2024: a year in review for the creative industries

We look back at the biggest creative stories of 2024, what was behind them, and why they mattered.

It’s been a rum-old year, hasn’t it? The challenges facing creatives and agencies have been multifold, from economic disruption to political change and a rapidly evolving media landscape. More broadly, it’s felt like the tech giants are increasingly against us, from the generative AI tools robbing illustrators of work to the social media giants burying quality content in favour of the divisive and dumb.

At the same time, there’s been light amongst the dark, with many creatives proving their ability to turn challenges into opportunities and several cultural moments providing global inspiration. Plus, as ever, there’s been a ton of great work from creative studios, and we’ve worked hard to bring you the brightest, best and most interesting case studies to help inspire your own practice.

Let’s take a whirlwind tour of some of the year’s highlights.

A year of facing the future

2023 was the year when creatives first got slapped in the face by AI, which suddenly graduated from an interesting tech concept to a real-world juggernaut. This prompted a lot of fear, a fair amount of loathing, and headlines such as Should the world put a pause on AI? 2024, however, has been a different story.

While few of us have made our peace with AI, there’s certainly a broad sense that it’s unavoidable, and we need to learn to live with it. That new sense of hard-nosed realism has been reflected in a series of Creative Boom features, ranging from Simon Case’s prediction of the rise of the one-person agency to Jon Cockley’s more upbeat piece, How I learned how to stop worrying about AI.

Most popular of all, meanwhile, was our industry report Where the creative industry is heading, which brought together a range of advice from design leaders on how to survive the next 15 years. If you missed it the first time, it remains essential reading to this day.

AI wasn’t the only story, of course. A second big challenge to creatives was simply the state of the world economy, and we gave practical and actionable tips in much-visited articles including Freelancers’ Best Kept Secrets: Top tips for thriving on your own. Another challenge was the increasingly confusing and fragmented social media landscape. Consequently, one of our most visited articles of 2024 was our guide to marketing strategies beyond Instagram.

Finally, even Adobe managed to upset creatives this year when it required everyone to sign controversial terms and conditions before they could log in to Creative Cloud apps, prompting us to ask Should we ditch Photoshop with immediate effect?

Work that grabbed attention

2024 wasn’t all about controversy, of course. The vast majority of Creative Boom’s content this year, just like any other, was upbeat and positive coverage of great creative work. Among our most popular reads were ​​about Primark’s refreshed brand identity crafted by VCCP, photographer’s Elizabeth Waterman art book Candyland, and the IKEA campaign which found an original way to talk about its low prices.

Elsewhere, the design world saw some stunning makeovers this year. Jaguar’s reimagined brand was the most talked-about, but the new, unified global identity for the Guggenheim by Pentagram also resonated with our readers. Kleenex celebrated its 100th anniversary with a fresh look from Turner Duckworth, and Chester Zoo’s brand refresh by How&How was another standout. Finally, Small’s work for CoorDown, on a new campaign for World Down Syndrome Day, attracted the most Instagram views in our 15-year history.

Other notable design stories in 2024 included Jessica Walsh launching her own type foundry, the launch of the Northern Design Festival, JKR’s new brand system for an expanded Uber in Lancaster, and Ragged Edge’s overall of Go Compare.

Cultural events that inspired us

All this took place against the backdrop of a year packed with cultural happenings that ignited imaginations everywhere.

Who could forget, for instance, Snoop Dogg’s presence at the Olympics? We offered our own take on how to live your best creative life by offering tips based on the rapper’s Parisian experience. We also explored what the success of the Oasis reunion can teach us about branding, while our on-the-ground reporting from Glastonbury Festival underscored why it remains one of the world’s most important artistic events.

More broadly, this was a year in which the music industry raised its game globally, from Afrobeat to K-Pop, and we covered everything from Suki Waterhouse’s magical Coachella set to John Mayer’s stripped back show at the O2. But it was the female pop stars that truly hit it out of the park in 2024, from Beyonce and Taylor Swift to Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. And even if dance beats aren’t your bag, no designer could escape the cultural importance of the ‘Brat summer’ phenomenon spearheaded by Charli XCX. Who knew that—in an era where virtually no one buys records any more—a deliberately crappy record cover could make such an impact?

Yet pop music and sport, arguably, are the last remaining bastions of the shared experience we all used to enjoy. In contrast, other things like television, movies and journalism seem to have splintered into a thousand online pieces for a thousand different audiences. In a world where podcasters influence elections more than CNN, British comedian Paul Smith built an arena-filling career without ever doing TV, and the fight of the year saw an ageing Mike Tyson take on an obscure (at least to most people) YouTuber – making sense of it all seems more challenging than ever.

How Creative Boom covered it

That’s just scratching the surface, of course… If we were to sum up every artistic, tech, business, and cultural happening of 2024, we’d be here all day. And that’s exactly why, throughout 2024, it’s been worth visiting Creative Boom on a daily basis.

All year round, it’s been our mission to bring you all the big developments and most interesting work in the form of words, images, audio and, for the first time this year, video too. All of which has come with thoughtful analysis to help put everything in context for you and explain why you should care.

In 2024, this effort was helped by having our people on the ground across the world. With first-hand reports from places as varied as Miami, Tokyo, Wellington, Milan, Prague and Lucerne —and of course, all across the UK—we brought you the skinny on what was really going down, not just what the organisers had written in their press releases.

And we haven’t even got around to mentioning The Creative Boom Podcast yet! Our show has continued to thrive in 2025, with two new seasons, reaching a milestone of 20,000 subscribers and welcoming a stellar lineup of guests.

With chats on topics ranging from AI and social media to design trends and the future of the profession, our podcast sparks the kind of thought and debate you can only get from long-form discussions with the industry’s most interesting people. If you haven’t already, we’d love it if you’d subscribe right now—it’s a great way to give yourself a fresh burst of inspiration for 2025.

To sum it all up, 2024 has been a year to remember, both for us at Creative Boom and the industry as a whole. Right now, though, we’re just as excited to see what 2025 holds. And we promise to be there for you every step of the way, providing insights, inspiration, and a platform for creatives to connect with each other.