has created a new visual and conceptual brand system for Vans to resolve inconsistencies accumulated across the footwear brand’s history. Guided by the proposition “Our Canvas. Your Way.”, the flexible two-layer framework preserves Vans’ recognisable assets while giving teams room to adapt the brand for new audiences, sports and forms of creative expression. The work includes product-branding standards and a clarified typographic approach using Pitch Mono alongside the existing Fann Doren family.
New York-based Chinese illustrator Wenjia Wang discusses her ongoing series, The Seduction of Discomfort, which combines polished, sensual imagery with quietly unsettling biological or decaying details. Wang explains how Chinese traditions of symbolic expression inform her process, and why she leaves space for viewers to form their own interpretations.
Tom May argues that brands become instantly outdated when they deploy TikTok slang in approved marketing copy, because slang derives its value from insider belonging rather than corporate adoption. He recommends that brands build an authentic, continually updated voice from their own personalities instead of performing youth-culture fluency, citing Duolingo, Ryanair and Aldi as examples of brands that succeed through distinctive, unconcerned social-media personas.
Tom May reflects on the career of Swindon artist and muralist Ken White, whose unsigned work included Virgin Atlantic's Scarlet Lady as well as public murals, liveries and music-press cover portraits. Timed to coincide with White's first major retrospective at The Little Gallery, the article argues that his craft-first, low-profile career offers a corrective to contemporary creative culture's emphasis on credit and self-promotion.
South Korean illustrator and artist Makitoy documents daily life through tiny, stamp-sized paper collages and drawings. Her patient, repetitive practice translates plants, natural forms and aged everyday objects into pared-back compositions of colourful paper, minimal lines and subtle spatial relationships.
Creative Boom examines the launch of The Ideation Bureau, an agency founded by The Night League leaders Yann Pissenem and Sam Mooney, and argues that it reflects a growing shift toward brands commercialising their own in-house creative capabilities. Drawing comparisons with TURF, City Studios, Disney's Main Street and CUPRA Design House, the article notes both the competitive threat to traditional agencies and the untested challenge of delivering repeatable results for external clients.
Brighton-based Buff Motion developed a comprehensive motion identity for Starling following the bank's 2025 brand refresh. Starting with 16 vertical social films for existing app and website features, the work evolved into a documented framework of animation principles and technical behaviours for Starling's in-house team. The successful work led Starling to commission a further 12 films for its business-banking products.
Bristol studio Wild People rebranded sustainable garden-room company Little Green Rooms around the platform "Headspace Found", shifting attention from construction specifications to the restorative space the rooms provide. The identity combines nature-informed, seasonal colours and dappled-light imagery with technical typography, bespoke icons, advertising, and digital work.
Tinder and agency Jellyfish have launched Dump Traditional Dating, a campaign promoting Tinder's new Double Date feature to Gen Z. Its hero film humorously shifts daters from a rigid Victorian-style first date to a relaxed arcade double date with friends, supported by video-on-demand, radio, social content and the TikTok series Double Date Island.
Turkish illustrator Fatih Öztürk discusses his nostalgic paintings of late-1990s and early-2000s video games, Nokia phones and colourful Apple products. Now based in Copenhagen, he uses layered colour, light and atmosphere to evoke the personal places, people and feelings that audiences associate with these objects rather than simply recreating fan art.