24 11 25
I’ve spent my career where creativity, culture, and commerce meet — building brands that don’t just sell, but mean something.
And the further I’ve gone, the more I’ve realised this:
every act of creation starts in the dark.
Not knowing. Not seeing. Not having the answers yet.
Last week I was at the University of Portsmouth talking to Graphic Design students (thank you, Neil Hardcastle x) about brand, soul, and meaning. The talk has been sitting with me ever since — sharpened by three posts I read in the days that followed.
James Shaw wrote about soul — and the quiet fears that kill it.
Sam Freeman spoke about graduates taught to chase trends instead of ideas.
And Lefteris Heretakis described, painfully accurately, how design education is being stripped of time, craft, depth, and genuine exploration.
All three were pointing to the same problem:
We’re losing the conditions that make creativity possible.
Students aren’t being given the space to think, to question, to fail, to form a point of view.
They’re being prepared for speed, content, algorithms, and “relevance” — not depth, curiosity or soul.
And it’s not the educators’ fault.
Most are doing everything they can inside a system that keeps removing the things creativity needs most: time, doubt, silence, experimentation, perspective.
Meanwhile, brands keep hijacking whatever’s cool this week.
Fleeting trends are replacing ideas.
Aesthetic is replacing identity.
Noise is replacing meaning.
And you can feel students internalising this.
They may not say it out loud, but it’s there — the pressure to mimic, not explore.
That’s why I talk about darkness.
Because darkness is where ideas actually begin.
Creativity isn’t the light — it’s the courage to go looking for it.
If we want brands with soul — and students with vision — we have to rebuild the foundations we’ve allowed to erode.
The young creatives I met last week want depth. They want honesty. They want meaning.
And honestly?
Don't we all!
JM
