AGDA Annual 2026 – UMM’s Top 3 Design Insights
Tags
Creative, Design
Simply click and drag your
cursor over a passage of
text from the article below
to tweet or share.
UMM’s creatives descended on AGDA, Sydney’s playground for the fiercely curious, and returned brimming with 2026 design insights. Their top three takeaways? Command AI on your terms, let design breathe beyond the screen, and dare the bold creative risks that make the world actually stop scrolling.
It’s that time of the year. The air turns crisp, the sun sets sooner, and about 50 of Sydney’s most eager creatives huddle in a room to swap industry insights on how to take design to the next level. Yes, it’s officially AGDA annual time.
This year, three of those lucky bunch were UMM’s very own creative team, Dylan, Max and Marley. From designers take on the world’s most hot-button topic AI (ahh!), how work-life- balance informs creativity and even a pep talk from a hostage negotiator on how negotiation is really the sharpest tool in your toolkit. Here’s UMM’s biggest takeaway from the day dedicated to decoding designs.
Define Your AI Relationship, Before It Starts Defining You.
Design, like every other industry in 2026, is trying to grapple with the “what the hell do we do with AI” moment. AGDA panellists hammered home that we should treat it like an extra set of hands, not a full-blown replacement. Whilst we’re all scared about whether AI will be taking creative jobs, they spoke about how it shouldn’t ever be used in creating original concepts or ideas.
Why? Because it can only ever draw upon concepts that already exist.
When AI first arrived, it was dining out on a rich buffet of human creativity. Now, as AI output continues to multiply faster than human created work, it’s increasingly stuck reheating its own leftovers, an ever polluting pool of incestuous work it believes we want to see.
🚨 Critics warn that AI isn’t just threatening jobs, it’s slowly killing the internet itself.
AI is now feeding on its own output, basically learning from content it created.
Some estimates suggest over half the internet could already be AI-generated slop. pic.twitter.com/ZbkNBNQZnS
— Kekius Maximus (@Kekius_Sage) March 17, 2026
It is exactly this, which gives us our edge. AI can never replace a good idea that hasn’t been seen before. Ideas based on undeniable human insights, experiences, and culture are unable to be conceived by AI as they have no reference for it.
And while AI promises speed, it often delivers more waiting. Half the time you’re stuck prompting, re-prompting, and gently begging it to get somewhere close to nearly there, when you could’ve just realistically done it faster yourself. A recent study from METR found that when software developers used AI for certain tasks, the time required to complete them increased by 19%.
@willfrancis24 Is AI making work easier or harder? Does using ChatGPT and Claude all day actually give us more time to think and be creative, or does it just fill all the gaps and make us exhausted? This research from Harvard says that it just intensifies our workday instead of easing it. #ai #artificialintelligence #technology #learnontiktok #tech ♬ original sound – Will Francis – AI + Marketing
Our Senior Graphic Designer Max’s biggest takeaway was to set your own standards for AI. Decide what AI touches, and what it absolutely doesn’t. It’s not a fix-all or a shiny bandaid, it’s an intern who should be picking up the time-suck jobs, allowing creatives more time to further refine their craft.
The More Work Life Balance, The More Life is Balanced In Your Work
In a seminar about work, our junior graphic designer Dylan’s biggest takeaway was actually about stepping away from it. Often in our industry, we tend to romanticise hustle as ambition and mistake sustainability as slowing down.
Out of AGDA we learnt about the five balls we juggle, Family, Work, Spirit, Friends, and Health. The reality is that Work is the only rubber ball, we all know better than everyone, that if it drops, it is definitely bouncing back. Our other four balls are glass, if they are dropped they scuff, crack or shatter, usually needing to be cleaned up by someone else in our lives.
View this post on Instagram
But funnily enough, just like AI, the more we human designers populate our brains with only work, all we’ll ever spit back out is the same reheated, algorithm-flooded ideas, familiar, safe, and just a little bit stale. The real magic tends to really happen off-screen (shocking, we know). The further you wander from your day-to-day, and delve deeper into films, games, galleries, or just a change of scenery, the richer your creative reservoir becomes. As designers, it’s our responsibility to continue to fill up our internal library of references, keeping it well-stocked and innovative.
For Dylan, it was a gentle reminder to continue heading down to the cinema on a Monday night or to know when to step away from the overly tabbed laptop, and prevent the eventual creative burnout.
Strategy First, Medium Second
Across the day at AGDA, our team was immersed in a dizzying array of mediums, everything from video and animation to podcasts, apps, gaming, illustrations and more. But amidst all the incredible execution, what Senior Graphic Designer Marley took away was a clear, unified theme: the medium is just the vehicle. What matters most is knowing exactly which thread you want to pull on.
It’s easy for brands to get distracted by the shiny “how” of a trendy new format. Yet, the standout speakers reinforced that the what and the why always shines first. The core idea and the emotional hook can naturally guide a project toward the best medium, rather than forcing a message into a pre-selected box.
View this post on Instagram
WRAPPING UP…
With that, we wrap up another year of AGDA. Our creatives leave with a bundle of insights, practical tips, plenty of inspiration and maybe a plan to expense movie tickets as a creative cost.
Looking to level up your design game? Chat to us, our ever-so-inspired creative team will make it happen.
