Year in Review with… Dot Dash Design’s Paula Rich and Christa Mavroudis

What was your pick of style guides in 2025?
Our top pick for 2025 is Peppa Pig. We just loved the whole marketing campaign around the pregnancy and arrival of baby Evie. It made it somehow more special than your everyday licensing launch and the public really got behind it!

We developed four trend guides to support the launch of Baby Evie, working closely with Hasbro’s Demi Patel and the wider team. As specialists in baby and toddler categories, we valued the opportunity to create a series of themes that were clearly differentiated yet cohesive for cross-category application. The final concepts successfully balanced theme, colour direction and trend relevance – while remaining age appropriate and aligned with the brands identity.

What design trend caught your eye most this year?
The fruit and vegetable trend! Rooted in themes of locally farmed organic produce, it celebrated freshness and played on slogans in a visually engaging way. It was interesting to see how brands applied this commercially, creating strong, relevant work. Overall, it felt like a powerful trend and used effectively by brands within the industry.

What design or business development from outside licensing influenced you the most in 2025?
The obvious one – and the most influential – is the continual evolution of AI, both in business and in design. From an art licensing perspective, we have seen a resurgence in our clients looking for original hand-rendered pieces… Something that has real depth and texture – and a story behind the piece of work. People are looking more and more for that human connection.

In our business, we have started to look at ways we can integrate AI into our workflow, not in the design of a piece of work itself but more in collating information, trends and layout presentations.

“From an art licensing perspective, we have seen a resurgence in clients looking for original hand-rendered pieces.”

What development in licensing and design took you most by surprise in 2025?
The sudden surge of mega-deals and ownership shake-ups has been one of the biggest surprises… The breaking news of Netflix and Paramount negotiating to buy Warners Bros is huge, potentially giving one company control over huge swathes of content, brands and distribution-power. How that will impact our industry remains to be seen, but I do worry about the effect on smaller independent creatives.

What has been the biggest design or business challenge you faced in 2025?One of the biggest challenges has been trying to maintain high-quality creativity with tighter budgets and shorter lead times. It’s essential for our business to deliver design solutions that are both impactful and commercially viable. This has required us to create clearer strategies, stronger collaboration with clients and a more strategic approach. While doing so, we needed to ensure we remain innovative while meeting cost and timeline. This has strengthened our ability to work more strategically, with efficiency.