Design with conviction
in a time when creativity
risks becoming generic.
About Eelco van Collenburg
Eelco van Collenburg is an Executive Creative Director @ Valtech with over 25 years of experience shaping the space where brand, design, experience, and strategy meet.
With strong roots in visual design craft and a sharp eye for storytelling, he now leads global multidisciplinary teams, helping brands to translate strategy into a a clear creative vision, one that aligns teams, excites stakeholders, and lays the groundwork for the digital experiences and identities that follow.
What is your vision on UX?
I think we’re at the beginning of a shift the industry’s been needing for a long time. For too long, we’ve seen design become overly processed, not just in how it looks, but in how it’s made. The process became the goal. Structure and method started to matter more than the visual impact or emotional resonance of the final work.
Design began to feel like it was built to pass internal reviews rather than to stop someone in their tracks. It’s no surprise that we’ve ended up in a ‘sea of sameness’, an ‘age of average’, where everything starts to blur.
What I find hopeful now is that we’re moving back to the fundamentals. There’s more attention again for storytelling, visual identity, and the deeper craft of design (grids, typography, composition) not as background tools, but as the foundation of how experiences are shaped. I’ve been waiting for design to feel expressive again and I think we’re finally on our way back to that.
What innovations are exciting to you and impacting your work?
What excites me most right now is that we’re getting space back. Technology has started to take care of some of the speed and repetition. That means we can slow down again where it matters. For me, the real opportunity isn’t in generating more, faster, it’s in making room to think and to care about what we deliver.
What I’m seeing now is that identity and story are starting to sit at the front of the experience again. Not flattened by efficiency, but part of the starting point. That return to meaning, to creative clarity, is what makes this moment exciting.
