Creative Business Wrap – January 2026

As a new year begins, many of us find ourselves in a “strange pause”. The impressively named Saul Betmead de Chasteigner says that most of us handle this pause by going through a fragmented mental highlight reels or half-considered lists of goals. In his article “What the year was trying to tell you,” he argues that the problem isn’t a lack of reflection; rather, the process rarely results in something usable. 

To address this, he proposes creating a “Life Theory Statement“—a practical container to turn a year’s worth of lived experience into a coherent story. This approach allows people to extract the “signal from the noise” of the past year and enter the new one with fewer but clearer priorities.

The framework is an eight-part, structured review that flows from hindsight to action, requiring honest rather than perfect answers. It begins with “Hindsight,” identifying what the year taught you about yourself, and “Foresight,” noticing what you are being subtly pulled toward. For these insights to lead to change, the process demands an accurate understanding of your core patterns—identifying who you are at your best and worst under pressure—to build “bridges” between your past and future self.
 
For creative business professionals, this offers a way to become more intentional in an unpredictable industry. By defining small, achievable steps and progress metrics, introspection turns into tangible actions. The author suggests treating this personal strategy as “always in beta,” acknowledging that the next year will bring its own surprises. The goal is to start the year with a narrative you believe in enough to live out. 

Worth a red-hot 2026 go? (Thanks to reader Brad Amos for suggesting this article. Others can do this too. Hint, hint.)

How do our collective design choices reflect the world we live in? In her review of 2025, Amelia Nash at PRINT Magazine describes the year as a period of reckoning rather than a typical cycle of aesthetic trends, where design shifted toward values of craft, restraint, and responsibility. Influenced by a volatile political climate and the fragility of institutions, design began to prioritise symbols that clarify and anchor rather than chase novelty. 

The year, she says, was defined by a sharp tension between the rapid integration of AI-driven automation and a renewed hunger for human-centred labour. Designers increasingly pushed back against efficiency as the highest virtue, leaning instead into tactile processes and visibly human craft to provide grounding in a world often flattened by technology. This resurgence of “slowness” as a form of care was evident in the popularity of analogue media, such as print book covers and intricate miniatures, which offered a sense of permanence and physicality.

Nash reckons that colour, typography and interpretive design reflected a desire for accountability and honesty, leading many designers to seek to make the world more legible and navigable. These are all themes she’s selected from PRINT’s 10 most read articles in 2025, which are also worth a look, from a new typeface for Black Sabbath’s Tommy Iommi, to the knitting of miniature jumpers. These creative industries are a broad church indeed.

In our semi-regular article on the theme “eep, look at what AI can do now”, here’s a piece from Viren Naidu of the BBC on how it’s changing Bollywood. In the world’s largest film industry, AI has become a way to bypass traditional studio gatekeepers. Filmmaker Vivek Anchalia used AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to produce the film Naisha, in which 95% of the movie was generated by AI, on a budget of less than 15% of a traditional Bollywood production. Anchalia sees this shift as a way to democratise filmmaking, allowing young directors with limited resources to bring their visions to life on their own terms.

Beyond independent projects, AI has integrated into the daily workflow of big-budget Indian productions, particularly for de-ageing veteran actors and pre-visualising complex scenes. For instance, a 73-year-old actor, Mammootty, was successfully de-aged to appear as a 30-something in the hit thriller Rekhachithram. At the same time, other directors use AI-driven pre-visualisation to test scenes before committing financial resources to physical production. Sound designers are also using AI-powered libraries to speed up the editing process, allowing for “last-minute” creative changes that previously required expensive studio sessions.

Despite these efficiencies, significant limitations regarding cultural nuance and legal protections remain. Many filmmakers note that AI often lacks emotional depth and is “tone-deaf” to specific Indian aesthetics or local references because its training data is primarily Western. Furthermore, India currently lacks a comprehensive legal framework to safeguard against AI misuse of intellectual property or actors’ likenesses, particularly concerning posthumous rights.

All this and more, coming to the Australian screen industry soon.

“Go to Hull,” someone shouted at me during a particular raucous Christmas celebration. At least I think that’s what they said. It’s hard to hear over all those carols.

OK then. So the Creative Growth Hull & East Yorkshire initiative is a funded program, specifically designed to help creative founders re-examine their growth plans, become investment-ready, and navigate daily operational pressures. It is open to profitable businesses and freelancers across diverse sectors, including architecture, film, performing arts, and video games. 

Participants benefit from expert-led sessions and peer learning, with the added opportunity to exhibit at a regional showcase or apply for a fully funded exhibitor package at the Big Creative UK Summit in London. Recent participants from the program’s sixth cohort, including business owners in photography and museum management, emphasised the value of stepping back from daily routines to gain fresh perspectives and hearing peer feedback that reflects a client’s point of view.

You might be wondering why all this Yorkshireness is relevant to Australia’s creative industries. My point is that we lack something like this here, and have done so ever since the demise of the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (which I used to work for). But in a glimmer of hope, the NSW government has committed to a successor program for Business Connect, the small business support program it dumped last year.

Business Connect had a creative industries strand… can we hope that the NSW government might look to Hull and back home to find examples of programs for creative businesses with a proven track record?

Finally, a podcast recommendation. On Spotify, the Culture Study podcast has a great episode called What it’s Actually Like to Run a Small (Creative) Business. It features a candid conversation where host Anne Helen Petersen interviews surface designer and printmaker Jen Hewett about the gritty mechanics of maintaining a creative career. Hewett challenges the romanticised view of the “artist entrepreneur,” describing independent artists as the “canary in the coal mine” regarding economic shifts like tariffs and healthcare policy. She draws a key distinction between freelancing and Hewett’s primary model of licensing—which she likens to “renting out a piece of art” for a specific time and fee—allowing her to function as a small business that also manufactures its own goods. 

Hewett rails against the pressure to be constantly visible on social media. At the same time, she built her career during Instagram’s “golden age” in 2012, she argues that today’s algorithmic landscape makes it a poor tool for business development. Instead, she reveals that 60% of her sales now come through her newsletter, and advocates for the tangible benefits of physical craft fairs over the “invisible labour” of creating reels. On the operational side, she discusses the “admin tax” of creativity, concluding with the advice to “hire out the thing you hate the most”—which, for Hewett, is bookkeeping—while retaining other tasks that offer more fulfilment.

Surely that’s worth a place in your “life theory statement” for 2026? 😉