Has creative culture become content culture?

I sometimes wonder whether the design industry has become too accessible for its own good.

That probably sounds elitist on the surface, and I don’t mean it in the sense that creativity should only belong to a select few. Some of the best designers, writers, photographers and thinkers came from unconventional backgrounds, not polished agency pathways or expensive universities. The internet has opened doors for people who may never previously have had access to this industry, and that in itself is a good thing.

But something else changed alongside it, and I’m not convinced we talk about it enough.

When I first started in design, you discovered work differently. You’d see a piece featured in Creative Review, stumble across a beautifully designed album sleeve in a record shop, notice a poster campaign in the street, or pick up packaging that simply felt unlike anything else around it. Certain agencies developed reputations because their work carried a recognisable level of thinking, craft and originality. You admired it because it felt authored. Someone had genuinely created something.

Importantly, it also had time to exist.

You weren’t immediately flooded with recreations, redesigns, “my version of this”, or social posts pulling it apart within hours of release. There was a natural distance between seeing good work and attempting to imitate it. Inspiration still existed, of course, but it tended to be filtered through your own perspective, your own influences and your own understanding of the brief or audience.

Now, everything is instant.

A new identity launches online in the morning, and by the evening, designers across the world are reproducing elements of it for fictional projects, moodboards or social content. In many cases, they’re not even trying to hide the influence. The culture has shifted from creating work to reacting to work.

That difference matters.

A lot of designers today are developing in public, which naturally means they are constantly consuming other designers’ output. The result is an industry where people often become highly proficient at reproducing aesthetics before they’ve developed any real understanding of communication, context, positioning or commercial reality. They know how to assemble something that looks contemporary because they’ve absorbed thousands of examples online, but originality is much harder to develop when your reference point is an endless stream of other people’s finished work.

I also think social media has changed the motivation behind creativity itself.

Work used to emerge from a process. A client problem. Research. Constraint. Collaboration. Debate. Trial and error. It existed to function in the real world and achieve something commercially or culturally meaningful.

Today, a huge amount of design exists primarily to perform online.

That’s not the same thing.

There’s a noticeable difference between work designed to communicate and work designed to attract attention from other designers. One tends to prioritise effectiveness, the other tends to prioritise novelty, speed and visual impact within a scrolling feed. That naturally creates a culture where people are encouraged to constantly comment on, reinterpret, improve or “fix” existing work because reaction itself has become content.

Personally, I find that side of the industry increasingly tiring.

Not because work should never be questioned or critiqued, but because critique now often feels performative rather than thoughtful. Designers publicly redesign brands that never asked to be redesigned, often with very little understanding of the business, audience, market position or constraints involved. The aim frequently isn’t to solve anything meaningful, it’s to demonstrate taste, visibility or creative superiority in front of peers online.

Ironically, I think this has contributed to businesses undervaluing design as a profession.

If designers themselves publicly treat creative work as endlessly replaceable, instantly improvable and easy to replicate, why would clients see it differently? Why would they view design as something strategic, considered or specialist when the industry increasingly presents it as disposable visual content?

In some ways, designers have unintentionally helped commodify their own craft.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t still brilliant work being produced. There absolutely is. There are still studios creating thoughtful, original and commercially intelligent design. There are still people who deeply care about craft, ideas and communication. But culturally, the industry feels different now. Faster. Louder. More reactive. Less patient.

And perhaps what I miss most is that feeling of encountering work naturally in the world.

Not through a mocked-up social media carousel designed to harvest engagement from other creatives, but through everyday life. A piece of signage. A brochure. A campaign. A shopfront. Packaging. Something that stopped you for a second because it felt genuinely new.

Back then, good work felt discovered.

Now it often feels uploaded.