A month ago I wrote about digital maxxing - a style where emptiness is something to be ashamed of, where chrome and ornamentation fill every inch of the frame. It was a good moment for that topic, because maximalism was genuinely dominant. The problem is, it's dominant for a shorter stretch every time.
After years of a flood of polished, saturated AI images, the direction is reversing - and I have more than other people's statistics to back that up. I have four years of my own practice that walked the exact same road before anyone was writing about it.
Four years, not one day skipped
I started on April 5, 2023. I haven't missed a single day since - a new image every day, something published every day. The question I get asked most often isn't about the technology, it's about endurance: how do you not lose creativity doing the same thing, every day, without a break?
The answer is simpler than it sounds: I stopped treating creativity as something you either have or don't, and started treating it as a skill you train - like playing an instrument, or running. I don't wait for inspiration to show up. I train it the way you train a muscle.
I spent a long time deciding whether to stick to one recognisable style - that's the standard advice for building a personal brand. I decided against it. AI lets you build an entirely new world every day, so that's the exact challenge I set myself: a new world, daily. Not the same motif on repeat, but a new scene, a new mood, sometimes a completely different direction than the day before.
Paradoxically, that doesn't lead to chaos. Certain motifs - specific colours, recurring characters, particular emotions - keep coming back on their own, weaving between series without any planning. That isn't inconsistency. It's proof I have a recognisable voice even when every day looks different - the same way a writer has a style regardless of what they're writing about on a given day.
Fatigue with perfection
Audiences are tired of images that generate in seconds and look like every other image[1] - what's increasingly just called AI slop. A counter-movement is growing: creators - including ones working with AI - are deliberately reaching for imperfection, texture, the mark of a hand. It's not a rejection of the tool, it's a rejection of the idea that "smooth" automatically means "good". Four years of daily practice taught me the same thing long before that: repeatable perfection gets boring faster than imperfection that carries the trace of a real decision.
From spectacle to story
The clearest shift: images built around one striking moment are giving way to images that tell something longer - memory, identity, isolation, the relationship between people and technology[2]. Emotional depth and storytelling are becoming what separates good AI work from work that's impressive but empty.
This goes hand in hand with progress on character consistency - the ability to generate the same face, the same proportions, the same character across many different frames[2]. Without that, telling a story through images simply doesn't hold together - and a daily series with no single coherent thread running through it is, in practice, exactly the same challenge, just stretched across years instead of one image.
Less is more - again
After years of maximalism, there's also growing interest in minimal composition: a clean background, a single subject, deliberately left empty space[1]. That's the exact opposite of digital maxxing - and proof that no style rules forever. Anyone betting purely on density and excess right now risks looking dated in six months.
What this means
It doesn't mean digital maxxing or similar styles suddenly stop working - it means treating style as a tool for a specific story, not as the goal itself. An image that only dazzles has a shorter life than one that says something. Four years and well over a thousand consecutive days taught me that the same is true of an entire practice, not just a single frame.
More on specific styles and how to pair them with real content: 5 Non-Obvious Midjourney Styles.