Most branding systems don’t fail because they’re poorly designed. They fail because they are overdesigned—too many rules, too rigid, and too little room for the people who use them to really think. In a world where culture moves faster than any guidance document can keep up, the brands that stick together won’t be the ones with the most complex systems. They will be the ones who do some basic things right and give themselves freedom of movement.
Over the past few years, as artificial intelligence has begun to reshape creative work at a pace, this idea has become even clearer to me. If the flexible layers of a brand identity—photography, video, illustration, 3D—are asked to respond to culture faster than ever, the problem of remaining fixed is no longer just a design issue. It’s existential. The core elements of a brand have never been more important, precisely because the pace of everything around them has accelerated.
Start with the reason
Before we design anything, we need to understand what we are building for and who we are building for. This means market analysis, brand audits, and most importantly culture and audience. Culture isn’t a trend report, it’s the environment in which brands must earn attention. Audiences are not a spreadsheet of demographics, but real people with preferences, values, and lifestyles. The goal is to connect business goals with cultural relevance. When these factors align, you can tell stories that are emotionally resonant and strategically poignant—real connections between what your brand stands for and what people care about.
We also need to understand how organizations currently build their brands. What’s already there? Where are the friction points? A beautiful identity that your internal team cannot execute is a failed identity. Each category has its visual code—a culturally rooted shorthand that helps audiences understand the brand’s purpose and positioning. Which aspects should we enhance to make the brand legible, and which aspects should we subvert to make it different? The trick is to read the landscape clearly enough to know where to work within conventions and where to break them.
Anchors are more important than ever
On this basis, we built the core identity – the symbols that became the fundamental hallmark of the brand. Logo, color, typography, graphic language, sound, movement. These are the elements that play the most important role in recognition and consistency. At a time when change is accelerating, they need to be more refined, more unique, and more resilient than ever. They are anchors. If the anchor doesn’t stand, nothing else matters.
This is where the industry’s instinct to systematize everything falls back. As the world moves faster, the natural impulse is to add more rules—more guardrails, more specifications, more pages in the toolkit. But the brands that thrive are not the ones with the strictest guidelines. They drove a few stakes into the ground so firmly that everything else could move around them.
Volume control
I think it’s the volume control. A brand, like a person, cannot always be eleven. Depending on the situation, context, and audience, you need to adapt, and the ability to adapt well is becoming the defining capability of resilient brand systems.
Working across multiple Google product brands has impressed me on this. Google understands the difference between fixed and flexible at scale. The core elements are very streamlined: name, logo, colors, shape, form, product experience, user interface. That last part is important – for many brands today, especially in the tech space, the product itself is the primary brand surface, where the brand lives at its quietest and most consistent volume. But it’s not just the ingredients that hold everything together, it’s the personality. Whether you’re looking at a Circle to Search campaign or the Chrome browser’s onboarding screen, a consistent tone and emotion make it feel like Google. Individual products adapt based on audience and context, but personality and some key signals remain the same. This consistency comes from teams that deeply understand their brands and partners who are willing to push each other to achieve the best results possible.
This is volume control in practice. Not a strict system that is applied uniformly, but a clear core expressed in varying intensities – meeting people where they are without losing the thread.
Stress test everything
Here’s the thing about core elements and volume controls: you have no way of knowing if they work unless you stretch them. As the media landscape evolves, brands must be present in more shapes and forms in ways that didn’t exist two years ago. A logo that looks great on a website may break down in a spatial computing environment. A font system that performs well in editorial may fall flat in operation.
This is why research and development is not optional, but essential. Experiments with code, 3D, motion, artificial intelligence—these are not the finishing touches after a system is locked down. They’re the way you stress-test whether your brand can survive in the real world and discover the edges of what your identity can do, which is where differentiation comes from. The brands that truly feel unique are not the ones that stay safe within their own guidelines. They pushed their core elements into unfamiliar territory and figured out the rules.
A system that empowers rather than restricts
If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ve experienced another version. The client asks for comprehensive guidelines, the team delivers an exhaustive system, and somewhere along the way you realize that even you (the one who helped build the system) are second-guessing every step of the two-hundred-page document. Rules designed to create consistency ultimately lead to paralysis.
The most important thing a system can do is answer two questions: What are the non-negotiable elements that must maintain integrity, and where is the creative freedom?
Our partnership with Okta is the most powerful proof of this. We’ve been working with their brand team for over four years – a genuine collaboration built on honest feedback and mutual trust. The system we developed together has real depth and breadth, and it thrives because Okta has a fantastic internal team who have the skills and ambition to grow it further. The scope of their work extends far beyond what we originally created, and our partnership continues to evolve as the brand grows. Define the core, establish volume control, and then trust talented teams to bring their own ingenuity and creativity to the work.
persevere under pressure
Brands that last won’t be those that try to control every pixel. They will understand what to hold on to, what to let go of, and what to explore new territory.
That’s what it means to design a brand that can withstand pressure. Not rigidity – elasticity. Not more rules – sharper intuition. These symbols give you identification. The volume control gives you range. Cooperation can help you live longer. And the judgment to know when to dial it up and when to dial it down? This is the part that no system can automate.
