Over the last 40 years, the creative design industry has undergone enormous change. Sixteen years of successive governments devaluing the creative fields haven’t helped – and over the past four years, I’ve seen and heard demoralised comments and stories from creative design professionals across the ranks.
Why is that? What’s happening out there? I think the answer lies in the story of the modern creative industry from the early ’80s.
By that decade, design felt everywhere in popular culture – magazines, fashion, and television. Every day, people knew who Terence Conran, Jean Paul Gaultier and Philippe Starck were. Without the internet, we were arguably more conscious of design in the world around us: the sports shoes we wore, the buildings we worked in, the shops we frequented. Bang & Olufsen sound systems were aspirational objects. You saw, experienced, and understood design.
Creative design carried such cultural weight that the Design Council had established offices in London’s Haymarket – by the ’80s, a prominent events, library, materials and exhibition space, complete with a café and design bookshop, front and centre until 1998.
There were whole shelves of design magazines in John Menzies (that was a newsagent – look it up). Bookshops had substantial design sections. It was all accessible. So much so that working-class kids from council estates around the country decided to go to college to study art and design, then onto an HND or degree at art schools across the country. It was hard to get in. It was hard work. And the design education experience was nothing like it is now.
You could graduate at 21 and, in London, expect to earn around £21k at an agency – the equivalent of a starting salary of around £42k today. It wasn’t easy to break into, but if you had the willingness to learn, a strong folio and determination, you had a shot. That much hasn’t changed much.
In London, creative design agencies – small, big, and really big – were everywhere. There was an exciting, rebellious buzz. You could join an agency and move between advertising, branding, and packaging without anyone blinking. A brand project came in, and if you could hold a marker, draw, and, most importantly, have ideas, you were in. The creative director genuinely guided you. You learnt a huge amount. You could sell ideas, and clients listened. Crucially, agencies were founded, owned and operated by the creatives themselves.
There was the ’92 crash, and then again in ’94, but creative design remained at the forefront of national consciousness. Fashion, advertising, architecture, magazine, retail, interior, product and graphic design – along with the budding web and digital arenas – coalesced into the high point of Cool Britannia. Even after the dot-com bubble burst and the events of 2001, you could still make a good living as a creative designer or freelancer.
Meanwhile, something quieter was happening. What some might view as the gradual dismantling of a world-class design education infrastructure was underway. As polytechnics became universities, art and design course numbers swelled, graduate numbers rose, and tuition fees arrived for the first time.
Simultaneously, holding companies and investors were racing to acquire creative agencies – merging, restructuring, gutting them, and fundamentally changing the way they functioned. Fee structures changed. As Gordon Torr put it in Managing Creative People, “two guys in a garage will beat a multi-million dollar corporation ninety-nine times out of a hundred” – and yet the industry handed itself over to exactly those corporations. As agencies adopted corporate operating models, creativity lost its seat at the big table, ceding ground to management consultants.
Observationally, some so-called creative design businesses now employ more non-creatively trained staff than actual designers. The non-creatives are making decisions that directly affect creative output — or outright making unqualified ones. There’s a lot of noise to shout over. Robert Grudin said it plainly in Design and Truth: “If good design tells the truth, poor design tells a lie” – and for too long, the lie has been that creativity is a cost rather than a value.
Then came the 2008 global financial crisis, followed by sixteen years of poor policy, austerity, a pandemic, and a sardonic extra dose of poor leadership. The creative industries – a genuine source of value and innovation – were denigrated and defunded. The corporate mindset hunted for savings. Redundancies, restructuring and wage cuts followed. Then AI arrived and supercharged all of it – for everyone except the C-suite.
According to the Design Council’s Design Economy Report, design contributed £85.2bn in Gross Value Added in 2016 alone, 68% of which came from designers working outside of design agencies. The result of ignoring that value: more hours demanded, salaries eroded, little career progression, and fewer opportunities to move agencies for a pay rise or promotion. A real, top-down erosion of creativity – in pursuit of short-term profit.
And as a final cherry on top, social media has been thoroughly enshitified as a platform for creatives. With the fabric of human decency being torn apart globally, it’s little wonder people across the creative industries are feeling the weight of it all. (See also: ‘Is Social Media Over for Creatives?’ by Tom May, Creative Boom.)
If we’ve learnt anything from the last forty years, it’s that when economic storm clouds gather, creativity is the first thing to be cut – despite consistent research showing that slashing creative and marketing budgets during recessions causes long-term damage to profits and stability. It is a repetitive doom loop of short-sightedness.
There’s a reason we all watch that Mad Men scene – Don Draper pitching the Kodak Carousel, no 200-page group-think deck in sight – with such nostalgia and think: what the hell happened? Something has been lost. Everyone’s tired of the bullshit.
But as Sir John Hegarty wrote, “What does it take to be creative? Fearlessness” – and that fearlessness is beginning to reassert itself. Historically, innovation spikes at breaking points. The hegemonic near-monopoly of the big six holding companies is fracturing – creative energy doesn’t work to that drum. The build-to-sell agency model isn’t looking too shiny either.
As old corporate, shareholder-value-driven models fail in real time, clients are beginning to question what exactly they’ve been paying for. They’re reframing value, reassessing what they need, and looking for genuine sources of creativity again.
The Renaissance was spurred by the crises of the late Middle Ages: the Great Famine, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War. Creativity surged after the Second World War. The ’80s began and ended in crisis, and yet design abounded, surging into the ’90s. Turbulence, it turns out, tends to produce creativity rather than kill it.
In June 2025, despite its missteps in consulting the creative industry on AI, the UK government announced £380 million in targeted funding to support innovation, R&D, skills and regional growth as part of a Creative Industries Sector Plan. It’s a good step.
Creativity is learning to say no again – to push back, have the hard conversations, and stand up for itself. Creatives are joining their own private networks, taking back control from social media. Creative-owned agencies are returning. Small independents are emerging, doing brilliant work and setting their own value. An indie agency renaissance is quietly underway.
The creative industries are uniquely good at seeing patterns – at imagining and predicting futures like no other sector. The disenchantment we’re feeling isn’t people walking away from the industry. It’s people walking away from a tired model.
There’s rebellion in the air.
