Envato Unpacked 2025: The year creativity got unhinged (and we’re here for it)

Sometime in 2025, creators started typing wonderfully specific ideas into Envato VideoGen, and the results took on a life of their own. One group of users prompted “humorous monkey interviews at sunset” often enough that it became a recognizable pattern. Another collective generated “romantic and dynamic kissing scenes,” contributing to a 264% increase in that trend. Meanwhile, dozens of others sparked a surge in time-traveling black hole animations (up 190%), each adding their own twist to the cosmic chaos.

These moments became part of the story we now call Envato Unpacked, proof that creative tools are only as wild as the humans using them.

This year, our community generated over 81 million AI creations, downloaded 3 million new assets, and collectively demonstrated that new technology doesn’t homogenize creativity; it makes it more specific, more surprising, and more distinctly human.

If you edited a video in 2025, chances are you used Woosh by TibaSFX. Or you heard it. Or your favorite YouTuber featured it in their intro. With 161,900 downloads, this sound effect became the audio equivalent of Helvetica: ubiquitous, reliable, and somehow never annoying.

Every transition. Every teaser. Every cinematic reveal. That’s the Woosh. It dominated so completely that it defined the sonic texture of the year. Whether you were cutting trailers, social content, or corporate explainers, this single audio file became shorthand for “something important is about to happen.”

Cinema Sunday by Handpikproject was downloaded 64,400 times this year, which makes sense when you realize it became the visual voice of 2025. Soft serif nostalgia meets cinematic polish. It appeared in YouTube thumbnails, brand storytelling, and minimalist poster art that somehow felt both timeless and perfectly suited to the present moment.

If your moodboard didn’t include Cinema Sunday at some point, you were probably making moodboards in a different timeline. The typeface hit that rare sweet spot: distinctive enough to elevate a design, versatile enough to work across industries. Fashion brands used it. Tech startups used it. Independent filmmakers building their visual identity used it.

The Most Useful Transitions Pack for Premiere Pro by Premiumilk has been downloaded 106,000 times, a testament to the power of simplicity. Smooth motion, fast implementation, client-approved results. It became the pack that editors kept returning to because it just worked.

No learning curve. No render errors. No explaining to clients why the fancy transition they saw on Instagram would take three hours to customize. Just clean, professional motion that made everything look better without calling attention to itself.

ROSÉ & Bruno Mars crashed into “APT.” and took over. It became the most-searched soundtrack on Envato, closely followed by Hans Zimmer (because of course) and the Stranger Things soundtrack (because nostalgia never sleeps).

Romance, drama, and cinematic pop. The soundscape of 2025 was emotionally subtle in the best way. Creators wanted music that felt big, that carried weight, that made people feel something immediately. Subtlety took a backseat to impact.

AI-generated vlogging yetis. Not a sentence we expected to type in 2025, but here we are. Creator Jamie Fenn’s yeti video pulled 187,000 YouTube views. Our Instagram repost hit 131k. The internet saw cryptids documenting their daily lives and collectively decided: yes, more of this.

The video became a watershed moment for AI-generated content. Not because of technical prowess, but because it proved that the most memorable AI work comes from creators with a clear, audacious vision. The tools didn’t make it interesting. The concept did.

Handmade design ruled 2025. The year’s most downloaded textures were all about touch, tactility, and beautiful imperfection. Old Master OverPrint Photoshop Effects by pixelbuddha_graphic (7,600 downloads), Extreme Grunge Textures by afterimagine (6,800 downloads), and Craft Papers Digital Paper by Julia_Dreams (5,300 downloads) proved that even as AI tools exploded, creators craved textures that felt human.

Messy. Textured. Unapologetically analog in a digital world. While AI tools got cleaner and more polished, designers pushed in the opposite direction. They wanted grain, fiber, and irregularity. Evidence of human hands. The contrast between perfect AI-generated imagery and deliberately imperfect textures became one of the defining visual tensions of the year.

Google searches for “video prompts” spiked 1,328% by August 2025. If you’re planning to dive into AI video in 2026, understanding how to talk to these tools isn’t optional anymore. Consider it foundational. 

Knowing what you want to make has always mattered. Now, knowing how to describe it with precision, specificity, and the right technical language determines whether you spend 10 minutes or 10 hours getting there. Prompt literacy became the new must-have skill, sitting alongside composition, color theory, and familiarity with software. Lucky for you, we have a handy guide on just that.

Google Veo 3, Nano Banana, and Nano Banana Pro launched and immediately redefined how we generate, edit, and remix visuals. Not incrementally better. Different. The kind of tools that make you rethink entire workflows.

Veo 3 (and later Google Veo 3.1) introduced longer, more coherent AI-generated videos, as well as synced speech and audio within your generations. Nano Banana made image manipulation faster and more intuitive. Both arrivals felt less like updates and more like inflection points. The question shifted from “can AI do this?” to “how do I integrate this into my process?”

On Envato, stock video took the top spot for downloads this year, followed by audio stock, photos, video templates, and graphic templates. The rankings tell a clear story: video content continues to dominate, but creators need audio, stills, and templates to support their workflows, a pattern highlighted throughout Envato Unpacked.

But the real story isn’t what topped the charts; it’s how creators used these assets. You built with them. Remixed them. Made something entirely new. A stock video clip became the foundation for a brand film. An audio track got chopped, layered, and transformed into something unrecognizable. A template got customized so thoroughly that it became a signature style.

Dark mode launched, making late-night browsing easier on the eyes. Claim Clear made copyright management less painful. Animated graphics and VFX categories expanded, giving motion designers more options. We added over 3 million new assets because you kept pushing us to keep up.

While everyone was creating, they were also upskilling. Our most-viewed tutorial of the year, How to Design a Logo in Illustrator, pulled 218,000 views. Blender for Beginners was also a big hit at 151,000. Creators weren’t just downloading and using; they were also creating. They were learning, improving, and building new capabilities. The appetite for education matched the appetite for assets, proving that creative growth happens when you combine tools with knowledge.

While you were learning and creating, we were building too. Dark mode launched, making late-night browsing easier on the eyes. Claim Clear made copyright management less painful. Animated graphics and VFX categories expanded, giving motion designers more options. Additionally, we launched a new generation of AI tools, including GraphicsGen and MockupGen, and added significant value and new models to our existing suite, including VideoGen, ImageGen, and ImageEdit.

Beyond individual assets, broader aesthetics defined how 2025 looked. Mocha Mousse (Pantone’s 2025 Color of the Year) made an appearance everywhere, bringing warmth and earthiness to palettes that had been dominated by digital brights. Memphis patterns made a comeback, injecting playful geometry into designs. Maximalism pushed back against the long reign of minimalism. The 70s aesthetic returned, complete with groovy typography and burnt orange sunsets.

Each trend offered creators a different visual vocabulary. Some leaned into retro nostalgia. Others embraced complexity and abundance. The diversity of popular aesthetics meant that our 2025 Envato Unpacked didn’t have a single look. It had dozens, all coexisting, all finding their audiences.

This year proved something important: AI didn’t replace creativity. It amplified the bold, imaginative, deeply human impulse to make things that don’t exist yet. The prompts got specific. The aesthetics got tactile. The tools got powerful. And through it all, creatives stayed stubbornly, beautifully human; the heartbeat of what Envato Unpacked exists to celebrate.

We saw it in the monkey interviews and the vlogging yetis. We saw it in the 64,400 people who chose Cinema Sunday for their projects. We saw it in the grunge textures downloaded thousands of times while AI generators offered pristine alternatives. Every choice, every download, every prompt revealed a creator making deliberate decisions about what their work should feel like — the exact stories Envato Unpacked was built to highlight.

2026 is going to be a wild and unpredictable year. We can’t wait to see what you make.