Cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as of being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past.
Stuart Hall
Welcome to the July edition of our newsletter!
Each month we meet here to share the themes that have crossed our creative journey and are echoing out into the world. In this edition, you'll read about the age of average brands, why taste can't be delegated to AI, the real state of the creative industry, the point of view no machine can borrow, and the aesthetic boom that won't look like AI.
In the section Tátil around the World, we have the return of Ricardo Bezerra (Global CCO), our love for sports, the new article by Fred Gelli, and Laila Rotter's (Creative Manager) piece on her experience judging the Pentawards.
Our goal is to stay true to our core principle of working WITH, not FOR. Feel free to share your suggestions, comment on our content, or interact with us by replying to this email.
Enjoy your reading!
Communication, Marketing, and Brand Team
Top 5 Tátil Curations
The age of average
Alex Murrell opens with a haunting experiment from the 1990s: two artists polled people across eleven countries on what they wanted in a painting, and every canvas came back nearly identical. Three decades later, those average landscapes became the landscape of branding, tech, fashion and car logos flattening into the same wordmark, twenty-seven campaigns sharing the "Find Your..." formula, and a study where only 38% of people could match a brand to its own tweet. When every category converges on a single style, sameness stops being a safe default and the few brands willing to look different are left owning the only space that remains.
Taste cannot be delegated
Aurélie Radom argues that taste is not something you can collect, measure or encode, and that AI and design-by-committee make the same mistake, confusing preference with judgment. AI learns what people choose and a committee learns what survives the meeting, but neither decides what deserves to exist next, which is the whole difference between optimizing the present and creating the future. Taste begins with an internal library built by exposure, yet it only becomes leadership when someone takes responsibility for the choice, and that is exactly the part no machine can carry.
Money, burnout and the machine
Creative Boom's survey of 882 professionals takes the temperature of the creative industry, and the reading is feverish. 69% reported burnout in the last year, 86% now use AI but only 10% think its overall impact is positive, and half feel less financially secure than a year ago. Adoption driven by necessity rather than belief tells its own story, a craft embracing a tool it does not yet trust.
A point of view can't be borrowed
In It's Nice That's In House column, Figma's Loredana Crisan makes the case that a genuine point of view is what AI cannot replicate. "A lot of the taste comes from doing," she says, "you don't discover an idea until you've gone into the rabbit hole", framing AI as one tool in the human arsenal, not a substitute for imagination. She points to a new craft forming around non-deterministic systems, and invites designers to treat it as territory to explore, not a threat to survive.
When perfection gets cheap
The essay argues that AI will cheapen perfection the way photography once did, and history says that is a release, not a threat. When the daguerreotype made technical realism trivial in 1839, painters ran toward light, feeling and everything a machine could not capture, and the value migrated with them. The same shift is arriving now, and whatever still reads as human made becomes the thing worth paying for.
Tátil around the world
Ricardo Bezerra and the Reverse Diaspora
Originality begins at the origin. Bezerra, Ricardo, Richard or Ricardinho, as we affectionately call him, arrives from New York with the purpose of building a space where clients discover an innovative culture, grounded in ideas, and also a place where global ambition coexists with local sensibility. A place where people feel safe to challenge one another to grow, as professionals and as human beings. He takes on the role of Global Chief Creative Officer, looking after how we take Tátil to the world, alongside Fred Gelli (CEO) and Flavia Buchmann (Senior Global Director of Strategy). "Working alongside extraordinary talents from all over the world taught me something unexpected: the more global my perspective became, the more clearly I could see what shapes my own point of view. Originality does not emerge in spite of where we come from, it begins there. We are living a kind of reverse diaspora, reconnecting more deeply with who we always were." So good to have you home, Ricardinho!
Sports
There are things we carry in the body. In a World Cup year, celebrating 10 years of the Olympic and Paralympic marks we designed for Rio 2016, we went to look at everything sport has crossed on our path since then, from Michelob Ultra, Coca-Cola, Powerade and SailGP to the Formula 1 trophy sculpted in steel with Gerdau. The reason behind it all is simple, sport was never just a territory we work in, it is a passion that lives in here. Our team also runs, surfs, climbs and cheers. Sport is part of our nature.
[Article] Fred Gelli
If the future will never fit into a spreadsheet, a better question remains: what are we still able to imagine before it closes? Imagining is not naivety, it is the raw material of everything that does not yet exist. Where imagination shrinks, cynicism grows, and tomorrow ends up becoming the inheritance of those who only know how to repeat the present. In Fred Gelli’s new article for Fast Company Brasil, imagining desirable futures appears as an act of courage, perhaps the most important decision we make about the world we want to inhabit.
[Article] Laila Rotter
Judging at the Pentawards, one of the world's biggest packaging design awards, includes a task few people imagine, writing the reason for every score, project by project, with your name underneath. In the article she just published in Design Week, Laila Rotter, our Creative Manager, tells what that exercise revealed about her own eye after evaluating more than a hundred entries for the second year, the craft that became a category requirement, the "challenger" codes that stopped challenging, the ideas that do not survive without the styling. And she argues for a more generous way of reading awards, a collective look, not a final sentence.
