The Future Isn’t Polished. It’s Fingerprinted.

I read the Stills Trends Report for 2026 the way I read most trend reports. With one eye, a coffee I don’t need, and a low-grade suspicion that I’m about to be told that “authenticity is back”...

I read the Stills Trends Report for 2026 the way I read most trend reports. With one eye, a coffee I don’t need, and a low-grade suspicion that I’m about to be told that “authenticity is back” by someone who owns three fonts and no pencils. I wasn’t planning to read it properly. I was planning to skim, scoff, and move on.

But then something unexpected happened. I kept reading… The headline takeaway, stripped of its buzzwords, is this:

Human-centred design is swinging back hard.

And not in a polite, tasteful way. More like a rude shove on a subway train. Emotional. Messy. Confident enough to risk being weird. Which, if you’ve spent the last two-ish years watching brands and agencies replace illustrators with prompts and stock humans with seven fingers, feels less like a trend and more like a huge sigh of relief.

(Click here to download the full report)

Over the past 20+ years in freelance illustration, I’ve watched creative cycles rise, collapse, and rebrand themselves as “disruption.” And the thing that always survives is not the tool. It’s the tell.

The report talks about a move away from sterile minimalism and toward work that shows evidence of touch. Texture. Bias. Opinion. You can see it everywhere already if you’re looking. Brands are letting things feel slightly wrong again. Type that doesn’t sit perfectly on the baseline. Illustration that looks like someone actually argued with the page, and maybe threw a bunch of versions in the bin.

This matters because for the last few years, everything has been sliding toward frictionless sameness. (Have you seen how many templated Squarespace sites there are now? They’re indistinguishable from each other.) AI didn’t invent that. It just accelerated it. When everything can be generated instantly, the only thing that feels valuable is what clearly wasn’t.

I think about this a lot when I’m drawing. You can smooth a line endlessly now. You can undo until your work looks like it was made by nobody in particular. Or you can leave the wobble in and let it betray you.

The wobble is the point.

One section of the report talks about “confidence in specificity.” Which is trend-speak for something artists have always known. The more personal you get, the more universal it becomes. General ideas slide off people. Specific moments stick. That’s why a cartoon about one man, one dog, and one stupid thought can land harder than a campaign built by a committee of twelve people trying not to offend anyone.

There’s also a renewed emphasis on time. Not speed. Time. Work that looks like it took longer than a lunch break. That rewards attention instead of hijacking it. This is not great news for anyone trying to win the internet in seven seconds, but it’s excellent news if you believe craft still matters.

(I do.)

I think of all the times someone’s apologised to me for liking something earnest. As if sincerity is embarrassing. As if caring too much is a design flaw? The report argues the opposite: That emotional clarity is becoming a competitive advantage. That people are tired of irony as a shield. I feel the same way.

I started drawing because I didn’t know how else to explain myself. I kept going because it connected me to people like you, whom I’d never meet otherwise. None of that shows up in a trend report, but it’s the engine underneath all of this work I’m doing here.

What the Stills report is really identifying is fatigue: People are tired of being “marketed at” by systems that don’t understand them. They want to feel a person on the other end again. Someone who made a choice, and might’ve screwed it up a bit. That’s good news for artists. Real ones. The ones who show their fingerprints.

It doesn’t mean AI goes away. It doesn’t mean the economics magically fix themselves. It does mean that human signal is becoming louder than machine noise, and if you’ve been quietly honing your voice while the world chased shortcuts, you’re better positioned than you think.

I’ll be honest. I don’t read trend reports for reassurance. I read them to see if the room has caught up to what artists already feel in their guts. This one mostly has.

The future isn’t clean. It isn’t neutral. It isn’t prompt-perfect. It looks like someone stayed up too late drinking too much coffee, cared too much, and left the mistake in on purpose.

That’s not a trend, that’s just being human again.

‘til next time

your pal,