When I started working in the creative business, you didn’t have to look hard to find legends.

Every designer, art director, or strategist had people they admired.

People whose work shaped how you thought, worked, and aspired.

You’d find books like Designing Design by Kenya Hara, The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher, or A Smile in the Mind on every serious desk. These weren’t aesthetics-driven manuals - they were philosophical anchors. You could flip through a few pages and immediately want to do better work.

The legends felt accessible - not because you could message them, but because their work was all around. Saul Bass, The Eameses, Le Corbusier. People who didn’t just make things - they made systems, perspectives, worlds.

Closer to home, there was Geoffrey Bawa, Dashrath Patel, Sudarshan Dheer, R.K. Joshi, Gopi Kukde, these were the people who didn’t have “viral strategies” - they had work that moved cultures. In advertising, it was people like Piyush Pandey, Kersy Katrak, Balki. Globally, there was George Lois, Dan Wieden, David Abbott - minds who shaped generations of thinking through clarity, not volume.

What united all these people wasn’t a single aesthetic or ideology. It was that their work had something to say. You didn’t need a caption to know who had made it. You could point to a piece and say: “That’s unmistakably theirs.”

I didn’t care if they had a hundred thousand followers. I cared that they stood for something. That clarity feels harder to find now.

When I speak to younger designers and creatives today, the names most of them mention are often influencers - people known more for their visibility than for their body of work. Often, it’s someone who shares tips, trends, or aesthetic opinions. The tone is polished. The presence is strong. But the work? It rarely lingers.

This shift isn’t accidental.

I’ve had clients ask - often directly - for “viral ideas.” Not good ideas. Not the right ideas. Viral ones. That request says something deeper about the state of creative work.

It reflects how marketing has been slowly degraded - turned into a surface function that’s easy to cut or commodify. Once treated as a core business driver, marketing is now often tasked with “getting attention,” not building value. As a result, creative teams are pushed into an increasingly narrow lane: be relevant, fast, and format-friendly.

Design, too, is being reduced to visual garnish. Everyone wants branding. Not everyone wants the thinking that builds it. We’ve turned the process into performance.

And when everything becomes about being seen, the work becomes reactive. The measure becomes frequency, not depth.

Cal Newport, in Slow Productivity, writes:

“We treat our days like boxes to be filled. The goal of productivity should be the opposite - to be as useful as possible, not as busy as possible.”

In our world, that means making work that lasts. That shapes. That helps. Not just work that lands well in an Instagram carousel.

This isn’t just a design issue.

In sport, we admire the ones with personal brands more than the ones with quiet consistency. In luxury and fashion, we chase drops and collabs more than ideas or craft. In enterprise tech, we reward narrative polish over real product performance. In writing, we follow those who are good at posting, not those who are good at building an argument.

We’ve swapped value for visibility. Refinement for reach.

The volume’s up, but the substance feels thinner. The noise has gotten louder than the craft.

We’re living in a time where sameness is dominating. Templates, safe outputs, content loops. Everyone’s trying to be seen. Fewer are quietly getting better.

I meet young designers who are exhausted - not from the work, but from the pressure to stay visible. They want to be inspired. They need to feel connected to something larger. But they’re stuck in a cycle that’s more algorithm than art.

What’s missing is that quiet sense of pride. The deep satisfaction of mastering something. The stillness it takes to find your own voice. The thrill of putting something out in the world that’s honest.

Originality doesn’t need to be loud. It needs to be built. Repeated. Over time.

Being consistently good over years is what creates legacy. That’s what shaped the legends we looked up to. That’s what raised the bar. I knew I’d never be as good as them - and that’s exactly what pushed me to try.

Who you admire shapes who you become.

Call it old-school, call it sentimental - but it’s not the past I’m clinging to. It’s the idea that work should have weight. That it should come from somewhere real, not just perform well.

We don’t need to reject this new world. We just need new heroes for it. Not the ones trending this week - the ones quietly building something that’ll still matter five years from now. I know they’re out there. Still choosing depth over speed. Still building in the shadows away from the noise.

As for me - I’m trying to confuse the algorithms by having varied taste in music. Half the time, Spotify has no idea what to recommend me. And that’s exactly the point - free from influence, free from the feed.

‍