In an industry flooded with increasingly polished visual content, being technically impressive is no longer enough. For Benjamin Simon and Dirk Schuster, Co-Founders and Creative Directors of FOREAL, the real value lies in something harder to replicate: a distinctive point of view, a recognisable creative identity and the intention behind the work.
Since founding FOREAL in Trier in 2013, they have built the studio into an internationally recognised creative force, collaborating with global brands including Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Netflix and Nike. Their work has reached some of the industry’s biggest stages, including their contribution to Xbox Design Lab Originals, a campaign that won seven Lions at Cannes, including the Creative eCommerce Grand Prix.
Ahead of their appearance as speakers at Golden Drum 2026, Simon and Schuster discuss how FOREAL continues to reinvent its visual language, why self-initiated work remains the engine of the studio, and what happens to craft and individuality when efficiency, performance and AI increasingly shape the creative industry.
FOREAL has developed a very recognisable visual language. How do you continue to evolve creatively without losing the identity that people come to you for?
Self-initiated work. Client projects always come with a framework, and that’s fine, but a style rarely moves forward inside a corporate identity.
The thing we’ve had to accept is that a visual language has a shelf life. What felt distinctive five years ago is a preset today. So you have to keep quietly reinventing yourself while still being recognisable, which is a slightly absurd task and probably the actual job.
With so much visual inspiration available at our fingertips, do you think it has become harder to develop a genuinely distinctive visual style?
Not necessarily harder. There are more resources, more tools and everything is more accessible than it’s ever been. It can get overwhelming, but that’s a different problem.
What is a lot harder today is standing out from the sheer volume of content and positioning yourself as an artist or studio. When we started 13 years ago, Instagram was still pretty young and we were one of the few posting bold, colourful CGI on there. That alone was enough to stand out. Now there are so many great people making incredible visual work, on top of a constant flood of content, and everyone is visually oversaturated anyway. The competition is on a completely different level.
You’ve worked with global brands such as Google, Adobe, Netflix, Meta and Nike. How do you balance a client’s established brand identity with the desire to create something that still feels unmistakably FOREAL?
Clients come to us for our distinctive style, our interpretation and our handwriting, and then sometimes the briefing lands and none of that is left in it. So in the concept phase we present a few safer routes alongside a few that lean properly into our style and our approach. Both are built to work for the brand, the difference is how far they go.
We always push for it to end up a FOREAL piece, and sometimes it doesn’t. The client has the final say, and that’s part of the deal. There are also the dream clients who just let us do our thing, but with the big corporations it’s about finding that sweet spot.
You’ve spoken about self-initiated projects as a playground for experimentation. How important is creating work without a client brief to keeping yourselves — and the studio — creatively curious?
It’s the engine. It’s how our style developed and it’s still the main reason clients find us, they see something we made for nobody, then brief us on something completely different.
It also works in both directions. A personal project can turn into commercial work, and a finished commercial project can leave behind material that becomes a personal one. Nothing is really wasted.
And it matters for the team. After weeks of revision rounds on a locked-down project, people need something where the only person they have to please is themselves.
As CGI and AI-generated imagery become increasingly accessible, impressive execution alone may no longer be enough to stand out. What do you think will separate truly great visual work from everything else?
Intention. Whether you can tell that somebody meant it.
Technically impressive is now the baseline, not the achievement. What’s getting more valuable is the opposite of polish: work that feels crafted, slightly off, made by a person with a specific taste, a specific style and a specific sense of humour. Those small imperfect decisions are hard to describe and very hard to generate.
We’re not precious about the tools. We use AI throughout the early, noisy part of a project, where you want fifty options in an hour. But the final output is ours, and that’s the line we don’t cross, not out of principle, but because it’s the only part clients can’t get anywhere else.
You built an internationally recognised studio from Trier rather than one of the traditional creative capitals. What has staying there taught you about where great creative work can come from?
Mostly that nobody cares. Nine out of ten times we tell a new client we’re based in Germany, they answer “Berlin, I love Berlin”, and we’re on the exact opposite side of the country, in a small town with Roman ruins and a lot of tourists.
Practically it’s cheap rent, a ten-minute bike ride to the studio, much less noise, and vineyards and river valleys about five minutes outside the door. Not a bad place to spend a working life.
What we do miss is the creative scene around us and the exchange that comes with it. Finding new talent is the other challenge, most graduates are drawn to the big capitals, so getting great people to come here takes more than an open position.
When you both look at the same piece of work, do you usually agree on what makes it good — or have you developed completely different creative instincts over the years?
For the most part we’re on the same page. Working together for this long naturally aligns your judgement.
Where we differ is in the details, and that usually comes down to our personal interests and pop cultural influences shaping how we each read something. So every now and then one of us picks up on an aspect the other doesn’t catch at first glance.
How do you maintain a strong creative point of view while still making sure the client feels heard and genuinely involved in the process?
Show, don’t discuss. A rough sketch, or a few strokes drawn over someone else’s frame, communicates more in ten seconds than a paragraph of feedback ever will. It works internally and it works with clients, and it removes a lot of the polite misunderstanding that happens when two people use the same word for different things.
Being early also protects the client. If the idea is clear in line before anything gets rendered, nobody discovers a fundamental problem three weeks and a large invoice later.
And even when a client arrives with a very clear vision, we still show alternatives. Not to overrule them, but because the option they didn’t ask for is surprisingly often the one they choose. Having a point of view doesn’t mean insisting on your first idea. It mostly means being willing to put a few more on the table.
Do you think the industry is becoming too focused on efficiency and performance, and are we at risk of losing some of the craft, experimentation and individuality that makes creative work memorable?
Definitely. Almost everything is driven by numbers, performance and efficiency right now, and with AI in the mix we’re noticing that the appreciation for real craft is taking a hit.
Most of the tools everyone is excited about are trained on existing work, which makes them excellent at remixing and pretty bad at surprising. New things don’t come from averaging what already exists. They come from breaking rules and norms.
The countdown to Golden Drum 2026 is on – get your delegate pass and make sure you’re part of it. Don’t forget — if you are a member of HURA (Croatia), UEPS (Serbia), or MAAM (North Macedonia), you can get 20% off your delegate pass! Contact your Association to receive the discount code. Under 30 and ready to make some creative noise? Read the brief and submit your work to the Young Drummers Competition by 21 September.
