Creativity wasn’t taught in school the way science was. For a long time, people considered it an innate talent; a calling that only a few were inclined toward. And yet, in the same breath, many demean its value despite being genuinely awestruck whenever they encounter something purely creative.
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I could do that too!”
Exactly.
Everyone can. Yet they don’t.
It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that creativity was never framed as something learnable and so it was never seriously taught. But art is learnable. Design is teachable. They are channels through which one can train and revive a way of thinking that was always there, waiting.
Creativity is a mindset. It arises from connecting dots that haven’t been connected before, and it surfaces most often through reflection or boredom, both of which are becoming increasingly scarce. For decades, we optimized our education systems for replicability: the kind of thinking that produces the same correct answer every time. Science and math matter deeply, but they were once inseparable from creativity and reflection. The theorems and laws we now treat as fixed were themselves, at their origin, just thoughts, just proven repeatedly through predictable methods. Thought has been quietly overtaken by its own conclusions.
Which is fine. Until a machine can do it faster.
Two Ways of Thinking
Vertical thinking – logical, sequential, and step-by-step – has become the dominant mode of both working and teaching. It is reliable and efficient, and for a long time, it was also scarce enough to be valuable. Lateral thinking, by contrast, moves sideways. It finds unexpected connections, reframes problems, and generates ideas that linear logic would never arrive at on its own. It has always been harder to teach, harder to measure, and harder to automate.
With the rise of design thinking in business frameworks, lateral thought became newly legible to institutions that had long ignored it. And then AI arrived and changed the equation entirely.
We have now handed vertical processes over to machines that execute them faster and more thoroughly than any human could. Quietly, the same logic crept into creative work. Not all at once, but gradually, optimization colonized spaces that were never meant to be optimized. What emerged wasn’t creativity. It was the silhouette of it: output that follows every visible rule of good design while missing the thing that made those rules worth following in the first place.
AI attempts to recreate human creative thought, but what it actually does is reimagine in every computable combination the work it has already digested. The output is technically correct but spiritually inert. The genuinely new, the genuinely resonant, still has to come from somewhere else.
The Rubber Stamp
Graphic designers saw it coming long before most people named it, and much before AI.
Template culture.
Works so neat, so used, so recycled and regurgitated that they became hollow versions of what they first started as. Some things can work too well and that’s when they become a cliché. A rubber stamp that anyone can recognize, avoid, and worst of all, distrust. All design begins with purpose and intention. But once that is lost, or inadequately repurposed, it becomes a banality that signals your values before your words can.
People can already feel the difference between what is generated and what is intentional. Designers, artists, and builders of this era know exactly how to chase connection that feels real:
Familiarity.
The strongest source of familiarity right now is nostalgia. Those who witnessed a time before the social internet crave what has passed: memories of comfort and laughter in person. Those who haven’t known a world before hyperconnectivity are, in simple terms, burnt out by it. They are reaching for what is small, slow, and transient. Things that speak not just of memories but of moments of life actually lived.
Trading cards and stamps.
Receipts and barcodes (not QR codes).
Paper tickets (because why don’t we get a paper ticket for that once-in-a-lifetime concert we witnessed anymore?)
Albums, CDs, vinyl records, cassettes.
Polaroids and blurry photographs from point-and-shoots.
Even bread tags with a singular date printed on them. (thank you Cova for this beautiful essay on microdesign)
It isn’t that we want to disappear from the network. We just want somewhere that isn’t a stage. Somewhere to exist without an audience, to make without metrics, to figure out who we are before we’re asked to present it.
The return to analogue isn’t sentimentality. It’s a signal. When designers reach for grain and imperfection, for paper tickets and smudged ink, they are not retreating. They are insisting on something that cannot be computed: the evidence of a hand, a choice, a moment of judgment that didn’t have to go that way but did.
That insistence has a name.
It’s taste.
Taste is Key
Lateral thinking has always required taste as its compass. You cannot connect dots that haven’t been connected before without a sense – often wordless, often inexplicable – of which connections are worth making. AI can generate options. It cannot feel the difference between the right one and the almost-right one. That gap, small as it seems, is where everything lives.
In an era where execution is increasingly automated, taste becomes the scarcest and most consequential human resource. Not skill, not speed, not even knowledge, but the cultivated capacity to know what is true before you can prove it. People are beginning to notice. We saw the quiet irony when Anthropic launched Claude Design and still posted a product design role starting at $260k. Execution was never really the point. Judgment was.
The question then isn’t whether AI will replace creative work. It’s whether we’ve been practicing the thing it cannot replicate.
Later Means Never
But here’s what knowing that doesn’t automatically give you: the nerve to act on it.
For a long time, I lived a life of much thought and limited action. I told myself I was doing the most: absorbing, preparing, gathering. What I didn’t see clearly then was how inaction breeds inaction and thought breeds more thought, which in turn breeds apprehension and doubt. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but years of hesitancy quietly turned that target into a far-fetched ideal I’d reach one day, when conditions were right.
But conditions are never right. And one day is not a date.
What’s become clear to me this year is that having an insecure job (or none at all), becoming an entrepreneur, or doing the fun, weird, and meaningful thing you’ve been waiting your whole life to do carry roughly the same risk, however the riskiest of them all is just waiting. The safety of inaction is largely imagined.
Taste, like a language you no longer speak or a skill you’ve left dormant, fades without use. It needs to be practiced – in public, in the work, in the doing. Knowing you have it is a comfort. Using it is the terror.
So, this year, I have dared myself to close the gap between the thinking and the making. Not because the conditions are perfect. Because later, as it turns out, is just another word for never.
In The Light
A kaleidoscope doesn’t generate its own light. It borrows it from whatever source is nearest and refracts it into something new. That’s what this section is.
Some things don’t make it into the essay but refuse to be left out entirely. A detail I didn’t expect. A perspective I hadn’t considered. A name I found myself mentioning to people all month. Taste doesn’t develop out of the blue, it comes from identifying and absorbing more of what you like and analyzing what you don’t like.
“These mental scrapbooks form our tastes, and our tastes influence our work” – Austin Kleon
In the Light is where I put those things: work that caught my eye, and the people behind it. Partly because I love returning to whoever and whatever has moved me and partly because it is very easy to feel alone while making things, and no one who is building something beautiful should go unseen.
- Cole (IG @covacut): not really surprising if you’re a fellow creative. Cova’s Hyphen has been one of my earliest motivations to just start Kaleido since last year. All it took was one line to move me to tears but also to try and explore what I could really do: “but creative joy is fragile. it withers under efficiency’s promise.”
- Anya (IG @karocrafts): absolutely insane artist and designer. Exactly how I envisioned a mixed media artist would be. Her works might as well make me believe that unicorns are real. Genuinely obsessed with her arts and storytelling practice she has so intricately designed.
- Ara (IG @studywithara): one of the OGs back when I tried running a studygram five years ago very briefly. Always up-to-date and one of the most innovative digital creators I would mention to friends.
