Your Research Practice Is Your Creative Identity
How art directors with a real research practice are building the visual authority that others can't replicate
Hi everyone,
Hope you’re well. The end of February is nearly there, which I think is a time when the industry is getting up to speed again, and more freelance jobs are appearing. It’s also almost my birthday, and it’s looking like it will be sunny for once! So things are good, as a Feb 25th baby in the Netherlands, my birthday isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, because it always rains, but this year might be different.
I want to start today’s newsletter with something I noticed on a recent project for a completely new kind of client. I was putting together a reference deck for a campaign brief, and about halfway through, I realised almost everything I had saved was already familiar. I had seen variations of all of it before, not necessarily because I lack taste, but it was because I had been pulling from the same ecosystem of circulating images in a short timeframe. The references were technically strong. But they weren’t mine and didn’t have my stamp on them as an art director.
That moment made me think seriously about what research actually means in 2026, when the volume of images being produced and consumed is unlike anything the industry has seen before. We are living through an era of what researcher Kate Crawford has described as ‘aesthetic flattening’ — a condition where everyone is drawing from the same water. And the more saturated the image landscape becomes, the more your research practice is what either sets you apart or keeps you running in place.
This essay is about that. About what genuine research looks like, what it builds in you over time, and why it might be the most important creative skill nobody talks about seriously enough.
We Are Living Through a Visual Sameness Crisis
I can’t stress it enough, honestly. Image culture in 2026 has a real problem, and it is not a lack of images, but what it actually is, is an excess of the same ones (or endless variations). AI generation has accelerated production to a point where technically polished visuals are now near-infinite and near-free. Social platforms have optimised so precisely for engagement that the images that surface are, almost by definition, already proven to resonate with existing taste. The result is a feedback loop that rewards familiarity and quietly punishes originality.
For art directors, photographers, and creative directors working in this landscape, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that it has never been easier to make work that looks competent but says nothing. The opportunity is that work with a genuine, research-backed point of view has never been more visible by contrast, because it is so rare.
The creatives who are building real authority right now are not the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose work has a specific visual intelligence behind it, one that comes from a research practice with actual depth. You can feel the difference immediately. There is a quality to work built on genuine inquiry that is hard to articulate but very easy to recognise.
The Difference Between Collecting and Thinking
I spent a very long time believing I was doing research when I was actually just collecting. There is a meaningful gap between the two and I think a lot of creatives are in it without realising.
Collecting is saving images because they are beautiful, because the mood is right, because they might be useful someday. It is passive. It lets the image speak without asking it any questions. A folder of thousands of saved images is evidence of a good eye, but it is not a research practice, it’s a database.
Research is when the act of looking starts producing ideas. You are making connections across unrelated fields, noticing patterns, and building a visual argument. You find a photograph in a 1970s Italian architecture magazine, and it changes how you think about negative space on a brief you’ve been stuck on for two weeks. You read a paragraph from a Susan Sontag essay on photography and suddenly the casting direction for a project you couldn’t articulate becomes clear. The research is not feeding the work, it is the work.
The shift between the two has less to do with what you look at and more to do with the rigour you bring to it. Slowing down. Taking notes. Asking what an image is actually doing rather than just whether you respond to it emotionally. This is the habit that builds a creative practice with longevity.
Where Distinctive Research Actually Lives
The images that carry genuine creative authority tend to come from sources that haven’t yet been absorbed into the industry’s shared visual language. The moment a reference enters the mood board canon is the moment it starts appearing across multiple decks and inspiration posts, and it starts producing a particular kind of sameness.
This is why I have become increasingly drawn to sources that live outside fashion’s own archive. I’m still learning, and also learning to be more interested. Because I’ve had a love for fashion, magazines and all that since I was young, but I also love looking at other aspects and relating them back. Architecture monographs. Scientific illustration from the 1960s. Food photography from mid-century cookbooks. Industrial catalogues made for function. Instruction manuals. Vintage science fiction. These visual languages were developed entirely independently of fashion, which means they bring something to a brief that fashion references alone cannot.
Physical sources have become essential to my process. Bookshops, secondhand magazine stores, and print archives that have never been digitised. There is something important about encountering an image that exists only in a physical object — one that has not been scanned, tagged, uploaded, or circulated. It is, by definition, less contaminated by the image ecosystem everyone else is pulling from. When I bring a reference like that into a creative conversation, it opens things up in a way that a Pinterest image never quite does.
Films are another rich territory, particularly the ones that have not yet been absorbed into fashion’s reference pool. The cinematography in Agnes Varda’s early documentary work. The production design in Eastern European cinema from the 1980s was characterised by creative constraints that produced genuinely strange and beautiful solutions. The costume logic in films that were never prestigious enough to be widely referenced. These are visual languages with real ideas in them, and most creatives working today have never looked at them at all.
Research as a Way of Seeing
What I have come to understand is that research is not just a preparatory step before the real creative work begins. It is the practice that builds your eye over time.
Every serious image-maker I have learned from, through their work, their interviews, their monographs, has a research practice that feeds directly into the visual intelligence of what they make. Wolfgang Tillmans speaks about sequencing images by intuition, a method that only works if your archive is rich enough to generate genuine surprise. Lynne Ramsay builds film references from sound cues, old magazine scans, and postcards collected from junk shops, they are objects that hold atmosphere rather than instructions. The result in both cases is a body of work that feels like it comes from a specific interior world rather than from a shared external one.
This is what research builds in you when you commit to it seriously. It develops a subconscious visual language like a set of instincts, references, and connections that are genuinely yours. On set, this shows up in the decisions that happen quickly: the frame you move to instinctively, the object you reach for, the casting quality you recognise immediately. These instincts don’t come from nowhere. They come from the accumulated depth of what you have actually looked at and thought about.
A creative with a deep research practice makes better decisions faster. They have more to draw on. They are less dependent on the brief to tell them what an image should feel like, because they already have a sense of what they believe images can do. Ever since this realisation I’ve made it my dedicated practice to keep researching and taking the step to more authorship over my work to understand what my style is. Each thing I read, project I do or decision I make is a step closer.
What Research Builds Over Time
In a climate where AI can generate a technically competent image from a prompt in seconds, the question of what human creative intelligence actually offers has become urgent. I think the answer is a point of view, a specific way of seeing that has been built through years of genuine inquiry, real-world experience, and research that goes beyond what an algorithm can surface.
This is the long game. It doesn’t pay off immediately, but it compounds. Over months and years, a genuine research practice builds a visual signature that shows up consistently across your work. Clients begin to recognise it. The right collaborations start to come. The work starts to feel like it belongs to a body of thinking instead of a series of individual briefs.
I am still building mine. I have deliberately been expanding my research into non-Western image archives, such as the independent magazine culture of Japan in the 1990s, studio portrait photography from my home town, and zine culture from communities whose visual histories were never widely preserved or digitised. There are entire visual languages that the dominant image industry has largely overlooked, and they are extraordinary. Finding them requires effort, going to libraries, seeking out physical archives, and looking beyond the collections that have been made easily available online. But that effort is exactly what makes them useful.
A Few Things Worth Starting With
Build at least one non-visual research source into your next project. A text, a film, a conversation with someone working in a completely different field. Notice what it changes about the brief. Sometimes I like to reference a song next to my moodboard, so the clients get the vibe better.
Keep written notes alongside your image research. Not captions, but actual observations about what something is doing and why it holds your attention. The act of writing forces articulation that images alone let you skip, and articulated ideas are far more useful in a brief than collected ones.
Spend time with images that create friction — the ones you can’t immediately place, that resist easy categorisation. That mild disorientation is usually a sign that your thinking is being stretched in a direction it hasn’t been before.
And pay attention to what keeps reappearing across your archive over time. The recurring motifs, the specific qualities of light or mood or gesture you are consistently drawn to. These patterns are your visual intelligence making itself visible. They are worth understanding.
The real archive is your eye. And your eye is built entirely by the depth and quality of what you have taken the time to actually look at.
In 2026, that is the creative advantage that genuinely matters.
I would love to know where your most interesting research comes from, such as the sources that have genuinely changed how you see. Drop them in the comments.
Love,
Zoë
Well done, and I totally agree. I'm a branding designer by trade in a creative director role, and this is definitely something I’ve spoken about to colleagues. The rise of Pinterest/Instagram sameness is exactly as you described – we're all using the same reference points now. Pre-internet you could not do that and relied on books, annuals, and magazines. Thanks for this and some good ideas to break up the status quo. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Love this point of view. Seeing the same pattern in architecture/interior design, where specific references are bounced around in the echo chamber, to the point of collapse. I think of it as creative hygiene, to look outside the algo, and the industry, ISO meaningful inspiration and creative direction: music, movies, poetry, nature, etc.