Notes, Noise, New Starts
signals, echoes & patterns
Hello, and welcome to 2026, although I hold little authority to usher in the New Year for you. I hope 2025 wound down well… it did for me.
And so to a new year, unreliably tied to new efforts, new ideas, new beginnings even.
The Colour Bar fires up with some fun hits, and a survey to boot!
MTV: endings, echoes, reinvention?
Trippy Posters: inside Vasilis Marmatakis’ visual logic
AI & Music: New year, more notes
▶️ Curated/Cuts: Patterns of 2025
➕ Grammys for album art, IGTV returns, sports photography
🎧 Prefer to listen? Hit play above to listen to me read this week’s dispatch.
A Survey
The new year is a good time to do a light tune-up for The Colour Bar. The aim is simple: keep the parts that are meaningful, earn real attention, that you really enjoy… trim anything that doesn’t.
So yes, there’s a survey. It’s short (2-3min max, really), simple, candid. I’d really appreciate you taking the briefest of diversions to fill it in.
Please give it a go! Polite answers optional.
1. Brilliant ideas & MTV.
I worked on MTV shows right at the start of my career, did much else, then more than 15 years later, became a custodian of the brand in Asia. I left it when its star was very much fading, especially in Asia- but we always found a fan, a viewer, a client, a partner who bemoaned the loss of its musical DNA, looked back on it with fondness.
Now, MTV's music efforts are largely no more. Many of our social feeds have seen a stream of eulogies from those who have grown up with the brand, or worked for it, or worked on it, or just loved it.
Re-rewind: Then, someone had the simple, brilliant idea to set up a website where you can rewind through over 10,000, 30,000, 39,000 videos from the 1970s through to the 2020s- all clubbed under an umbrella of 'MTV rewind'. You can choose ‘channels’ by decade, and it now has specials like Live Aid, TRL, Yo!, Unplugged, Headbanger’s Ball and a bunch more. AND some of those MTV idents are peppered in too!
Built by one Flex, this is a proper homage to the iconic music and youth brand, with- needless to say- zero deference to any reality TV stuff.
It’s brilliant in its simplicity- you could argue MTV could have done something as straightforward anytime in the past decade (but didn’t).
Another smart play: MTV music channels around the world faded out on Dec 31. Well done to whoever had the brilliant idea to play ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ near midnight on Dec 31st. Even though in this case ‘lots more video killed the video star’, that choice mirrored the clever pick of this song as the first to play when MTV went live, back in 1981.
The Undead: What’s an unknown brilliant idea? The ‘new’ Paramount and David Ellison are in search of one. They want to reinvent MTV.
2. Trippy posters
I chanced upon this quite fascinating chat with graphic designer Vasilis Marmatakis. He may not be a household name, but Vasilis is the man behind the striking posters for many of director Yorgos Lathimos’ films. I definitely remember being stopped in my tracks by this brilliant poster from Poor Things.
We get a glimpse into his approach, ideas and background.
Having recently watched (and loved) Bugonia, I did enjoy reading about and seeing his work again, plus this very apt description of that weird, striking font from Bugonia, “futuristic, but in a very analogue way.”
3. AI & Music (again)
I wrote about 2025 for GenAI and music back in December, a piece (and videos) that got a fair few reactions on the lines of, ‘where is music going’.
Here is another good look at the state of affairs, where Spencer Kornhaber looks at both ‘sides’ of the divide around AI and music, concluding that, “A cultural countermovement that emphasizes flesh-and-blood talent and craft seems inevitable— but so is a future for recorded music that grows more crowded and chaotic with each day.”
As music companies look to find some way forward with a series of ‘settlements’, Virginie Berger evaluated this path. Her intent is to see how some fundamental issues are being addressed (or not)- consent, remuneration, attribution- while, in fact, making copyright infringement profitable.
“Both Suno and Udio can now market themselves as “responsibly licensed” platforms, pointing to their deals with major labels as proof of legitimacy. The narrative shifts from “they stole content to build this” to “they’re innovative partners in the future of music.”
But the theft hasn’t been remedied. It’s been selectively licensed after the fact, and only for those with the power to demand it.”
4. 🎬 The Curated/Cuts Wrap
Somehow, though new years are generally a time to look forward, we sometimes enjoy looking back just as much. This draft hung in limbo through the holiday season.
Scrubbing through 2025’s Curated/Cuts, I kept an eye out for threads… and could see instincts that kept hanging around- sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
If you’ve been dipping into these curations, you’ll know this is not going to be some grand conclusion; I don’t pick these to map the state of creativity or advertising.
It’s more because something in them lingered. Craft. Oddity. Humour. Human decisions. A residual thought worth holding. Or simply, “errr… ok?!”
Also, I quote myself. Yes, let’s deal with it.
A recurring affection for handmade effort.
This is not surprising, I love when craft and vision come together.
BritBox’s quite brilliantly crafted See It Differently practically spelt it out: multiple sets, long hours, many humans. “One actor. 11 sets. 50 crew. No AI.” Was that “No AI” a flex? Maybe, but it also proclaimed: this took serious effort, and effort matters.
Channel 4’s You Go, Kids! reminded us that ambitious collaboration with young people can be messy… and worth it.
Polaroid’s gentle prodding of the digital with Analog Lives was not quite anti-tech, but very pro-texture. Claymation in BBC’s Names Will Be Made for the Women’s Euros (“made the old-fashioned way”) was so kinetic, and proudly handcrafted. While also on the isle, A Very British Tableau (John Lewis) orchestrated 100 people, 100 products, 100 seconds- for a centenary of care.
Absurdity & amusement.
I clearly have a soft spot for the odd, unresolved, even uncomfortable, or just hilarious.
A lot of it came from Asia, like Pointlessly Pointed’s Thai humour of the “deadpan, nothing’s-really-dramatic-at-all variety”, or One Tight Slap’s mockumentary style “fearless creative liberty”, or Indonesian ghosts who cleaned up their act in this far-out spot.
Elsewhere, How Do You Spell Olgabasha? opened with a preference for no radish in the salad, but that had nothing to do with anything! Trending Today, Tacky Tomorrow? employed Samuel L. Jackson to be a little braggadocious…with teeth.
Even Tilda Swinton in Be Bold, Gentle Monster belongs here, with that techno-wild rave energy. It was confusing, strange, might sweep you along or “drop you cold in bewilderment”, and both reactions would feel fair.
Here were brands letting themselves be silly, strange or mildly unhinged without apologising.
AI, but try not to get weird about it?
Grappling with AI showed up repeatedly across the year, but rarely as spectacle.
The short film Recall Me, Maybe used AI as a narrative device to explore memory, truth and acceptance, “a gentle but not entirely comfortable collision.” AI-generated Post Scarcity Blues leaned darker, embracing irony, showing us what generative AI can do, while warning us what it can do to us.
And Cuco captured the balance quite nicely- generative tools used to bend reality, while staying culturally rooted and based on artist work. The ‘how’ was as interesting as the output.
While world.org put out ‘If you’re human and you know it’, pushing its very uncertain product with a very human tone.
The AI companies also gave it a go (storytelling, not gen AI itself!). Anthropic’s Keep Thinking pushed against the idea of AI as cognitive offloading, trying instead to “bring it back to the enabler, collaborator space.” ChatGPT’s campaign stayed closer to daily life, but still as “our partner in stumbling from one week to the next.”
Both entirely human crafted, mind you.
Values, sans sermons
Work that carries weight without too much shouting? I like.
The Ordinary’s Periodic Fable skewered beauty marketing by “calling out the uncomfortable absurdity of beauty trends.” The Worst Library made harm visible with “not fiction, not exaggeration. Just data made visible.”
Channel 4’s Sorry Not Sorry doubled down on its values, without flinching.
Nike x NBNW embraced process + heritage- “to respect the past is to respect the process and the people who carry it forward.” While Adidas looked again to shift the lens away from winning and toward those who support athletes, with You Got This. A worldview that, I noted, “resonates deeply with both my life and worldview.”
Even some climate-leaning work (Burn ’Em Plants!, Motherf’n Windfarms) landed through wit, reveals and cool casting choices.
Story time
Letting things breathe: music, pacing and restraint do a lot of work across these picks.
The Dance of the Sea was a languid exercise in the ebbs & flows of youth on the Senegalese shores of the Atlantic. Whatsapp India’s nine-minute vignette was built around voice and video notes. Whatmore’s album promos earnestly rejected rockstar posturing. Even one Dapper was worth a look, turning B2B marketing into Pulp Fiction pastiche.
Shorter but no less intentional, Guinness’ A Lovely Day in America felt “like a documentary in a 90-second montage” ; Everybody Loves a Fight for Battlegrounds Mobile hadn’t a screen in sight, soundtracked by a 1956 song ; Burberry’s Postcards from London were lighter, but continually charming.
So yeah, I like pieces that don’t feel the need to rush and explain themselves.
In the end
Of course, this is no definitive list. It’s not trying to be. I just wanted a loose reflection of what consistently caught my eye- efforts that valued craft, embraced ambiguity, treated technology with care, occasionally enjoyed being strange.
But, in their way, they do reflect a year where creativity did what it always looks to- bumping into culture, commerce, belief & technology to make a point. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly.
➕
Grammys for album art. Specifically for album covers, the split from being part of the ‘best recording package’ category, which considers all physical materials & images, this is “an effort to recognize the impact of cover art in the digital age”
IGTV Is Back….sorta. Get set for an Instagram Reels TV App, which seems similar to YouTube’s interface.
Please enjoy this superb collection of sports images from 2025.
And again, please do take a quick couple of minutes to do that survey. I love surveys!
