We were handed a brief that most brand teams would quietly cry into their kerning over.
The ask?
Create a single brand identity system that could speak to:
- Third-year students navigating adulthood
- Established professionals with legacy expectations
- Growing families looking for stability
- Multiple benefit tiers
- Every touchpoint from TikTok to boardrooms
AND make it feel premium, modern, and human, not like a stitched-together Franken-brand.
We knew immediately that a static brand guide wasn’t going to cut it.
Not in a world that shifts this fast, across this many platforms, with this much noise.
Then throw AI into the mix, and the expectations explode. You need more content, faster delivery, and tighter consistency.
Suddenly, your brand needs to show up everywhere, all the time, without falling apart in the process.
After working with some very corporate brands over the years, this brief made me think brighter.
Following a traditional CI structure just doesn’t work anymore.
There are too many audiences, on too many platforms, with too many different messages.
So how does a brand keep it all together?
And no, adding a “digital section” to your CI isn’t the answer.
That’s just resizing your billboard. It’s tired, it’s old, and in a real-time world, it’s completely ineffective.
Here’s the real problem:
AI isn’t the replacement. It’s the accelerator.
If your identity system isn’t built with flexibility at its core, AI just creates chaos faster.
You end up with more content, less cohesion.
More visuals, less meaning.
More noise, less brand.
This is where creative systems thinking still matters.
This is where designers, strategists, and brand thinkers still lead.
You need rules.
You need stretch.
You need something that can hold the shape of your brand while still letting it breathe.
We built a system for that.
We call it Elastic Identity™, and it’s more than just a clever name.
It’s how you keep your brand recognisable in a world that won’t sit still.
But here’s the most important part, and no design system can survive without it:
You need a brand team with the experience to look at a piece of creative and know, instantly, that it feels right. That no matter who sees it, they’ll know exactly what brand they’re looking at.
In our next post, we’ll talk more about what Elastic Identity™ looks like in practice and how it changed everything for a client with one of the most complex audience spreads we’ve ever seen.
But for now, ask yourself this:
If your brand had to speak ten different languages tomorrow, would it flex or would it snap?