The agency, which started in a cramped Dunedin flat, has now become one of the world's top independent creative advertising agencies, showcasing its remarkable growth.
All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe's time has come. The Creative Cloud provider's suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades.
We've both fought against needless promotional content before and lamented that frontier AI platforms are falling into the same pattern. As designers and users, we've learned that "free" usually means putting up with interruptive, slightly creepy ads that feel more like a tax than a benefit - a frustration tax that now colors how we approach free‑tier services and now AI tools.
Something's been slowly shifting in the design zeitgeist. I've been watching my feed on X and the vibe has changed. More and more, I see designers sharing finished experiments or prototypes they coded themselves, rather than static Figma files. Moving from working on a canvas to talking to an LLM. The conversation isn't "here's a design I made" anymore... it's "here's something I shipped this afternoon."