ImpactReportImpactReport

A QuickLook atOurYearAQuickLookAtOurYear

Reading isn't dead. The panic is mostly vibes. Book sales in 2025 ran higher than 2019, indie bookshops are thriving, and text has quietly outlasted radio, television and dial-up. Reels and soundbites hit the spot the way fast food does, yet people keep returning to the slower, more nourishing stuff. There's only one way to feel your brain folds stretch, and it's to drag your eyes across a page.

So Driftime's 2025 report leans analogue, via digital. Long-form, an audio briefing, a tip of the hat to the New Yorker, which turned 100 February 2025. That magazine shaped our early editorial roots, back when the Annual Digest ran covers riffing on its cartoons and told gritty stories of creative leaders, or like the time we got arrested in Copenhagen for flying a drone.

This Impact Report takes the analogue history of slow consumption, and uses new technology to explore how the two can be harmoniously together.

We've always been more focused at building than sharing. Driftime launched in 2016, so 2026 marks ten years. Here's to the long read, the eager listen, and the slowness when sitting with your own thoughts.

Co-founder & CCO Driftime®

The Landscape We Navigate

Themes Covered

Advocacy

Partnerships

Lessons & Setbacks

Landscape is the honest read of the ground Driftime stood on. A contracting creative sector and a stretched sustainability one made for a hard year, so Driftime chose depth over breadth, working with 10 partners across 12 projects, 70% of it climate-focused. That meant balancing interactive design against a lighter website, focusing capability around the Green Design Skills that matter most, and stepping back from work it believed in, like the Notion Kits. Saying no, it turned out, was how Driftime said yes more fully to the work that counts.

Landscape

The Moves We Make

Themes Covered

Partnerships

Environment

Community

People & Culture

Moves is the record of what Driftime actually did, across services, partnerships, community, and the planet. Its Foundations services carried accessible design to mission-driven organisations, from photojournalist Adrian Fisk to impact investor WHEB, while long-running work with the Climate Policy Initiative launched at COP. Alongside the partner work, Driftime planted 156 trees, gave £32,400 in pro-bono time, grew its local B Corp community to 394 members, and saw Abb-d Taiyo listed among ADPList's top 10 mentors for 2025. The thread through all of it is translation, turning complex, vital work into something people can grasp.

Moves

The Moment We Build

Themes Covered

Clients & Partners

Environment

Community

People & Culture

Lessons & Setbacks

Moment is where Driftime tells the truth about the year, the parts that worked and the parts that didn't. The new website came in heavier on carbon than hoped, which pushed a leaner rebuild and a move towards audio, and the Impact Pathfinder stalled in beta at exactly the hard part, so it is being reshaped to keep a guiding hand in the room. After five years, Driftime made itself redundant at Only One and left the team stronger than it found them. The quiet lesson underneath it all is that Driftime has been better at building than at sharing, and means to change that.

Moment

The Horizon We Reach

Themes Covered

Advocacy

Clients & Partners

Lessons & Setbacks

Horizon is where Driftime looks up and points forward. The year ahead is about saying things more plainly and carrying less weight while doing it, a clearer set of Foundations and a lighter, carbon-aware site. A reshaped publication and a book marking Driftime's tenth year are finding their feet, and a small family of open-source tools, Cairn, Spectrum, and Handbook, will start surfacing through 2026, built so the responsible choice becomes the easy one for other teams. The benchmark keeps moving because Driftime keeps moving it.

Horizon