Creative Boom

There's a particular kind of maths that creative mothers do in their heads, usually at 11pm, usually while staring at a laptop in a quiet kitchen. It goes something like this: How many hours did I actually work today? How many of those were interrupted? And how much of my brain was simultaneously tracking school pickup, missing socks and the precise location of a packed lunch? It's an invisible spreadsheet that never balances, and it rarely shows up on a payslip.

Harry Matuszewicz-Milne spent 10 years as a mental health nurse before retraining as an interior designer. He graduated from UWE Bristol in 2024 with a first-class honours degree and then spent the best part of a year applying for design jobs. Close to 550 of them, by his own count, including speculative letters, branded coasters and a hand-typed cover letter on custom stationery. Not one of them led to a job.

Every city has at least one building everyone walks past without really looking up. The Lord & Taylor flagship on Fifth Avenue is one of New York's: a 1914 limestone hulk with gilded entrances and crests carved into the stone. It's the kind of place that's been there so long, it's almost stopped registering as a place at all. Now, though, boutique consultancy Love & War has given people a reason to look again.

The most surprising thing to me when I opened my branding agency, Letter A, was just how ready I was, which is not to say it was easy to get to that place. It absolutely wasn't. I'd spent the past 20 years working in-house as a creative director and graphic designer for some of the biggest beauty and fashion brands while living in New York City. Vogue. Kate Spade New York. Bumble and bumble. Ann Taylor. I was even part of the team that launched the cult brand Kate Spade Saturday from the ground up.

Kaitlin Brito makes, in her own words, images with a "sparkle": careful linework, bright flat colour and a playful sense of nostalgia that keeps finding the whimsy in the mundane. A Peruvian-American illustrator based in New Jersey and a School of Visual Arts graduate, she has been named a Society of Illustrators winner and drawn for the likes of Google, Disney, Pinterest, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR.

Here's a lovely thing. The work that defined this year's D&AD New Blood Awards wasn't a glossy product film or a clever brand stunt, but a thoughtful, brave proposal about menstruation – and it earned its makers both of the night's top honours. Announced yesterday evening at The Steel Yard in London, Blood Stocks proposes treating menstruation as a medical asset rather than something to be quietly managed and never spoken about.

At the start of a project, all good creatives ask the same questions. Can we build it? Will people want it? Can it scale? David Johnston, founder of Accept & Proceed, has spent two decades answering all three, first at Nike, then across nearly 20 years running his own studio. What he's increasingly preoccupied with now is the question nobody trains you to ask: should we do it at all?

There are really only a handful of reasons a brand decides to reinvent itself. Sometimes it's a growth spurt, and the old look simply doesn't work any more. Sometimes it's a new market or audience. And sometimes it's because the world has shifted under your feet, and you need to remind everyone why you still matter. Stack Overflow's new identity, by global studio Koto, has a little of all three. And that, for me, is what makes it such a good project to pick apart.

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, held over five days on the Côte d'Azur, brings together some of the biggest voices in the industry on stage, in panels, and at fringe events throughout the famous Croisette. After a week of walking between the Palais, the beach activations and the little pop-ups, a handful of shifts kept surfacing – and most of them point the same way. Resonance will beat reach If the last decade belonged to audiences, the next belongs to communities.

Every England fan has a tell. Some can't watch penalties. Some leave the room. Some grip a cushion so hard that it loses its shape by full time. And a huge number of us, whether we'd admit it in daylight or not, end up with our hands pressed together, eyes shut, silently bargaining with whoever might be listening. It's this unconscious gesture, repeated by millions, that London and South West studio Happy Ending has decided to design for.