Tom May
Author
About
Writer and editor covering design and the creative industries, with features published by Creative Boom.
SourceIn their own words
The exact moment a piece of slang becomes useless to marketing is the moment someone has to write a press release explaining it.
By the time slang needs decoding for parents, it's not cool. It's cooked.
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.
Her argument, then, isn't 'anti-progress'. It's that progress built entirely around speed and constant availability will quietly filter out a particular kind of talent—and that talent happens to be disproportionately female and experienced.
Creatives aren't refusing to use AI; they're adopting it because they feel they have to.
What creatives say they need most isn't a new AI feature; it's people.
Apple Sports is essentially the answer to a data visualisation problem: vast quantities of live, unpredictable information, delivered to users who want answers instantly and don't want to think hard to get them.
Articles & interviews50
- Ecover turns lucky charms into unwashable T-shirt campaign
Ecover and Uncommon Creative Studio created The Unwashables, a limited-edition four-T-shirt campaign made with traditional symbols of good luck, including clovers, horseshoes and meteorite fragments. The deliberately unwashable shirts support Ecover's laundry-care message of helping consumers make clothes they love last longer, using humour and existing beliefs rather than environmental guilt.
- Jessica Hische Uses Hand-Lettering to Comfort Children
Jessica Hische's new children's picture book, Tomorrow I'll Be Happy, uses warm, deliberately wobbly hand-lettering and colourful illustrations to help children acknowledge difficult emotions. The Penguin Workshop title completes a trilogy of books designed to communicate emotional concepts through minimal language and typography that actively supports the message.
- Best New Fonts to Watch This September 2026
Creative Boom's September 2026 Type Drop surveys newly released typefaces from independent designers and foundries. Highlights include Göran Söderström's long-developed, multilingual Exemplar; a politically conscious Victorian-grotesque-inspired Foundry Kingdom; and display, editorial, branding and packaging-oriented releases including Autêntica Serif, Castillon, Peignot Jumbo, Vieno, Novaform, Raimundo and Arpeggio.