The creative design industry has changed dramatically over the past 40 years. Sixteen years of successive governments devaluing the creative sector has done nothing – and over the past four years I have seen and heard demoralizing comments and stories from a wide range of creative design professionals.
why is that? What’s going on outside? I think the answer lies in the story of the modern creative industries in the early 1980s.
By that decade, design was everywhere in popular culture—magazines, fashion, and television. Every day, people know who Terence Conran, Jean Paul Gaultier and Philippe Starck are. Without the internet, we were arguably more conscious of the design of the world around us: the sneakers we wore, the buildings we worked in, the stores we frequented. Bang & Olufsen sound systems are aspirational. You see, experience and understand design.
Creative design had such a cultural impact that the Design Council established an office in London’s Haymarket in the 1980s, which housed important event, library, material and exhibition spaces, complete with café and design bookstore, until 1998.
John Menzies (it was a newsagents – look it up) had a whole rack of design magazines. The bookstore has a large design section. It’s all accessible. So much so that working class kids from council estates across the country decided to go to university to study art and design and then study for HNDs or degrees at art schools across the country. It was hard to get in and the work was hard. The design education experience was completely different than it is now.
You could graduate at 21 and expect to earn around £21,000 in an agency in London – equivalent to today’s starting salary of around £42,000. Breaking into this field is not easy, but if you have a willingness to learn, a strong belief and determination, you have a chance. This doesn’t change much.
Creative design agencies – small, big and really big – are everywhere in London. There was an exciting, rebellious buzz. You can join an agency and switch between advertising, branding and packaging without anyone batting an eye. A branding project comes in, and if you can hold a marker, draw, and most importantly, have an idea, you’re in. The creative director guides you with sincerity. You learned a lot. You can sell ideas and clients will listen. Crucially, agencies are founded, owned and run by creatives themselves.
There was a crash in ’92, and another in ’94, but creative design remained at the forefront of the national consciousness. Fashion, advertising, architecture, magazines, retail, interiors, product and graphic design – as well as the emerging web and digital spheres – come together to form the pinnacle of ‘Cool Britain’. Even after the dot-com crash and the events of 2001, you can still make a good living as a creative designer or freelancer.
Meanwhile, something quieter was happening. Some may believe that world-class design education infrastructure is being progressively dismantled. As polytechnics became universities, the number of art and design courses proliferated, the number of graduates increased and tuition fees became available for the first time.
At the same time, holding companies and investors are racing to acquire creative agencies—merging them, restructuring them, spinning them off, and fundamentally changing the way they operate. The fee structure has changed. As Gordon Torr said in Managing Creative Talent, “Two guys in a garage will beat a multimillion-dollar company ninety-nine times out of a hundred”—yet the industry leaves itself to those companies. As agencies adopt corporate operating models, creativity loses its place at the big table, ceding its place to management consultants.
It has been observed that some so-called creative design companies now employ more employees without creative training than actual designers. Non-creative people are making decisions that directly impact creative output, or are making decisions that are directly substandard. There is a lot of noise to shout about. Robert Grudin made it clear in Design and Truth: “If good design tells a truth, then bad design tells a lie”—a lie that has long viewed creativity as a cost rather than a value.
Then came the global financial crisis in 2008, followed by 16 years of bad policy, austerity, a pandemic and laughably extra bad leadership. Creative industries – the true source of value and innovation – are denigrated and defunded. The business mentality is to seek savings. With that came layoffs, restructuring and pay cuts. Then AI arrived and brought huge support to everyone but the C-suite.
According to the Design Council’s Design Economy Report, design contributed £85.2 billion in gross value added in 2016 alone, 68% of which came from designers outside design agencies. The consequences of ignoring this value are: increased working hours, reduced wages, slower career advancement, and reduced opportunities to move organizations for raises or promotions. A real, top-down erosion of creativity in the pursuit of short-term profits.
As the final cherry, social media has completely become a creative platform. With the fabric of human dignity being torn apart across the globe, it’s no surprise that people in the creative industries are feeling the weight of it all. (See also: Is the Age of Social Media Over for Creatives? by Creative Boom’s Tom May.)
If we’ve learned anything from the past four decades, it’s that when economic storm clouds gather, creativity is the first to be cut—despite consistent research showing that cutting creative and marketing budgets during recessions can cause long-term damage to profits and stability. This is a short-sighted cycle of repeated doom.
We watch scenes from Mad Men — Don Draper pitching the Kodak carousel, with no 200-page groupthink deck in sight — with such nostalgia and think: What the hell is going on? Something is missing. Everyone is tired of the bullshit.
But as Sir John Hegarty wrote, “What does it take to be creative? To be fearless” – and that fearlessness is starting to reappear. Historically, innovation surges at breakthrough points. The hegemony and near-monopoly of the six major holding companies is unraveling – creativity no longer works. The agency model from production to sales also looks less than stellar.
As the old corporate, shareholder value-driven model breaks down in real time, customers are beginning to question what they are paying for. They are redefining values, reassessing their needs, and once again looking for true sources of creativity.
The Renaissance was spurred by the crises of the late Middle Ages: the Great Famine, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War. After World War II, creativity surged. The 1980s began and ended in crisis, but designs emerged and flourished in the 1990s. It turns out that turbulence often creates creativity rather than kills it.
In June 2025, despite missteps in advising the creative industries on AI, the UK government announced £380m of targeted funding to support innovation, R&D, skills and regional growth as part of a plan for the creative industries sector. This is a good step.
Creativity is about learning to say no again—to fight back, to have the hard conversations, and to stand your ground. Creatives are joining their own private networks and taking back control from social media. Creative agencies are coming back. Small independent companies are emerging, doing great work and setting their own values. A renaissance of independent institutions is quietly underway.
The creative industries are uniquely good at seeing patterns – imagining and predicting the future – like no other industry. The disappointment we feel is not that people are leaving the industry. This is people walking away from tired models.
There is a sense of rebellion in the air.
