We didn’t forget how to listen to music, draw, play games, or spend time together. What changed was how we were taught to consume things. Music is a good example. A lot of people of a certain age grew up experiencing albums as complete pieces of work. You’d go into a record shop, put the headphones on, sample a few tracks, take a punt on something, then sit with it from start to finish. That experience wasn’t just about music. It was about discovery, patience, and shared culture.
Today, music often arrives in fifteen-second clips, optimised for instant impact and endless scrolling. Unsurprisingly, the music itself has changed to suit that model. It’s faster, simpler, and more disposable. That isn’t anyone’s fault. If you’re taught to consume something in a certain way, how else would you understand it? But people are starting to feel what’s been lost. You see it in vinyl making a comeback, in people listening to albums again properly, and in the resurgence of things like Dungeons & Dragons, helped along by shows like Stranger Things. At its core, this isn’t about records or board games. It’s about people wanting to be in rooms together again.
After years of isolation, financial pressure, political fatigue, and constant bad news, this feels almost like a survival instinct. We’re reaching back towards things that bring us closer to other people. That’s what analogue really represents to me in 2026: a quiet rejection of isolation in favour of community.
In branding, we often talk about “tribes”, but what we really mean is community. The strongest brands aren’t just well designed. They’re recognisable because people see themselves in them. They share them, talk about them, and bring others into the fold. That’s always been the endgame of good design: connection.
Which is why the recent flood of AI-generated content feels so hollow. I’ve already seen TV adverts this year that are clearly AI-generated, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which brands they were for, because the second I clock it, I switch off. There’s no human signal there and nothing to latch onto. The same thing is happening across social media. A lot of feeds are now half AI-generated, and it’s painfully dull. Technically impressive, perhaps, but emotionally empty. If community is what people are craving, this kind of content does the opposite. It pushes people away.
In 2025, it felt like a proving ground for AI. We saw how fast it could move, how much it could produce, and how “fine” the results often were. That’s the danger. AI isn’t killing creativity by being bad at it. It’s doing it by being sensible. When systems start making decisions for you, everything trends toward the middle. Taste flattens, risk disappears, and work starts to feel familiar before you’ve even really looked at it.
Design at its best doesn’t work like that. It often comes from turning a problem on its head rather than choosing the most logical option. That instinct doesn’t come from prompts. It comes from experience, conversation, failure, and human judgement.
This isn’t about turning AI into the villain. I don’t believe in demonising it, and that would be lazy. I use it myself. I regularly talk through ideas while walking my dog and then shape them properly later. It helps me be clearer, more concise, and make better use of my time.
There’s a quote that sums this up perfectly: AI should be washing the dishes so humans can create more art, not creating the art so humans have more time to wash the dishes. The problem starts when tools begin doing the thinking for us. Once authorship disappears, so does ownership, and without ownership there’s nothing for people to connect to.
For me, analogue thinking in 2026 isn’t anti-technology. It’s about values. It’s about slowing parts of the process down on purpose, sketching ideas before screens, thinking before generating, and learning how things work rather than just how to get outcomes. Sometimes that does literally mean pen and paper, not because it’s nostalgic, but because it trains your brain to explore rather than select. That kind of thinking is what leads to work people actually feel something about, and feeling something is the starting point of community.
We also owe something to the next generation of creatives. One of the harder things to watch is younger designers thinking they’re developing skills when they’re really just producing outputs. That’s not a criticism, it’s an education gap. If you’ve never been shown the process, how would you know what you’re missing?
That’s where senior designers and creatives have a responsibility, not to lecture, but to open up how we think, talk about process, answer questions, and show the steps that don’t appear in polished final work. If analogue thinking is about community, that has to include mentorship.
As I head into 2026, I still want to learn new tools and keep moving forward. But I’m deliberately balancing that by relearning old skills, strengthening foundations, and exercising the creative muscle rather than outsourcing it. Not to go backwards, but to build work that people can actually connect with.
If 2026 really does become a more analogue year, I don’t think it’ll be because people reject technology. I think it’ll be because we finally remembered that creativity only really works when it’s human, shared, and rooted in community.
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