Spotify Wrapped Goes Analogue: You may have noticed that this year’s Spotify Wrapped showed up full of collages, cutouts, doodles, and black and white pages with messy pops of color. The whole thing feels lifted straight from 90s and early 2000s mixtape culture, back when we expressed ourselves with Sharpies and collages instead of data visualizations. It’s nostalgia, sure, but it’s also a reminder of when content and design weren’t dictated by AI and algorithms.

Brands across the board, from Burberry to Burger King, are reaching back into heritage and analog techniques as well. Retro marks, scanned textures, layered compositions, and intentionally imperfect typography are popping up everywhere as a way to signal something AI still can’t fake: a real human made this.

As AI slop spreads to every corner of the internet, designers are doubling down on the spaces where AI struggles. Mixed media. Organic layouts. Imperfect layering. Tiny flaws that read as emotional texture instead of errors. Adobe’s 2025 design forecast supported this outlook by calling out the rise in demand for handcrafted visuals, earthy textures, and scrapbook-inspired layouts.

The sans-serif minimalism of the past decade made everything look clean. AI made everything look the same. Now brands are trying to look unmistakably human again by showing the work, the process, the fingerprints. The analog edge is becoming the new luxury.