Creative Boom

I've been paying attention to Instagram since the very start. In the early 2010s, the audience was mostly designers and developers. In fact, I personally knew the person with the most followers on Instagram: the Bath-based web designer Mike Kus, who posted his photography there as a side project. As I recall, his numbers were only overtaken when Justin Bieber joined in 2011. That's how big a cultural shift Instagram went through: from niche community to worldwide juggernaut in a matter of months.

When you've got a few years under your belt and have learned a thing or two, it's a great feeling to pass those learnings to juniors. Especially if that's advice you wished you'd received when you were younger. It's worth reflecting that some professions don't do this regularly. In some cut-throat sectors, people feel like promotion is a zero-sum game and keep hard-won information close to their chests, lest they get overtaken by rivals, even people who are technically below them.

If you're a designer, illustrator or art director, there's a decent chance photography lives somewhere in your working life. Or maybe just your life in general. Either way, you love taking pictures, but probably don't think of yourself as a professional photographer, which is why, every now and again, it's worth listening to one.

It's no secret that we're big fans of Brompton at Creative Boom (watch our exclusive video Inside Brompton's London Factory if you don't believe me.) Their funky folding bike has been a design icon since 1975, and attracted the kind of cult following most brands can only dream of.

Remember when, a few years back, everyone thought generative AI would help us unleash our creative potential and bring forth whole new worlds from our imagination? Instead, everywhere we look, we're confronted by AI slop. And D&AD's AI & Creativity Report 2026: The Cost of the Shortcut points out an uncomfortable fact. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. A couple of sentences in this report really hit home for me. "Live prompts [were entered] for the word 'ketchup'.

"I always wanted to be an artist," says Stefhany Lozano, and looking at her childhood, it's hard to imagine how she could have ended up doing anything else. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, 40 years ago, she grew up in a house where art books filled the shelves, where her aunt painted, where her grandmother loved to talk about art over dinner, and where Sunday mornings meant museum visits with her grandfather. Even so, her path wasn't a straight line.

A pigeon on a beach path; a blue elephant spring-rider bolted to tarmac; a chain-link fence catching the afternoon light. These scenes might not sound like much on paper, but on the canvas, in Naruhiko's hands, we're seeing ordinary objects turned into delicate, luminous and otherworldly stories – all caught in a single frame. The Osaka-born, Osaka-based illustrator studied oil painting at university, then worked as a web designer while getting crafty on the side.

We often hear about a character or subject matter becoming a focal point in a creative's work. It can start unknowingly, because you just enjoy drawing a certain thing. Then it creeps back in again and again, and there you have it – you're obsessed with drawing one thing, and you become well known for doing it. In the case of Minyoung Kim, it's cats. But don't expect a cat sitting prettily in the centre of the canvas.

In Gaia Alari's drawings, you'll see worlds where characters are engulfed in flowers, and pigeons tangled in string. And if you look for more than a few seconds, you will start noticing the hand behind them – the lines wobbling slightly where a pencil pressed a touch too hard, or the charcoal smudges sitting close to precise crosshatching. Nothing about the work looks rendered or smoothed over by AI; instead, it looks handmade by someone physically involved in every step.

If you work as a creative and haven't been to Green Man Festival, you might want to pay attention. It's too late to get tickets for this weekend's festival which, like Glastonbury, tends to sell out in about an hour, before a single act has been announced. But a quick peruse of 2026's lineup should convey that this event is about more than just bands in a field. I wrote an article last year about Why Green Man Festival made me think about creativity in a whole new way, and that's no exaggeration.