Heritage, humanity and why the future looks a lot like the past

Last week, we attended the Northern Design Festival for the first time. It was the kind of day that reminds us why we got into this industry.

There were a lot of honest conversations (on stage and between ourselves), and a room full of people who care deeply about what they make and why they make it.

This year’s festival theme was heritage. And before the festival we didn’t know how much that theme would resonate, but we came away with a lot of discussions that echo how Creatomatic have been feeling lately.

The age of AI is sending brands backwards… on purpose

Something is shifting in the design world, and it was felt across almost every session we attended. In the age of AI, where generating something fast has never been easier, brands are looking backwards.

Heritage is having a moment as a deliberate rejection of disposable design. Brands are returning to their roots, to their founding stories, to the things that made them matter. There’s a growing sense that if almost everything can be generated in a second, then what can’t be becomes infinitely more valuable.

Oli Bentley from design studio Split is someone who has spent years interrogating exactly this. His project These Northern Types, a series of 17 publications each exploring northern identity through custom typography, is a perfect example of the distinction he drew in his talk between history and heritage. History is what happened. Heritage is what you choose to carry forward, what you decide is still alive and worth holding onto.

That distinction runs through everything Oli does. The People Powered Press, a world record-holding super-scale letterpress is a living, working thing. It takes the craft and physicality of traditional letterpress and puts it in the hands of communities today. It’s heritage in action!

Our main takeaway from Oli’s talk was the idea that great creative work requires you to connect with a place, a community, and the story that already exists there. You’re not inventing something from nothing. You’re uncovering something that was always there and giving it a form it is worthy of.

Human is the strategy

In a panel discussion with Studio Sana, Salt & Sister Studio and Creative Review something became clear that we think will only become more true in the near future: in a world where AI can create anything, the human stuff is the strategy. It’s the questions you ask before you ever open a design tool. The commercial understanding you bring to a client relationship. The trust you’ve earned by showing up, being interested, and not letting people down.

Most business owners, it was pointed out, don’t actually know what a brand is. That’s not a criticism, it’s an opportunity. The studios that will thrive are the ones who can sit across from a client, understand what they’re really trying to build, and help them see their own story more clearly than they could on their own.

That’s not something you can automate. That’s heritage of a different kind, it’s the accumulated knowledge and relationship-building that only comes from years of doing the work.

In amongst the more serious talks of the day, one that stood out for us was Baxter and Bailey’s hilarious Design Laundry – ‘a place where creative mistakes, mishaps and downright disasters are aired and shared’. They reminded us that making mistakes is human, nobody is perfect, and a problem shared is a problem halved!

Digital Made Human

All of this landed so strongly for us because we’ve just been through our own process of looking inward.

Creatomatic’s rebrand was an exercise in working out what we actually stand for. The answer we kept arriving at was that we may use digital tools to create digital work, but the work is fundamentally human.

That led us to our tagline: Digital Made Human.

The Northern Design Festival, and its focus on heritage, confirmed to us that this is exactly the right direction, not just for Creatomatic, but for the design industry as a whole. The studios that know their own story, that can articulate their ethos clearly and mean it, are the ones clients will seek out precisely because they feel different from everything a machine can produce.

We can’t believe that this year was our first Northern Design Festival, but we’ll definitely be back. If you’re a studio or creative in the north and you’ve never been – go!