2025 News Roundup
Here is our round up of the news stories and industry articles that caught our eye during 2025.
January 2025
Art Vinyl names Record Cover Artwork of the Year
At the Hari in Belgravia, London, Art Vinyl announced the winner of the 20th greatest Art Vinyl Award, which is the yearly art prize for the year’s greatest record cover design.
‘Love Heart Cheat Code’, the fourth studio album by the Australian jazz/funk band Hiatus Kaiyote, featured artwork by multimedia artist Rajni Perera, located in Toronto, which won first prize. The record was selected from a varied shortlist of 50 recognisable and memorable vinyl cover art pieces from 2024 and was released by Brainfeeder and Ninja Tune.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
February 2025
Why are so many brands ditching their logo?
The recent See You in the Morning ad by Kellogg has generated a lot of discussion about whether it was a brilliant idea or a brand disaster. It’s the former for me. It radiates confidence by reducing the brand promise to its most basic components: its recognisable script wordmark and a catchphrase that dominates the morning.
Find out more in Creative Bloq
March 2025
AI isn’t the ‘creative cure-all’ that some hoped
Video game companies are putting caution before change, according to the recently released Unity Gaming Report, which was unveiled today at GDC 2025. As the research notes, “AI hasn’t quite been the creative cure-all that some hoped,” suggesting that the time for generative AI to be the panacea for all of the industry’s issues is not yet here.
Find out more in Creative Bloq.
April 2025
AI is coming for advertising
How may I be of assistance? Many people find that AI assistants’ default prompt to be comforting, but advertising professionals might not feel the same way.
For many years, the quintessential advertising man—played by Don Draper in the television series Mad Men—embodied innovation through human appeal, cultural awareness, and instinct. However, as data-driven, decision-making computers increasingly control creative processes, that image is changing—or rather, vanishing.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
May 2025
McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives turn 100
In a humorous campaign to commemorate the 100th anniversary of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives, TBWA places the popular snack in the same category as the telephone and the wheel as the greatest human inventions in history. To be honest, they present a strong argument.
The campaign, which was implemented across digital, experiential, out-of-home, and public relations channels, celebrates the “Choc Dig”—as the team lovingly refers to it—as a cultural icon in a light-hearted yet deliberate manner.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
June 2025
The best rebrands of all time
The most successful rebrands strike a delicate balance between tradition and modern design, but they are not risk-free. On the one hand, you could risk losing your brand’s reputation if you continue to use its distinctive character. However, if you follow the trends, you can end up alienating your current audience.
Find out more in Creative Bloq.
July 2025
It turns out the iconic Jaws poster design isn’t as terrifying as you thought
You have undoubtedly seen the poster artwork for Jaws, even if you haven’t seen the original film. A consistent addition to our list of the greatest movie posters, it effectively and simply conveys the drama and intensity of Spielberg’s work, drawing in viewers with minimal details.
The ad skilfully manipulates the viewer’s gaze to depict the mesmerising threat of a great white shark soaring over the water towards a woman swimming on the surface, clearly aware of the danger below—or is it?
Find out more in Creative Bloq.
August 2025
Royal Mail celebrates 75 years of Peanuts
It was our youth’s psychological foundation. Highbrow animated entertainment for curious kids. And the main reason I’ve never been able to get rid of the Lucy moniker is that I was always the one giving uninvited counsel (typically from behind a make-believe lemonade stand). My inner kid jumped with joy when I learnt that Royal Mail would be releasing a set of commemorative stamps to honour Peanuts’ 75th anniversary.
Eight exquisite designs showcasing Charles M. Schulz’s well-known characters are included in the special edition, which was completely developed by Interabang. However, this time, there are some endearing British details included. Woodstock and Snoopy sit on a red postbox. At the beach, Lucy and Linus construct sandcastles. Franklin has a kickabout with Charlie Brown. In classic UK fashion, the entire group also enjoys tea and cake.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
September 2025
Coca-Cola marks 125 years in Britain
Coca-Cola is commemorating its 125th anniversary in Great Britain with a campaign that highlights corner store owners, who are undoubtedly some of the most underappreciated cultural leaders in the nation and who keep communities running smoothly.
The campaign, titled The Bosses, combines six short documentaries helmed by Earthling Films’ Ross Bolidai with a series of images by photographer Serena Brown. Together, they weave together the tales of six independent retailers from all throughout Britain, fusing moments of joy, tragedy, resiliency, and legacy with everyday familiarity.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
October 2025
A deep dive into the Turner Prize identity 2025
This year, Bradford hosted the Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious contemporary art prizes in the world, for the first time. Therefore, it makes sense that this is also the first time that its identity feels so strongly shaped by its environment.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
November 2025
Ten of the decade’s best designed magazines
It’s Nice That invited the founder of magCulture to personally select ten of the most attractive magazines from the previous ten years in honour of the publication’s tenth anniversary. He also discusses the past, present, and future of the small press sector.
Find out more in It’s Nice That.
December 2025
Pantone crowns ‘Cloud Dancer’ as its Colour of the Year 2026
Cloud Dancer, or PANTONE 11-4201 if you prefer the formal name, has been named Pantone’s Colour of the Year for 2026. It’s a delicate, airy white that seeks to feel more like a pause than a colour. It can be the ideal remedy for the depressing atmosphere of the moment. Alternatively, it can be Pantone observing the room and realising that we’re all a little burned out from the current world events.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
About DWH
DWH is an award winning Coventry-based creative design agency offering a full range of services including:
April 2025 News Roundup
Here is our round up of the news stories and industry articles that caught our eye during April 2025.
The Co-op’s revolutionary new food delivery brand
The method we obtain our things has changed significantly in the five years since the outbreak. For example, you may have observed that neighbourhood takeaway places are far less likely to leave flyers outside your door.
They will likely inform you they no longer take orders directly and refer you to an online delivery service if you find an old one in the back of a kitchen drawer and give them a ring. Even worse, given competition from so-called “ghost kitchens” that cater to these applications without the need of a physical shopfront, they may have just gone out of business.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
These are the 7 wildest perfume ads
Ads for perfumes are different. Advertising an aromatic product through a visual medium is very challenging, which might result in some odd results.
“Booze, car or perfume?” is a game that my loved ones and I like playing at the movies. One of the three must be guessed when a particularly abstract pre-movie advertisement starts. I’ve discovered a rather trustworthy heuristic: the more perplexing, alienating, and absurd the advertisement, the more likely it is to be a perfume advertisement.
Find out more in Creative Bloq.
Dropcity Launches with a provocative exhibition
When it comes to architecture, some of the most rigid and regulated spaces are also the least seen. Prisons, with their harsh geometries and repetitive routines, exist in a world apart – physically contained, socially distanced, and emotionally opaque.
Dropcity, Milan’s new urban centre for architecture and design, is changing that with a bold inaugural exhibition: Prison Times – Spatial Dynamics of Penal Environments. Running from 3 April to 31 May 2025 and spread across five of Dropcity’s repurposed railway tunnels, the exhibition spans over 1,000 square metres and offers an unflinching look at the carceral world.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
Pickleball’s not the only paddle game
Pickleball, a rapidly expanding paddle sport that combines aspects of ping-pong, badminton, and tennis, seems to be the talk of the town these days. However, it seems that Glasgow creative firm Pim-Pam still has a sweet place for table tennis.
The third installment of their exhibition series, TOPSP!N, which turns ping-pong paddles into sought-after pieces of art to promote community sport, will debut in April.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
Elon Musk and AI are the biggest risks for branding
I apologies for contributing to the constant headlines about Elon Musk and artificial intelligence, two topics that many people would likely like to see less of in the media. However, the story today supports a long-held suspicion: they may both be detrimental to branding.
According to a recent survey by the Global Risk Advisory Council, the two largest threats to brand reputation at the moment are misuse of AI and a connection to the CEO of Tesla.
Find out more in Creative Bloq.
Irreverent energy for Portsmouth Historic Dockyard
How can a 500-year-old shipwreck pique people’s interest? Or the mast of a vessel from the 19th century damaged by a cannonball? Leaning into a witty wordplay, you throw out the museum marketing manual and charge headlong into the turbulent waters of public opinion.
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, which is home to one of the most important naval collections in the world, has a new campaign that showcases its crown jewels in a delightfully unconventional way. Consider it history, but not as you know it, from the HMS Warrior and HMS Victory to the Mary Rose.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
AI is coming for advertising
How may I be of assistance? Many people find that AI assistants’ default prompt to be comforting, but advertising professionals might not feel the same way.
For many years, the quintessential advertising man—played by Don Draper in the television series Mad Men—embodied innovation through human appeal, cultural awareness, and instinct. However, as data-driven, decision-making computers increasingly control creative processes, that image is changing—or rather, vanishing.
Find out more in Creative Boom.
About DWH
DWH is an award winning Coventry-based creative design agency offering a full range of services including:
Musk’s unhinged first year as Twitter CEO in 6 tweets
It's been just over a year since Elon Musk completed the drawn-out purchase of social media site Twitter for $44 billion, and it’s been a fascinating 12 months to say the least. Let’s take a look at some of the key moments in Twitter’s first year under Musk’s reign.
It's been just over a year since Elon Musk completed the drawn-out purchase of social media site Twitter for $44 billion, and it’s been a fascinating 12 months to say the least. Let’s take a look at some of the key moments in Twitter’s first year under Musk’s reign.
“The bird is freed”
On October 28th 2022, Musk infamously tweeted: “the bird is freed” in reference to the finalisation of his purchase. However, a more accurate version of this post would have been “the staff are freed”, as the new CEO almost immediately culled around 80% of Twitter’s staff. This included senior figures such as CFO Ned Sega, head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde, and former CEO Parag Agrawal.
He also disbanded the trust and safety council, which was created in 2016 to address problems of child exploitation, suicide and self-harm on the platform. Not exactly a good look for someone whose critics’ main concerns have been that Musk would turn Twitter into a free-speech haven for all the wrong kinds of people.
“The people have spoken”
On October 22nd, Musk posted: “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” This tweet is in reference to a poll he posted three days prior, asking users to vote whether former president Donald Trump’s account should be unblocked. Trump’s account had been suspended after the January 6th Capitol riot for violating Twitter guidelines and due to the risk of inciting further violence.
With over 15 million votes, only a slim majority were in favour of reinstating Trump’s account, with 51.8% for and 48.2% against. Hardly an overwhelming result. Interestingly, one of the people who wasn’t in favour of reinstatement was the former president himself, who said “I don’t see any reason for it” and that he would stick to his own platform Truth Social. With even former Twitterholic Donald Trump feeling disillusioned with Twitter, even Musk had to have struggled denying that the platform was rife with issues.
During his tenure as CEO after buying Twitter (a multi-month shitshow that he tried to back out of), Musk introduced many controversial changes to the platform. This included reinstating banned accounts, culling the platform’s workforce, and introducing an $8 charge for the blue verification badge that was almost instantly exploited by trolls. And that’s not to mention the bizarre choice to rename the platform to X.
The huge initial success of Threads spoke volumes about user dissatisfaction with Twitter. However, its glory days didn’t last long.
“Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue”
On February 3rd 2023, Musk posted:”Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads”. With the new Twitter CEO himself stating that the platform was losing over $4 million a day, it was pretty clear that this new policy of sharing ad revenue was designed to bring in more money to keep things afloat.
He followed up this announcement by stating that “To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified”. This created a pay-to-play situation encouraging users to create content in order to earn a tiny share of the profits. With no proper vetting or fact checking, it seemed inevitable that the accounts would take advantage of this system by sharing extreme or controversial content guaranteed to generate engagement.
“All news is to some degree propaganda”
On April 9th, after former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev tweeted that Ukraine was a “Nazi regime”, Musk defended his right to tweet, and said that “All news is to some degree propaganda. Let people decide for themselves.” Twitter’s trust and safety team had been known to apply “visibility filtering rules” to Russian government accounts and state-affiliated media accounts from countries “limit access to free information”. Medvedev’s account was previously one of those that was filtered and, understandably, many users were concerned about the spread of misinformation.
Musk’s throwing-his-toys-out-of-the-pram approach was to add the tag “state-sponsored media” to posts from a variety of reputable news outlets. While it had previously been reserved for blatant propaganda from Russian and Chinese sources, it was now being added to posts from the BBC and NPR under claims that it meant giving equal weight to all information.
“X.com now points to “twitter.com”
On July 23rd, Musk finally made good on his plans to rebrand Twitter as he posted: “X.com now points to twitter.com. Interim X logo goes live later today.” The billionaire has long had a bit of an obsession with the letter X, using it in everything from business names and car models to his own child’s inscrutable name. In 1999, he co-founded an online banking company called X.com, which later merged with Confinity and became PayPal. Having bought the domain from PayPal back in 2017, saying the name had “great sentimental value”, it seems that Musk had finally found the right project to take it over.
Of course, users and marketers alike pointed out the insanity of throwing away one of the most successful brands of recent years. From the instantly recognisable blue bird logo to the seamless vocabulary of tweeting and retweeting, Musk has obliterated 17 years of brand heritage and online community to make all his toys match.
Elon Musk’s recommendation of war coverage from accounts that have made false claims or antisemitic comments.
“@WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good”
On October 8th, following the previous day’s Hamas atrocities, Musk advised in a since-deleted post: “For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good.” While he followed this up by saying: “It is also worth following direct sources on the ground”, it’s hard to look past the platform’s owner recommending coverage from accounts that have been known to make false claims and antisemitic comments.
The recent conflict demonstrates just how well (read: poorly) the revamped social media platform conveys and verifies accurate information during a major crisis. A cursory search on X for posts about Israel and Gaza returns copious debunked information and (to use Trump’s favourite term) fake news designed to incite hatred. Following new laws regulating content on social media viewed within the EU, Thierry Breton, the commissioner of the Digital Services Act, has issued a warning to Elon Musk about the content shared on the platform. In a letter dated October 10th, Breton stated that there is evidence that “your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU.” Failure to comply will see Musk slapped with a fine of 6% of his revenues from X or a total blackout in the EU.
Does Twitter still have the X factor?
It’s been a turbulent 12 months for Twitter/X, with some internet users wondering whether the tech billionaire has been deliberately trying to tank the platform. Whether he’s trying to run the business into the ground or is genuinely just this bad at business, it doesn’t look like Musk’s unhinged posts and questionable strategies are going to slow down any time soon.
However, as one of internet’s oldest still-operational social media platforms, there’s a strong history and community behind the blue bird that isn’t that easy to kill. Even Threads, the fastest-growing platform in history, wasn’t able to topple the short-form text giant. So it seems that X is here to stay (or the time being, at least), and nobody has any idea what the next 12 months have in store for the world’s social media users and fake news outlets.
One thing is for sure: Social media is a tricky business. If you’d rather put your tweets (or whatever we’re calling them now) in the hands of a professional, speak to DWH and we’ll make sure your business’ social media strategy is sound.
October 2023 News Roundup
Here is our round up of the news stories and industry articles that caught our eye during October 2023.
Nike pledges to ‘stay on the offensive’ as it increases focus on demand creation
Nike’s CFO Matthew Friend stressed the significance of “staying on the offensive” as the company seeks to take advantage of the surge in direct-to-consumer sales.
It happens at the same time as the world’s largest sportswear company reported a 13% increase in demand creation spend, which amounted to $1.1 billion (£0.9 billion) in the first quarter of its 2024 fiscal year.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
In an effort to connect with Generation Alpha, V&A builds an interactive website
The V&A’s new website Mused, which was created with 10 to 14-year-olds in mind, aims to provide young people “social currency” and the self-assurance to discuss culture on the playground.
Read the article in Design Week.
Marketing leaders share cautionary tales about what can go wrong
Tesco, Costa Coffee, and Octopus Energy marketing executives give three cautionary tales about what can go wrong in your marketing career and how to fix it.
Every marketing leader has a cautionary tale that explains the lessons they had to learn in order to reach where they are now.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
Neil Packer creates illustrations for new Shakespeare edition
Shakespeare’s plays were originally printed together in a collection in 1623, known as the originally Folio. The Folio Society has released his works in a limited-edition set of three volumes, separated into the Comedies, the Histories, and the Tragedies in accordance with the original, and including two plays that weren’t included at the time. This publication commemorates the event’s 400th anniversary.
Read the article in Creative Review.
Brewdog launches new sub-brand
The new Session IPA from the Scottish craft brewer will be included in the core lineup but will have a more “anarchic” style centred on a snarky eagle character.
Read the article in Design Week.
To encourage “repeaters,” Eurostar intensifies its focus on loyalty.
Following its merger with Thalys International last year, Eurostar is starting the next phase of its journey by introducing “the new Eurostar,” which includes a new identity, website, app, and loyalty programme.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
‘It’s in the DNA’: First Direct’s CEO on why it doesn’t have a customer experience team
Chris Pitt is an example of a marketer who has made it to the dizzy heights of CEO. The former head of marketing took on the top job at First Direct in 2020 after four years at its parent company, HSBC. The first thing he did? Ring the 34-year-old business’s first-ever CEO.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
The Design Council has launched a new study project
Design Economy: People, Places, and Economic Value was the title of a report on the economic impact of design in the UK that was released by the Design Council in 2022. This study found that the design economy employs 1.97 million people and generated £97.4 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA), or 4.9% of the UK’s overall GVA in 2019.
Read the article in Design Week.
Consumer confidence falls as UK economy stalls
According to the most recent GfK Consumer trust Barometer, consumer mood in the UK has sharply improved. In October, the British public’s trust in both their personal finances and the larger economic outlet “nose-dipped.” Following months of gradual but steady increases in confidence, the most recent data reveals a dramatic decline in each and every index.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
Viviane Sassen’s new show blurs the line between art and fashion
Renowned for her unique style that experiments with light and shadow, vivid colours, and depictions of the human form, Viviane Sassen is one of those uncommon photographers who has a genuine impact on both the commercial and art sectors.
Read the article in Creative Review.
Mastering FMCG
Rapid shifts in consumer tastes and intense rivalry are hallmarks of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business. Effective marketing tactics combined with skillfully done graphic design might mean the difference between failure and success in this ever-changing environment.
Read the article in Marketing Week.
About DWH
DWH is an award winning Coventry-based creative design agency offering a full range of services including: