Guinness found a new idea hiding inside a word it already owned. Hermès and Chanel picked a human illustrator over a prompt box. A viral AI video tried to bury Hollywood and instead built two Empire State Buildings. And a new report put a very large number on what design is worth to the economy. Let's get into it.
Guinness turns the word "Lovely" into brand iconography
Guinness didn't advertise for the first 170 years of its life, on the logic that the beer should do the talking. When it finally relented after a post-WWI slump, it set a rule that the ads had to be as good as the stout. The latest, "LoVely" from AMV BBDO, takes the old "Lovely Day for a Guinness" line and swaps the V for the brand's harp, so the word itself becomes a mark. Credited to creative director George Hackforth-Jones, it ran outdoors in Ireland over summer and is now feeding into the brand's Premier League activity, with Africa and Asia to follow. As Creative Boom notes, no new logo required. This is the smart move of the year for asset-rich brands: mine what you own instead of manufacturing another visual system nobody asked for.
UK design economy hits £136.7bn and overtakes retail
The Design Council's Design Economy 2026 report lands a striking figure: the UK design economy generated £136.7 billion in gross value added in 2023, up 40% since 2019. That puts design ahead of the £114 billion retail sector as the single biggest contributor to the national economy, roughly £1 in every £20. Digital design did most of the heavy lifting at £81 billion, and 80% of designers now work embedded in manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and finance rather than in studios. Wales alone grew 88%. The reporting via Interior Daily also flags the crack in the foundation: a 68% drop in Design and Technology GCSE entries. The industry has never been more valuable and the pipeline feeding it has never looked shakier. Worth remembering next time a client treats your work as a nice-to-have.
Manchester City Women gets the WSL's first distinct identity
Manchester City Women is now the first Women's Super League team with a brand separate from the men's side, built by Nomad after internal research showed real divergence between the two supporter bases. The work sits on a monogram of M, C and W tied together by a single flourish, running in sky blue, neon and chrome depending on context. The studio calls the concept the "light trail"; creative lead Sally frames it as "it's the light leading the way." The crest and sky blue stay, so the women's team reads as part of City while owning something of its own. It's Nice That has the full story. Women's football has spent years working with borrowed identity; giving it a distinct mark of its own is overdue, and Nomad's footballing pedigree shows in how connected the result still feels to the parent brand. We covered City's design world not long ago, too.
Hermès and Chanel pick an illustrator over AI
Hermès handed its summer 2026 online store to Paris-based artist Sarah Martinon, who hand-illustrated the whole thing as a drawn world, later animated by Armand Béraud. It followed her painted window displays for the brand in Lugano, and her packaging patterns for ABASK that led to commissions from both Chanel and Hermès. The through-line the coverage keeps hammering: two of the most powerful luxury houses on earth chose a human illustrator at exactly the moment other brands are getting burned by AI-generated marketing that erodes trust. The Creative Boom profile calls it her campaign of the summer. Luxury sells scarcity, and nothing signals scarcity like a mark that couldn't have come from a prompt. The tactile, made-by-hand look is doing real positioning work, and we've written before about the pushback against AI-smooth design.
Tabby rebrands with Ragged Edge and a cast of "Monions"
Tabby, the Middle East fintech founded in 2019, has rolled out a new identity from London agency Ragged Edge as it shifts from a split-payments tool to a full "money app." The brand now runs on bold type, a confident voice and playful mascot-like characters nicknamed "Monions," launching alongside a new spending account, Tabby Cash. With more than 25 million customers across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this is a serious platform choosing personality over the sterile blue-and-sans-serif template most fintechs default to. Campaign Middle East has the details. Finance apps have spent a decade convincing us they're trustworthy by being boring; Ragged Edge is betting the next round is won on warmth, and mascots are a fast way to buy it.
A viral AI video "kills Hollywood" and finds two Empire State Buildings
On 7 September, an X user posted an AI-generated clip of 1993 New York styled as HD footage, made with a tool called Seedance 2.5, captioned "If this is the level of AI creations, then it's over for Hollywood and big production houses." It went viral for the wrong reason. Commenters clocked the usual tells: extra fingers, gibberish signage, pedestrians moving in an eerily uniform pack, bodies merging into traffic, and a skyline sporting two Empire State Buildings. Someone dubbed it "the Empire State Trade Centre." The point, made via Creative Bloq: the tech is improving fast and still can't hide the slop, and a large audience can spot the difference instantly. Every time someone declares the human obsolete, the artefacts do the arguing for the other side.
Aporva Baxi on the trap of "good enough" design
DixonBaxi co-founder Aporva Baxi used his POV column to name the threat quietly building in the industry: not bad work, but "good" work. Competent, professional, impossible to criticise, and slowly dragging everything toward a bland centre. "Nobody decides to make work that settles," he writes. "It happens in the accumulation of reasonable decisions." His real warning is about "going numb and calling it professionalism," losing your own judgement without noticing. Read the full column at It's Nice That. Guinness, Martinon, the AI backlash: all of it points the same way. What cuts through is the decision someone was brave enough to make, and defend, past the point of safe.
Themes this week: do more with what you own, and let the human hand show. Two brands proved it, one viral video proved the inverse, and a decent report proved the whole thing is worth £136.7 billion. Go make the braver decision. See you next week.
