Design has always been difficult to pin down. It’s not a discipline that sits neatly in one box. It’s an approach, a mindset and, yes, sometimes it’s a beautifully executed logo. But more often than not, design is reduced to aesthetics by some observers. To polish. To surface. And at Cannes this year, that tension was hard to ignore.

In the jury room, the question we kept coming back to was deceptively simple: What is design? What we saw, and celebrated, ranged wildly from full-scale brand transformations to product innovation, physical experiences and delicate craft. But the work that stood out didn’t look good. It was working hard, building value and making people feel something.

Design as a business engine

Too often, design is treated as a bolt-on. Something that dresses up a campaign after the strategy’s been written. But that’s not where its power lies. The most impactful work we saw had design baked into the brand from the start. Design that wasn’t just expressive, but also strategic. That didn’t just elevate a brand, but compounded its value across time, touchpoints and teams.

R/GA and Sephora reminded us of something obvious but easy to overlook: brands are judged not by their biggest campaigns, but by their smallest moments. When the app doesn’t work, when the packaging is confusing, when the tone of voice jars, those are the cracks where trust is lost. That’s where design needs to show up. Not as a final flourish, but as the operating system of the brand.

AI and the role of the human designer

This year also felt like a turning point in how we talk about craft. AI is everywhere. And while it’s changing the pace and scale of execution, it’s also forcing human designers to step up and upstream. As machines take on the ‘doing,’ our role is to define the ‘why’. To inject meaning, emotion and intent. Because a prompt can’t tell you what feels right. And that’s where our value lies.

At the same time, there was something beautiful about the resurgence of the handmade. The visceral tactility of physical design — quiet, crafted, often analogue — sitting side-by-side with algorithmic production. It]s not about one replacing the other. It’s about the harmony between both.

One standout was Telstra’s ‘Better On A Better Network’ campaign, which won a Grand Prix in Film Craft. The handmade campaign featured 26 stop-motion films, each spotlighting a remote Australian location and its quirky native characters, from goth cockatoos to blokey wattle flowers. Voiced by real locals, the 15-second ads grounded the work in community culture, embraced absurdist humour and celebrated craft.

To realise design’s impact, we must increase visibility

And yet, in the Palais and on the Croisette, the create heavy hitters still dominated the conversation. Big campaigns. Big stunts. Big budgets. That’s the way Cannes rolls. But in the quieter corners — the case studies, the juries, the shortlist talks — you could feel design beginning to claim its space.

The Titanium Lion winner, ‘Caption with Intention,’ sparked the kind of reaction that makes you pause and think, ‘Why hasn’t this been done before?’ It was a piece of design that solved a longstanding systemic issue facing the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Not flashy. Not campaign-able. But meaningful. Impactful. Human.

From purpose to purposeful

We also saw a shift from talking about purpose to designing for it. The best work didn’t preach values in a film, it embedded them in a service, in a product, in behaviour. Just look at the AirPods Pro 2 hearing aid feature, which won Gold. The team believed in the product as a positive tool and invested in it without a business case. Design made its purpose tangible. You could see it. Use it. Hear it. And that’s where it sticks.

So, is design finally being recognised for what it truly is?

Not fully. Not yet. But this year felt like progress. Design isn’t the star of the show — not in the loud, self-congratulatory sense. But it’s there. In the work. In the results. In the brands quietly outperforming, because design isn’t just considered but central.

And maybe that’s the point. Design doesn’t need the spotlight; it just needs a seat at the table. Preferably at the top table.

First published in The Drum.