The Physical

Scroll through your feed and you’ll see it. Brands parading printed newspapers, hand-drawn signage, and physical objects in high-budget video campaigns.

There’s a strange irony here: thousands spent on polished video production…just to showcase paper. Why? Because I think we’re aching to feel something real.

We want texture. Tactility.

We want to brush up against something that exists outside the feed.

As AI floods every corner of our lives, from the emails we read to the copy we prompt into existence, there’s a subtle compression happening. A collapse of originality. A convergence of tone, structure, even punctuation (long live the em dash). We’ve seen this before.

NFTs were the first warning shot. I remember a fund manager pitching them as the future of ownership. Detached from the real, existing in code. But their fatal flaw was always the same: no physical anchor.

The only ones that made any sense were paired with something tactile, Look at certificates of authentication in art, sculpture, fashion and watches. I said back then: if Rolexes lived on the blockchain, we'd see far fewer floating around networking events.

That entire wave was one of the many attempts to detach us from reality. To sell meaning without matter.

Commerce without a gold standard is value without grounding (how macroeconomic). What happens when the lights turn off? When the servers go silent? Like it or not we’ll be left with sticks and stones: it's the physical that remains.

Even Zuck, who once preached the gospel of the metaverse, now lives on a beer-fed bison, off the grid complete with apocalyptic bunker. Preaching virtual futures while quietly living a tactile, subsistence paradise. It’s equal parts comical and terrifying.

We are waking up to a strange truth: Much of what we see online is a ghost echo. Synthetic. Replicated. A dead internet.

And we might be approaching an inflection point.

Where content is spun up, logos are spun out, brands are indistinguishable.

Everything sounds the same. Everything looks the same.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The ChatGPT syntax is the dead giveaway: It's not X it's Y, with a few buzzwords for good measure Scroll LinkedIn or any corporate Instagram and it leaps off the screen.

So what happens next? I think we will return to what we can touch.

This is why I’m drawn to materiality. I love architecture. Furniture. Form. Art.

Come to my home and you’ll find a mix of wood, chrome, concrete, stone, paper, plants and textiles.

Things that last. Things that feel. Move beyond luxury or status. Embrace the presence of the physical.

I want to live a life that feels real.

So what does this mean for creative? Probably more imperfection.

More sketches. More texture. Marks of the hand. Brands with scars and grain and character.

A return to hand-drawn, layered visuals, film with grain, hand written letters, craft that doesn’t apologise for being personal.

Historically, minimalism flourishes during booms: clean lines, muted palettes, restraint that whispers confidence. But in downturns, paradoxically that restraint gives way as we crave richness. Boldness. resonance.

Minimalism is fading. Maximalism is rising.

When the world turns uncertain, we reach for the sensory. And what we reach for in our visuals often mirrors what we’re missing in our lives: clarity, emotion, energy. Peace.

A desire for presence, for boldness, for something to feel. I don’t think we want neutral anymore.

We want life.