Creative Director Daniel Irizarry of Athletics argues that the most resilient brand systems aren’t built on exhaustive rules – they’re anchored by a few essential elements, and designed to move.
Most brand systems don’t fail because they’re poorly designed. They fail because they’re overdesigned — too many rules, too much rigidity, too little room for the people using them to actually think. In a world where culture moves faster than any guidelines document can keep up with, the brands that hold together won’t be the ones with the most elaborate systems. They’ll be the ones who got a few essential things right and gave themselves the freedom to move.
That idea has sharpened for me over the past few years as AI has started reshaping how quickly creative work can move. If the flexible layer of brand identity — photography, video, illustration, 3D — is being asked to respond to culture faster than ever, then the question of what stays fixed isn’t just a design question anymore. It’s an existential one. The core elements of a brand have never mattered more, precisely because the pace of everything around them is accelerating.
Start with the why
Before we design anything, we need to understand what we’re building for and who we’re building for. That means market analysis, brand audits, and — critically — culture and audience. Not culture as a trend report, but culture as the living context in which a brand has to earn attention. And not audience as a demographic spreadsheet, but as real people with preferences, values, and ways of moving through the world. The goal is to connect business objectives with cultural relevance. When those align, you can tell stories that are emotionally resonant and strategically sharp — a genuine connection between what a brand stands for and what people care about.
We also need to understand how an organisation currently delivers its branding. What’s already in place? Where are the friction points? A beautiful identity that an internal team can’t execute is a failed identity. And every category has its visual codes — shorthands rooted in culture that help audiences place a brand’s purpose and position. Which do we reinforce to make a brand legible, and which do we subvert to make it distinctive? The craft is in reading the landscape clearly enough to know where to play within conventions and where to break them.
The anchor matters more than ever
From this foundation, we build the core identity — the symbols that become a brand’s essential markers. Logo, colour, typography, graphic language, sound, motion. These are the elements that do the heaviest lifting for recognition and consistency. In a moment of accelerating change, they need to be more polished, more singular, more resilient than ever. They’re the anchor. If the anchor doesn’t hold, nothing else matters.
This is the part where the industry’s instinct to systematise everything gets backwards. As the world speeds up, the natural impulse is to add more rules — more guardrails, more specifications, more pages to the toolkit. But the brands that will thrive aren’t the ones with the thickest guidelines. They’re the ones who planted a few stakes in the ground so firmly that everything else can move around them.
Volume control
I think about this as volume control. A brand, like a person, can’t always be at eleven. Depending on the situation, context, and audience, you need to modulate—and the ability to do so well is becoming the defining capability of a resilient brand system.
Working across multiple Google product brands has made this vivid for me. Google understands the difference between fixed and flexible at scale. The core ingredients are remarkably lean: name, logo, colour, shape, form, product experience, UI. That last part matters — for many brands today, especially in tech, the product itself is the primary brand surface, where the brand lives at its quietest and most constant volume. But what holds everything together isn’t just the ingredients — it’s personality. There’s a consistent tone and emotional register that make something feel Google, whether you’re looking at a Circle to Search campaign or a Chrome Browser onboarding screen. The individual products modulate depending on the audience and context, but the personality and a few key signals remain constant. That coherence comes from a team that deeply understands its brand and partners willing to push each other toward the best work.
That’s volume control in practice. Not a rigid system applied uniformly, but a clear core expressed at different intensities — meeting people where they are without losing the thread.
Pressure-test everything
Here’s the thing about core elements and volume control: you can’t know if they work until you’ve stretched them. As the media landscape evolves, brands have to show up on more surfaces, in more formats, in ways that didn’t exist two years ago. A logo that looks great on a website might fall apart in a spatial computing environment. A type system that sings in editorial might go flat in motion.
This is why R&D isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s essential. Experimentation with code, 3D, motion, AI — these aren’t finishing touches applied after the system is locked. They’re how you pressure-test whether the brand can live in the real world and discover the edges of what your identity can do, which is exactly where differentiation lives. The brands that feel truly unique aren’t the ones that stayed safe within their own guidelines. They’re the ones that pushed their core elements into unfamiliar territory and found out what held.
Systems that empower, not constrain
If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ve lived the other version. A client asks for comprehensive guidelines, the team delivers an exhaustive system, and somewhere along the way, you realise that even you — the person who helped build it — are second-guessing every move against a two-hundred-page document. The rules intended to create consistency end up creating paralysis.
The most important thing a system can do is answer two questions: what are the non-negotiable elements that must retain their integrity, and where is the creative freedom?
Our work with Okta has been the strongest proof of this. We’ve partnered with their brand team for over four years — genuine collaboration built on honest feedback and mutual trust. The system we developed together has real depth and range, and it thrives because Okta has an exceptional internal team with the skill and ambition to take it further. They’ve extended the work far beyond what we initially created, and our partnership continues to evolve as the brand grows. Define the core, establish the volume control, and then trust talented teams to bring their own ingenuity and creativity to the work.
Holding under pressure
The brands that endure won’t be the ones that try to control every pixel. They’ll be the ones who understand what to hold onto, what to let breathe, and what to push into new territory.
That’s what it means to design a brand that holds under pressure. Not rigidity — resilience. Not more rules — sharper instincts. The symbols give you recognition. The volume control gives you range. The collaboration gives you longevity. And the judgment to know when to turn it up and when to pull it back? That’s the part no system can automate.
