2024 was a strange year. As the world got stranger, a whole lot of creative output got safer. A loop of safe, repetitive ideas played out.
Some brands broke through using astute cultural insight or by going above and beyond in their storytelling, yet many fell victim to 'the sea of sameness'.
The struggle to balance innovation with the demands of tightened budgets and fragmenting audiences, all as technology sped at the speed of light. We believe for 2025 it’s time to double down on being daring. In a world of chaos, change is the only constant. Boldness doesn’t just become a strategy, it’s a necessity.
Over the next few pages, our global Jelly team share their thoughts on the shifts in culture and trends that they’ve spotted that we think are the key to a renaissance in creativity in 2025.
The success stories of the past year proved that when brands took risks, it worked.
Kinetic type @daniëlmaarleveld
Let's Get Weird
The Brands cutting through are the ones getting a bit chaotic. What better way to break through all the safety and blandness than by becoming unleashed. Audiences are clued up and advertising is disrupting their feeds (and not in a good way). The alternative?
Liquid Death have brought ‘adult cartoon’ style back into advertising with their 'The of Murder Man', understanding entertainment to their very core. From Dunkin Donuts recently getting unhinged on X through to RSPB's banging 'Birds of the Week' and downright bizarreness of Nutter Butter on TikTok, ‘out of the box’, chaotic and absurd thinking are what’s bringing entertainment value and joy into people’s feeds. Another brilliant example of off-the wall storytelling is Unilever's lynx's (Axe) success with these TV spots.
Content needs to be memorable to cut-through and the best way to do that is to entertain - and be utterly absurd whilst doing it. That way it can build, guide and feed culture in a never-ending loop. Everything, if it’s effective, gets filtered through social media nowadays; whether it’s reshares, re-mixes or the holy grail; it's caught cultural fire. The weird and wonderful thrives in the social media ecosystem.
Absurdist
This influence in both style and content is already rising amongst illustrators, commercial artists and animation directors. The chaos felt in the world, reflected in a strange alt-reality and an absurd take in a move away from the traditional. It's almost anti-logic and anti-pretty by design. Taking inspiration from the bizarreness of online culture and memes, we predict it's on the rise as a chaotic world becomes reflected in visual culture and content.
One of the best talks of the year for us was Beth Bentley from Tomorrowism and former Head of Strategy W+K London speaking at Brands & Culture, delivering her observations of how the strength of algorithmic pull was destroying the norms of personal taste and expression. This translated as a rallying cry for finding a point of difference. Don't do what everyone else is doing, resist the pull of the norm. Do what's really you to stand out. Be different.
It made us fizz with energy as this is what we've always strived to do. And with that in mind, across the team we've pulled some visual aesthetics that we predict will be big in 2025. Yes, the storytelling is imperative, but in ‘busting the algorithm’, first you must stand out, be noticed. When everything's a bit vanilla or Mocha Mousse (looking at you Pantone, colour of the year, really?) go big and go bright.
Amid an increasing ‘sea of sameness’, maximalism is a bold cure for the mediocre by embracing excess. Rejecting decades of minimalism-dominance, maximalism utilises bold colours, attention-grabbing visual complexity and compositions with limitless creativity. What better way to stand out than go all out?
Previous page: @luhardcastle
From left to right:
Escapist, utopian virtual art that’s giving innovation and tech meets dreamer artist. Maybe it’s the rise of the technologists as Artists, not AI? We consistently take on visual information that is flat and lacks any tangibility, this is a reaction. The shapes scratch the brain, and we can feel them. They are sensory, eliciting an emotional response in a way that we can foresee interactive exhibitions and reactive artworks that embrace an audience.
Previous page: @macarenaluzi
From left to right:
There is so much that is hard to process in the world right now, so bringing some bright, joyful pattern into everyday visual communication feels like a balm. It's a reminder joy is possible, and brands are yearning to align with artists who can demonstrate this feeling with their practice.
A blend of familiar nostalgia from times past but with a contemporary edge. Fluid, organic keyline work with bright fluoro palettes that root it in the now. In a chaotic world, whilst absurdism is on the rise, there's also some comfort in messaging that’s coated in familiarity - yet these feel new and old all at the same time. Bridging both eras is the reason for its effectiveness.
As certain as night follows day, a return to hand-crafted always follows a tech revolution. Craft is the latest come-back kid, actually, in our book, it never goes out of fashion. As pushback to generative AI visual content, we believe the hand-made will become more elevated. Or perhaps better; a positive differentiator.
In a tale as old as time, the best way to tell a story to connect with humanity - is to create it by humans. It’s rooted in neuroscience that we crave stories; it’s the way our brains retain and recall information the best.
The biggest ads of the year? The Christmas adverts. All stories. The brands that will continue to stand out and deliver effectiveness, whilst maybe not having the block-buster budgets of Disney or John Lewis, will understand that utilising storytelling that’s rooted in human experience across their comms matrix never goes out of fashion.
Image credit previous page: @becomingamorningperson
Left to right, top to bottom: Apple 'Fuzzy Feelings'
'Percebes' by Alexandra Ramires & Laura Gonçalves
'I'm Only Sleeping' by Em Cooper for
The Beatles with Apple Corp. & Universal
'Beautiful Men' by Nicolas Keppens
RetURN TO HANDMADe
With the increase in interest in how AI will evolve, we've seen a huge counter surge in the use of hand crafted techniques; the mistrust in the machine has sent us reaching for the integrity of hand made and hand crafted work to tell our stories.
Hand-crafted work also showed up big in award wins last year. The Beatles, 'I'm Only Sleeping' beat Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and other notable live action music videos, to take the Grammy for Best Music Video.
There are painterly animated sequences in both Paddington in Peru and Gladiator 2 plus at Annecy Film Festival, there were a lot of hand painted films, alongside a lot of water colour animation and stories that unfolded with fluidity, heart and maturity through this medium. One of the winning films at Annecy was 'Beautiful Men,' a Dutch stop-motion production.
Top left: 'Don't Hug Me I'm Scared' by Becky Sloan
Top right: IKEA 'Ways to Shop' by Matte Cooper
Bottom left: 'Group Session' by Studio MALS & Setreset
Puppetry
Furthering the growth in hand-crafted techniques, we predict a greater return to puppetry. Not only with Puppets in a modelled environment but also using them in mixed media alongside live action. Pulling on cues from nostalgia and delivering stories in unexpected ways, stop-motion and puppetry is highly effective in creating emotional connections.
Bottom left: @himuroyuri for Loewe
Top middle: @kokooma_ for Hermès
Bottom right: @huwmessie for Burberry
ARTISAN
Luxury fashion brands are also noticeably embracing human-craft and doubling down on artisanal values throughout their visual content. In their first 2025 social post, Hermes introduced the theme of the year 'Drawing is everything at Hermes, and everything starts with drawing' Pierre-Alexis Dumas.
Artists Hand
With the onset of gen AI art, we predict the mark-making of the Artists hand will come through strongly, with a new urge to embrace crafted expressionism and mark-making in illustrated content. A return to physical technique is yearned for and will worth investing in.
Top: Hayao Miyazaki 'The Boy and the Heron'
Bottom: Totto-Chan 'The Little Girl at the Window'
Dynamic 2d
Creative animation directors who make grown up, elegant content for short and long format animated films constantly evolve their craft and develop skills as story tellers to find new ways to break the boundaries.
2D techniques have been a continued trend; Miyazaki-esque emotive storylines and 2d characters. Digitally, layered dynamic motion working over fantastic landscapes with atmospheric lighting combines beauty and adds power to even the simplest story.
There's inherent honesty and integrity in something which has visibly been crafted by a human hand, another reason visual story-telling in this technique is so compelling and powerful for brands. A lot of what we are seeing does use CGI, but it's cleverly, as a layer and a tool, in turn allowing the hand-crafted visuals be brighter, more detailed, more elaborate, and more fantastical.
With the relentless pursuit of tech focussing most people’s minds on the quickest and easiest ways to produce brand assets, it’s interesting to see that in the actual branding of logos/devices and fonts there is a return to hand drawn. The humanity of hand-crafted lettering adds much needed personality to big brands, so they are running to embrace it to stand out and maximise their relatability.
Organic Human Feeling, Hand-Created Lettering
There's now huge success in understanding how to embrace audiences that are splintering faster than ever. Brands that can sustain being several different unique things at once to an audience without diluting their central purpose will win out. Generations aren't monolithic and campaigns that cater towards differing niches and tastes are on the rise.
Cut-through is key in the marketing world as it becomes more congested, so having different creatives running through a campaign means you can appeal to different eyes without having to hang your hat on any one style.
Channel 4 Idents
A brilliant example of utilising multiplicity are the Channel 4 Idents (that won 9 D&AD pencils this year) by 4Creative. Seventeen independent creatives, artists and filmmakers were brought together to create an emotionally rich journey of 25 looping scenes depicting life in modern Britain for Channel 4’s bold brand transformation.
To showcase the breadth of the collection in this iconic London Museum, the campaign by Adam&EveDDB in London utilised 70 different crafted objects to appeal to the nichest of niche audiences. It dug into communities from gaming, book-binding, street wear, ceramicists, sports fans through to metal detecting on Tik-Tok and Swifties. All with uncompromising attention to detail and craft throughout.
If You're Into It, It's in the V&A
9
Multi-Artist Campaigns
Why disrupt with only one style or means of expression when you can do it in the multiple? This Amazon Books campaign by Droga5 was an early example. Of late, Coldplay’s “Feel like I’m Falling In Love” by 15 diverse animators and directed by Raman Djafari whose styles include stop-motion, 2D, 3D, oil pastels, watercolour, and felt manipulation. It's a visually led way of spreading messaging and impact across niche audiences - and supported by the right strategy can be highly effective.
We see this trend continuing, especially with marketing budgets continuing to get tighter, as it allows more bang for your buck. Clients can get a wider variety of creative and different ideas so they can be more tactical with how they use them. It also allows a campaign to feel fresher for longer as the same creative isn’t being seen every time which means more longevity from the work, meaning better value for money, which we know has been a big trend this year and likely set to continue being a key factor in 2025.
Left: 'Megazoid' by David Jonathan Ross
Above: 'Maxi' by Dinamo
Retro-Futurist
Currently back on trend, this blend of old-fashioned "retro styles" with futuristic technology, explores the themes of tension between past and future, sensing the current alienating and empowering effects of technology. Geometric sans-serifs work well, but hand-crafted styles are important.
The inspiration is old sci-fi movie posters and popular movies like Blade Runner or Tron. But we are also seeing lots of ways to treat an "ordinary" font to get a retro future look, aping Sci-Fi book covers.
The Artists Voice
Historically, artists react to global situations that are tough or pressing through their practice. Artists use their work to amplify their voice, resulting in something very powerful and potentially cathartic. After a tough year in the economy combined with many other impending feelings of doom and gloom, burnout with creating work that is ‘empty’ or ‘superficial’ is common. Artists are now turning the burnout into something practical and, a lot of the time, into something extremely tangible and valued.
Ultimately, as an antidote to faceless AI art we see the choice of artist, their personality and identity becoming an even bigger role in a collaboration with a client than it being purely based on an artist’s style.
Brands that understand they can collaborate with and support artists more holistically than only in calendar moments, will find the most success out of a collaboration. Along with embracing an artists authentic voice, it needs to always be backed up by how a brand behaves horizontally through their own culture.
Fake Out of Home
Fake Out of Home blurs the lines between the physical and digital worlds. These ads do not ‘exist ‘in physical spaces like traditional OOH ads but are CGI creations. Fashion and beauty campaigns have utilised this successfully such as these by Jacquemus and Acne, spurred on by Maybelline’s early viral example. We predict this will continue in 2025 and expand in increasingly imaginative ways as brands embrace the virtual landscape to their fullest.
Social media campaigns: FOOH ads are shared as digital content to create the impression of a real-world presence without physically producing or installing the advertisement.
Augmented reality (AR): Users can view the ads through AR apps, making them appear as if they exist in the real world.
Top left: 'Daisy' by O2
Middle: 'Missing People' by Untold Studios
Bottom left: 'Adoptable' by Pedigree
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
What trend doc of now would be complete without mention of AI. But let’s do this differently: AI for good please.
AI for creating visual content is still so controversial - and rightfully so in many respects, given the multiple IP lawsuits filed against its big players. Whistleblowers coming forth to undermine companies own policies when it comes to ‘fair use’ as a defence to the vast swathes of copyrighted materials they have been trained on.
Ethical models are already on their way, yet no-one has yet found a solve for the vast energy consumption the LLM’s require. And as a friend recently wisely said to me, ‘AI is not a monolith’, like most online chatter the conversation falls into is it ‘good’ or ‘bad’ which isn’t the way to resolve the discussion. It’s a technology that’s here and will affect all aspects of our lives in so many varying ways. The question is, how do we use it effectively? Right now, it’s when it’s fuelling creativity for good. Let’s manifest more of that please.
IN wrap up: The Anti Trend-Trend
Ripping up the rule book and trying to do something completely unique that doesn’t conform to any trend is obviously the way forward for us. We think 2025 is going to be the year of the rebellion, let the Chaos commence!
Now is the time to challenge the bland.
Bravery is breaking through and reversing the trends. Brands are realising that having the courage of their creative convictions will get them out of the slump, the Malaise of 2024 is coming to an end.
Low budget doesn't mean low concept. It means must try harder, think harder, let's do the best we can, lets smash things up!
Credits & Acknowledgements
This document has been a joint project by the Jelly global
team with contributions from:
Alli Albion
Anesu Hwenga
Charlie Sells
Chris Page
Eri Panasci
Hazel O'Brien
Hanna Zakouri
Katrin Grun
Leah Airey
Millie Windibank
Nicki Field
Pierre Gobin
Ross Frame
Laura Thomas
Sue Loughlin
Further Reading & Resources:
> Burn After Reading by Mørning: 'When Weirdness goes mainstream'
> That Business of Meaning: 'ENCORE Grant McCracken on Multiplicity & Culture
> Pattern Recognition by Tomorrowism: 'Is the Algorithm making us less stylish...' & 'You'll Never be Cool (...if you can't be weird)'
> Brands & Culture: '2025: The Year of Shifting Culture & Marketing Trends'
> Most Contagious in Brief / The Contagious IQ Download
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We specialise in brand storytelling and bold visual content that connects brands with their audiences in meaningful, memorable ways. With a focus on collaboration, creativity, and craft, we transform ideas into stand-out visuals that cut through the noise.
We’ve worked with some brilliant brands over our 18+ years in business and picked up some awards along the way too. Our carefully curated network of creative talent includes some of the industry’s finest, and together, we push boundaries to consistently elevate our work.
In 2023 we made the decision to become an employee owned business, a reflection of how tenaciously we uphold our values, and now with a women-led senior leadership team, we’re hell-bent on ensuring equality and inclusion across everything we do.
At the heart of everything we do is a passion for crafting authentic, impactful stories through beautifully crafted visuals. Whether it’s through motion, illustration, or design, we’re here to help brands connect, inspire, and create lasting impact.