Ekaterina Solomeina is a creative director, writer, and co-founder of Future London Academy — the executive school for creatives recognised by the Don Norman Design Award, It’s Nice That, Dezeen, and AIGA, whose alumni now lead design at companies like Apple, Nike, Netflix, and BMW.
In this talk, Ekaterina traces the school’s journey from in-person courses in London to a global online offering, unpacks why creative fundamentals matter more than ever in the age of AI, shares the standout finding from her new report on the future of creativity, and makes the case for why the smartest move a design studio can make right now is to stay small.
Let’s dive in.
Born From Her Own Career Plateau
Future London Academy did not start as a business plan. It started as a personal problem. For twenty years, Ekaterina worked as a creative director across advertising, branding, and early digital design — “web and Flash, all of that jazz” — collaborating with names like Michael Wolff and Donatella Versace, and co-writing a book on British design. By most measures, she had made it.
But she was still in her thirties, with decades of career ahead of her, and she could not find anywhere to keep learning once she was already good at her job. “I couldn’t find a place where I could learn more things, or more new things, or things that will be helpful for me while I’m already very good at my creative job,” she says. So, in 2013, she co-founded a place to learn directly from people ten, twenty, thirty years further along, about how they think and how they got there. Thirteen years later, that instinct has become an international company she still learns from every single day.
Contextual, Current, Connected
From the start, Future London Academy made a strict rule: every course is taught by someone who has actually done the thing, not studied it. “If someone is teaching you leadership, they led teams of all sizes. If someone is teaching you branding, they launched brands many, many times.” No academics, no theory divorced from practice.
That same rule became the real challenge when the school decided to move online. Ekaterina had resisted digital learning for years — she loves being in a room with creative people, where the best insights often surface in the in-between conversations, not the scheduled ones. So before launching anything online, the team set themselves a brief: preserve three things at all costs. Contextual — grounded in real industry case studies, not decades-old examples. Current — constantly refreshed, never stale. Connected — somehow still carrying the human element that made the in-person programmes work.
The first online course sold out thirty minutes after launch. What surprised Ekaterina most wasn’t the demand — it was who showed up. One piece of feedback has stayed with her: a message from a triathlete and father with an unforgiving job schedule, who wrote that self-paced learning was “the best decision I’ve ever made” because it let him absorb the material entirely on his own time. Online hadn’t replaced the in-person experience. It had reached people the in-person experience never could.
The Skills That Get More Valuable, Not Less
Asked what creative leaders should be building toward as AI reshapes the landscape, Ekaterina’s answer runs against the instinct to chase new technical skills. As practical, tool-based skills get commoditized, the core creative skills become the differentiator: coming up with ideas, solving nonlinear problems, empathizing, spotting opportunities others miss.
“I feel like that’s a very unique time for a creative, where we should almost double down on our core skills of imagination, understanding systems, really thinking about problems in a different way.”
That, she argues, is the best time in memory to be a creative — not just because it’s good for design work, but because businesses are now actively hungry for that kind of thinking at the top table.
Learn the Language of the Business
Getting into that room, though, requires a translation step most creatives resist. Ekaterina’s number one piece of advice to any designer who wants to be seen as a strategic partner, not just an executor: learn the language leadership actually speaks. PL, CAC, LTV, TAM-SAM-SOM — the vocabulary creatives tend to avoid is the same vocabulary that gets their work taken seriously.
She’s careful to frame this as addition, not compromise. “It’s like saying that by learning another language you will forget your own… it actually will give you a richer palette of understanding the world.” The shift isn’t presenting a beautiful interface — it’s presenting the beautiful interface and the customer lifetime value it moved. That’s the version of the work that gets a designer promoted.
More Creatives Belong in the C-Suite
Ekaterina is skeptical of headline-grabbing reports naming creativity the skill of the future — not because it’s wrong, but because it’s always been true. What’s changed is that everything else is being automated, leaving the uniquely human capacity to imagine, connect unrelated dots, and solve problems without a template as one of the few things left that can’t be outsourced.
Her hope is specific: more chief design officers and chief creative officers sitting alongside the CFO and COO. Not to soften business decisions, but to widen them — to bring in the bigger context of people and planet alongside the numbers, so decisions are good for the balance sheet and good for the world.
What 80% of Creatives Actually Want
Future London Academy recently co-produced The Future of Creativity report with OFFF Barcelona, interviewing both twenty-five-year veterans and people newly entering the industry. The most counterintuitive finding, in Ekaterina’s words: 80% of creatives would prefer to work at a company under 50 people.
It tracks with a story she tells about Stefan Sagmeister, who — after running Sagmeister & Walsh at various sizes — landed on five or six people as his personal sweet spot for doing his best work. And it explains something distinctive about London’s agency culture: small, tightly-knit shops that punch far above their size internationally, not despite being small but because of it.
“When you are small in size, your only choice is to collaborate, not compete, because you cannot have every single discipline in-house.”
Technology has made this viable at scale for the first time — small teams can now access the tools, talent, and global reach that used to require headcount.
Why Small Studios Are Having a Moment
As agency networks like WPP consolidate — folding, renaming, and merging shops until clients can no longer tell one from another — Ekaterina sees a real opening for small, independent studios willing to stand for something specific.
Her example is Hey Studio, run by past podcast guest Veronica: a studio that made a deliberate choice not to grow, in favor of a highly distinct visual style. Not every client is right for that style, and that’s the point. “There is no point trying to grow a massive team and try to win every single client. It’s better to stay small,” Ekaterina says — because the clients who do want that exact thing will come, without hesitation.
The same logic extends to audience targeting. Where brands once chased broad demographics and then broader psychographics, the more interesting move now is speaking to an “audience of one” — a specific, quirky, deeply particular sensibility — and trusting that the internet makes that audience large enough to matter, wherever in the world it lives.
Brand Is a Belief System, Not a Campaign
Pressed on whether the future of branding lives in bold, niche campaigns, Ekaterina redirects the question: it’s not the campaigns, it’s the core of the brand itself. The brands that stand out speak to a specific audience of true believers first — the way Apple originally spoke only to creatives before becoming ubiquitous — and let growth follow from there, rather than trying to be broadly likable from day one.
“The only thing that creates loyalty, creates your audience, and actually creates a sustainable business is what you stand for as a brand.”
That, she stresses, includes the internal brand — culture, values, what a company’s founder actually stands for — not just the external expression of it. It’s a long-term investment with no immediate payoff, but in her view, it’s the only strategy that survives sustained competition.
Finding Your Third Identity
Running a company, Ekaterina is candid, is often lonely at the top — there’s frequently no one else in the room to talk it through with. Her advice for any founder: build a community of peers who understand the specific weight of the job, whether that’s a co-founder (she has one, and calls it a privilege to run the company with her best friend) or a wider circle of other founders.
She also passes along a framework she picked up from a podcast: founders benefit from holding multiple identities, not just “founder” or “creative director.” A relationship identity — partner, friend, parent. And ideally a third one, unconnected to work entirely. For Ekaterina, that’s Muay Thai, where her training partners have no idea what she does for a living. When work isn’t going well, there’s still a version of her that’s a good training partner, a good friend, a person making progress on something completely her own.
Betting on Real Human Connection
Closing the conversation, Ekaterina pushes back gently on the idea that human interaction is becoming rare by default. She thinks there’s already a counter-swing underway — a hunger for real-life connection precisely because it’s become more expensive, in time and effort, than a message or a follow. The payoff, she argues, is proportional: in-person connections trigger something Zoom calls don’t, and they last longer because of it.
Her prediction isn’t that technology loses out to humanity, but that people get more deliberate about which is which — using technology for scale and efficiency, and protecting real human time for what actually needs it. As AI makes more of everything faster and more generic, that deliberate, inefficient, human choice may end up being the most valuable one a person or a brand can make.
To connect with Ekaterina Solomeina, find her on LinkedIn. She also hosts Creative Capes, named a top design podcast by Wallpaper and Smashing Magazine, where she’s interviewed icons like Don Norman, John Maeda, and Stefan Sagmeister. To explore Future London Academy’s programmes and download the Future of Creativity report, visit research.futurelondonacademy.co.uk.
