D&AD speaker Alex Center on why the creative industry needs to start backing itself

Creative Boom: Insight Creative Industry D&AD speaker Alex Center on why the creative industry needs to start backing itself From Coca-Cola design director to Brooklyn studio founder, Alex Center has a message: creativity's most important chapter is just beginning. Written By: Tom May 11 May 2026 There's a certain irony in Alex Center's appearance at D&AD Festival this year. The Brooklyn-based designer once swept a stack of industry awards for a single project without realising that the one he'd missed, D&AD, was the one that really mattered. "We submitted for everything, but we missed the deadline for D&AD," he recalls, with a palpable wince.

"United Sodas of America was our first major branding project as a studio, and it won us all of these awards. And I remember thinking, this is amazing—but I didn't realise at the time that D&AD was the big one." That project was the debut work of Center, the studio he founded in Brooklyn in 2018 after a decade as design director at The Coca-Cola Company, where he helped shape the global identities of vitaminwater, Powerade, and smartwater. Today, he and his team work with everyone from Apple and Coinbase to breakout brands like Liquid Death and Bero, the premium non-alcoholic beer.

He's now a D&AD jury member for new brand identity, and a speaker at this year's Festival, which is framed around a single provocative question: Is creativity dead? Alex's answer—delivered with enthusiasm in a Brooklyn accent that could sell anything—is an emphatic no. But it comes with a nuanced argument that's worth hearing out, because it goes well beyond a mere "don't panic". Back to centre Alex is 40 now, 20 years into his career, and he's using D&AD's platform to take stock of where the industry has been and where it needs to go. But his talk isn't a simple rebuttal to the doom-mongers.

It's more of a call to arms, rooted in his own career arc. He traces a path from a self-described "lonely, insecure kid" growing up on Long Island, where artists weren't exactly thick on the ground, to a young designer watching the industry fight for a seat at the table, win it, and now face a new kind of pressure. "Visual aesthetics have never been more achievable," he points out. "There are more designers than ever before, and the tools are getting incredibly effective at making things look beautiful. So, as people who build brands and do creativity for a living, we need to defend why it matters. And it's not just about aesthetics.

It's about relationship building, connections, and communication. It's about differentiation, and I think those are the things that we've always done well." This, he argues, is what can't be replicated by a tool or flattened by an algorithm. The problem, as he sees it, isn't an excess of designers or AI-generated imagery so much as it is an epidemic of sameness. "Algorithms create this singularity, everything congealing into sameness: people, cars, design. Our role is to create things that make people stop and say, 'What is that? I've never seen that before.' That feels fresh, that feels different.

To push forward and create something new and exciting, and I feel like that is getting lost." The dentist analogy For a sense of how seriously Alex takes this moment, consider the analogy he uses when discussing the creative industry's responsibility to champion itself. "My father was a dentist for 40-plus years," he says, "and he hated it every damn day. Dentists didn't get together and say, "We've got to defend dentistry, we love dentistry. But for us, we love this.

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The article addresses significant industry challenges and encourages a strategic shift for designers, making it impactful and relevant, though the themes of creativity and adaptation are not entirely new.