In the branding world, multiple trendlines are swirling.

Debranding continues to happen everywhere (covered in Issue 13). On another trendline, famous minimalists like Jony Ive are embracing ornate identities.

Somewhere off to the side of that, a new trendline comes out of the era of hackable brands made famous by Google Doodles, executed brilliantly for IBM Think, and achieved peak awesomeness at the MIT Media Lab.

Generative brand identities leaps one step further as it embraces variability, releases control, and builds from dynamic algorithms. The result? A single brand identity is expressed through countless permutations.

For example, Guilty by Association’s logo consistently redraws itself. Wieden+Kennedy’s new design studio lets you play with their identity generator. And incredible design studios are launching to push this field forward.

Together, at the intersection of design and technology, compelling brand identities will keep emerging. (Now, let’s hope the brand design industry can continue to avoid the tropes of today’s “sprinkle AI on everything” buzz factory.)