Institution vs. individual

I’m coming across more and more people, designers, strategists, copywriters, motion designers, who are either thinking about stepping away from the organisations that shaped their careers, or they’ve already done it. Leaving agencies, studios, consultancies, and setting up on their own, or in small creative collectives.

Almost everyone wants some version of independence. Not necessarily to build an empire, more the ability to say: this is how I like to work, this is my pace, this is my point of view. Those are usually the first things to get compromised, to different degrees, inside bigger organisations.

At the same time, most people don’t want to spend their lives raising invoices, chasing new business, or worrying about cash flow. For a lot of people, the reality of being an independent creative feels less like freedom and more like a nightmare. So I don’t think this is a story about everyone going solo.

It feels more like the centre of gravity is shifting slightly. It’s now far easier to publish, share and release work, build an audience, and find buyers for your services without a big commercial wrapper. And once that’s true, it raises the question: what’s left if the large ecosystems aren’t as appealing to top talent, and people don’t have to stay to make a good living?

Add to that the backdrop of agency layoffs, mergers, and the steady drift of senior talent in-house, and the question starts feeling less theoretical and more like a real challenge.

Maybe the challenge is standardisation. I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s just what happens as organisations grow. Coherence makes an agency’s services easier to buy. The work becomes more predictable. Risk lowers for the buyer. And to be fair, this is often framed as a quality thing. Standardisation is how you make sure the work meets a bar, even when teams change, timelines shrink, and pressure ramps up. It’s a way of stopping things from going off the rails. I get that.

The problem is that “quality control” and “sameness” can start to blur. Coherence creates patterns, and patterns repeat over time. Teams learn what gets approved, what sells, what’s seen as “good.” Designers get tired of the repeat patterns. Agencies deny having a “house style” to keep creatives feeling empowered, while quietly relying on it to win the next job.

And at some point you have to ask: are we left with a studio that has a clear creative point of view, or just a commercial creative machine whose only real difference is its people?

That’s why I find A24 interesting as a comparison, because it seems to build coherence, and maintain quality, differently. From the outside, it doesn’t feel like every film release is being pushed through one obvious filter. The common thread is that it consistently backs distinct voices. The films feel strongly authored, and the “A24-ness” is more about the kind of people they choose to support than a single style they impose.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t a drop in standards. If anything it feels like the standards are higher, just applied in a different place. More emphasis on being selective upfront, being disciplined about what you greenlight, and then supporting the work properly through development, production, and finishing. Quality comes from taste, judgement and care, not from forcing everything into the same-ish shape.

It makes me wonder what agencies and studios would look like if they took an idea like that seriously. Less “make it feel like us” and more “give us your best take, and we’ll build the conditions for that to be excellent.” Obviously there’s a client brief in the middle and that changes everything, but the provocation still holds. Maybe the role of the studio shouldn’t be to standardise the output, packaging it as a buyable offering, but to protect the uniqueness of its human team and help the work land in the best way possible.

This is also where the argument can feel weak in branding and design, because the default belief is that the outcome should be a pure response to the brief. The brand is the brand. The job is to channel the personality of the brand and keep your personality out of it. But I don’t think that’s realistic. Briefs don’t produce work on their own. They get interpreted. Two talented teams can respond to the same brief and produce completely different outcomes, and the difference is judgement. What you prioritise, what you leave out, what you push on, what you protect. The team’s individual fingerprints are there, whether we admit it or not.

When branding is at its best, it has soul. You can feel a human intelligence making choices. So the question isn’t “should there be fingerprints.” It’s whether they’re applied intentionally, whether they have depth and texture, and whether they’re the right ones for the brand. Its these layers that makes a brand more magnetic.

The catch, of course, is that this requires choosing the right people. It’s less like buying a service and more like casting. You’re not just hiring an agency to “do branding.” You’re choosing a designer, or a small team of designers and strategists, whose instincts you actually want inside the brand, because those instincts will show up in the work. The brief can guide the direction, but at some point the brief runs out, and you’re left with judgement.

That’s a harder kind of relationship for clients, because it demands clarity about what you’re buying, and who you’re buying it from. You don’t get the magic without the maker. If you want the work to feel more human, you have to accept that a human fingerprint will be in it. And I believe, today, that’s a really good thing.

You can see a version of this playing out on social, where the brands that feel most alive often feel authored. Sometimes it’s literally one creator behind a brand’s account. Sometimes it’s a small group. Either way, you can feel the fingerprints when the tone is more human, less committee-shaped, less flattened by templates, and the truth is people respond to that.

And then, of course, there’s the AI layer sitting underneath all of this. As generic output gets cheaper and more abundant, “pretty good” becomes the norm. Which means the thing that holds value shifts again, away from volume and towards unique human perspective.

When our attention is flooded with content, the most valuable work will be the work that carries a point of view, work that feels like it came from someone. And I think that puts pressure on organisations that have relied on standardisation to keep the work coming in, because I worry that “standard” won’t be considered as valuable as it once was.

So when I look at creatives stepping away from institutions, studios like A24 building a strong commercial case for distinct voices, and brands winning by letting more humanity show on social, none of it proves a single neat point. But it does point in the same direction.

Maybe the next phase of creative organisations is less about sanding down distinct voices into something coherent and buyable, and more about backing individual voices, coaching them, shaping them, nurturing them properly, and letting your range of individuality be your advantage, whether its 2 people or 200. Because the more automated and abundant the generic becomes, the more it matters that the work feels like it came from you.

I write about the creative process, running an independent studio, the twists of a non-linear career, the tools I’m using, what I’m learning, what I’m unlearning and current things I can’t stop thinking about. If you’re into branding, design, creativity, considering an independent creative career – you might be interested in following along.