Most of the working day happens on a screen. Research, references, experimentation, refinement — and at the end of it, a smaller screen. It's a familiar pattern: the same platforms, the same curated feeds, the same sources available to everyone working in the same field. At some point the work that emerges from that begins to converge — technically fluent, recognisably current, gradually indistinguishable.

Writing in It's Nice That, Poppy Thaxter observed that the homogenised, over-polished output that emerges when everyone draws from the same sources is starting to feel like what it is — content without a maker. Audiences, she noted, are increasingly hungry for the opposite: proof that something was made by a person, with their own judgements, their own worldview, their own way of seeing.

What she's pointing to isn't really about tools or platforms. It's about whether the person making the work has a perspective that is genuinely their own — formed from their own experience, their own way of looking, their own sense of what's interesting and what isn't. That's what's increasingly difficult to find, and increasingly valuable when it appears.

It made me think of Bráulio Amado. A Portuguese designer based in New York, his work sits noticeably outside the current. His posters, record covers and editorial illustrations have a quality that's difficult to systematise — handmade marks, unexpected colour, a looseness that reads as deliberate without being self-conscious. He works across music, culture and publishing, and whatever the context, the work carries an unmistakable personal character — the kind that comes from a genuinely individual way of seeing, not from what's currently circulating. The work feels like it was made by someone who spends time looking at the world rather than at representations of it — the lettering on shop fronts, discarded objects, the particular visual density of a neighbourhood. Things noticed in passing rather than retrieved on demand.

The connections between what you notice and what eventually appears in the work are rarely direct or conscious. You don't find a texture on a wall and reproduce it in a logo. But the habit of looking — without purpose, without a brief in mind — keeps a particular kind of curiosity alive. It's the curiosity that produces the unexpected detail, the slightly wrong colour that turns out to be exactly right, the decision that can't be generated. It can only be built, slowly, over time.