There was a time when the hard part was finding things. You had to know which record shops to visit, which magazine to read, which late-night TV show to stay up for. Access was limited. Discovery was slow. And the people who were good at finding things - the ones with the instinct for it, the ones who always seemed to know first - had genuine power.
That world is gone. We live in the opposite reality now. The hard part isn't finding things. The hard part is filtering them. There's more music, more writing, more design, more news, more opinion, more everything than any human being could process in a thousand lifetimes. The internet doesn't have a scarcity problem. It has an abundance problem.
And the answer to an abundance problem isn't more creation. It is better curation.
Curation is a creative act
There's a persistent idea that curators are somehow lesser than creators. That putting things together isn't the same as making things from scratch. That a playlist is less creative than a song. That an exhibition is less creative than a painting. That a magazine is less creative than the articles inside it.
This is wrong. Profoundly wrong.
Think about the best magazine you ever read. Not a specific article - the magazine itself. The way the cover set a tone. The way the editorial choices created a point of view. The way placing one piece next to another created a conversation between them that neither piece had on its own. That's curation as creative act. That's what The Face did in the 1980s and 90s. It didn't just publish things. It arranged the world in a way that made you see it differently.
I grew up on those magazines. The Face, i-D, Dazed, and dozens of others. Before I knew what advertising was, before I understood strategy or branding, I understood that the person choosing what to put on those pages was doing something creative. Something that mattered. Something that shaped culture as much as the individual pieces they chose to feature.
Every project is an act of curation
When I look at the products I have built, I see a common thread that took me a while to articulate. They're all, at their core, acts of curation.
A pub guide is curation. Out of the thousands of pubs in London, I chose a specific set and presented them in a specific way. The choices reveal a point of view - what I think makes a pub worth visiting, which neighbourhoods matter, what atmosphere feels right. Someone else curating the same city would make completely different choices, and both could be excellent, because curation isn't about being comprehensive. It's about having a perspective.
A news aggregator is curation. CultureTerminal doesn't try to show everything happening in culture. It surfaces the stories I believe matter at the intersection of advertising, design, fashion, media, and brands. The selection is the product. The algorithm that ranks and filters is an expression of editorial judgment, not a neutral act.
A bookmarking tool is curation. Trove is designed around the idea that what you choose to save over time reveals your taste - and that taste, accumulated and organised, becomes something more valuable than any individual link.
Even Modern Retro, which involves generating images rather than collecting them, is curatorial at its heart. I'm choosing which brands to reimagine, which era to place them in, which aesthetic to apply. The creative act is in the selection and the framing, not just the execution.
The collector instinct
I've always been a collector. Links, books, references, recommendations - I gather things. My browser has too many tabs. My bookshelf has too many books. My saved folders are overflowing. This used to feel like a quirk, maybe even a flaw. An inability to let things go.
I don't see it that way anymore. The collector instinct is the raw material of curation. You can't curate from nothing. You need a deep, wide, constantly-refreshed pool of inputs. You need to have seen enough, read enough, absorbed enough that you can make distinctions. That this is good but that is better. That this belongs here but not there. That these two things, placed together, create something neither has alone.
The best curators I've encountered - magazine editors, DJs, gallery directors, the friend who always knows what to recommend - all share this trait. They consume voraciously and then they select ruthlessly. The gap between those two actions is where taste lives.
Curators are the new creators
Here's my conviction: in an era of infinite content, the curator becomes more important than the creator. Not because creation doesn't matter - it does, enormously - but because creation without curation is just noise added to noise.
The people who will matter most in the next decade of the internet aren't the ones who produce the most content. They're the ones who help the rest of us make sense of it. The ones who filter, select, arrange, and present. The ones who take the overwhelming flood and turn it into a stream you actually want to drink from.
This isn't a passive act. It requires knowledge, taste, conviction, and the willingness to say: this matters and this doesn't. It requires the confidence to have a point of view in a world that increasingly rewards having none.
I believe in curation as a creative practice. I believe in the power of selection. I believe that what you choose to pay attention to, and what you choose to share, is an expression of who you are. And I believe that building tools and platforms that make curation easier, better, and more beautiful is some of the most important work happening right now.
This isn't nostalgia for the magazine era, though I feel that too. It's a belief about what comes next. The abundance isn't going away. If anything, AI will make it worse - more content, more options, more noise. The curators are the ones who will help us navigate it. They always have been.
The only difference now is that we can build the tools ourselves.
