He might have kept the Twitter name, but the bird has flown.
For a moment back there, it looked like Twitter might be back. Years after Elon torched the brand with the messiest rebrand in history and gave us the dumpster fire that is X, it the bird appeared to be rising from the ashes. ‘Operation Bluebird‘ was recently launched with the aim of creating a brand new social media experience. Called Twitter.
X, of course, sued. And this month, a judge ruled that Musk’s company could indeed keep the Twitter name. But not the logo. And it’s all because of Musk’s incendiary tweets from back in 2023 – specifically two of them.
Operation Bluebird launched earlier this year (Image credit: Bluebird)
On 22 July 2023, Musk tweeted that X was planning to “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” One day later, he posted that the company was taking blow torches to the Twitter logo on the building.
And now, it seems those tweets have flown back to haunt him. While Musk might be keeping the Twitter name, in a 35-page document, the judge has ruled that he’s lost the right to the bird logo, as well as the word ‘Tweet’ – citing those two Musk tweets as evidence that Operation Bluebird was “likely to succeed in proving both that X Corp. discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends not to resume the use of the marks.”
The Twitter/X rebrand was certainly messy (Image credit: Twitter / X)
“They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” TechCrunch quoted from a company statement from Operation Bluebird. It further states: “A ‘Tweet’ was never a corporation. It’s one person saying something. That word survived three years of a company trying to replace it, because the public declined to stop using it. We think that tells you who it belongs to.”
Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles. He has interviewed leaders and designers at brands including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Daniel’s debut book of short stories and poems was published in 2018, and his comedy newsletter is a Substack Bestseller.
An under-16s ban on TikTok and Instagram might do more than protect children – it could reshape who gets hired by agencies.
There’s a moment that’s become familiar to anyone hiring creatives over the past decade. You’re looking at someone’s portfolio. It’s solid enough. Then you spot the line: “50K followers on TikTok.” Suddenly, the conversation changes.
When that happens, those of us of a certain age, who came up during the days of print, have felt the fear. The fear of no longer being relevant. Maybe it’s paranoia, maybe it’s realism. Either way, if you’ve not a died-in-the-wool social native, it’s tempting to feel your “old-school” skills are no longer adequate, and the algorithm has become the new resume. But what if that era is about to fade? The path to getting your first design job might soon look very different.
(Image credit: Gov.uk)
Is the tide turning?
The assumption that social fluency equals creative value made sense when social media sat at the centre of cultural life. Increasingly, though, that centrality appears to be weakening.
Ofcom data published in April found that fewer than half of UK adult social media users are now actively posting, sharing or commenting, down from 61% in 2024. Meanwhile, only 36% believe social platforms are good for their mental health, and a third have deleted an app because it was affecting their wellbeing.
The mood is shifting. This week’s announcement that the UK will ban under-16s from using TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and X feels like another sign of that change. What’s striking isn’t simply the policy itself, but how little public resistance it appears to have generated, compared with the debates that surrounded social media a decade ago.
Whether the legislation succeeds remains to be seen. But culturally, it reflects a growing willingness to question assumptions that once seemed untouchable. And that’s where things get interesting for creative industries.
Rebalancing, not revolution
(Image credit: Gilaxia via Getty Images)
None of this means social media skills are about to become irrelevant. Clients will still want social content. Agencies will still need people who understand how visual culture moves online. And teenagers will inevitably find ways around restrictions, just as they’ve done elsewhere. But there’s a difference between circumventing a platform and being shaped by it from childhood.
For over a decade, social media has acted as a powerful formative influence on aspiring creatives. It’s shaped not only what they consume, but how they think about creativity itself: what gets attention, what gets shared, what succeeds.
If future generations spend less of their developmental years optimising content for algorithms, they’ll arrive at design school (and eventually at job interviews) with different instincts.
They may be less conditioned by the high-stimulation, short-form aesthetics that platforms reward. They may be more willing to explore slower, deeper and more varied forms of creative practice. In some ways, it could feel a little like stepping back into the pre-2010s creative landscape (but with better WiFi).
What this means for hiring
If you’re responsible for hiring designers, it’s worth thinking now about what this shift means for the talent pipeline. The candidates you’ll see in five to ten years will have grown up differently. Their portfolios may look different too: less platform-optimised, potentially richer in other ways. The instinct to reject someone because they don’t have a strong social presence may start to look, frankly, as outdated as rejecting someone for not knowing QuarkXPress.
Maybe I’m a hopeless optimistic, but I think there’s a broader opportunity here to restate what design education is actually for. If the appetite for digital natives has put pressure on colleges to teach content creation over craft, a cultural shift away from social media could ease that pressure.
None of this is inevitable, of course. Industries don’t change hiring habits easily or quickly. But the UK’s ban challenges a long-standing assumption: that the people best equipped to navigate social platforms are necessarily the most creatively valuable.
They never were, of course. It just took a piece of legislation, and the beginnings of a cultural retreat from the doom scroll, to remind us.
Feature image credit: Galina Zhigalova via Getty Images
Tom May is an award-winning journalist specialising in art, design, photography and technology. He is the author of the books The 50 Greatest Designers (Arcturus) and Great TED Talks: Creativity (Pavilion). Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.
One of the most popular typefaces in the world, Gotham, has been upgraded by Monotype. Say hello to Gotham Variable, a major evolution of the iconic typeface, which introduces continuous control across weight and width in a single, performance-optimised file.
Gotham, designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones and published by Hoefler & Co., has been involved in various elements of global communication since it launched publicly on the January 2001 cover of GQ. It has been used by brands the world over, including Netflix and Coca-Cola, the United States Postal Service and Saturday Night Live. Twenty five years later, it enters a new era that enables a new level of creative control and adaptability.
Gotham Variable consolidates multiple static files into a single streamlined file, which improves performances, reduces load times and simplifies implementation across platforms. It’s also highly adaptable, working seamlessly across screens, systems and contexts while maintaining Gotham’s iconic qualities. There are also 54 new intermediate styles, including subtle new shades of weight and a new Compact width.
Why has it been upgraded now? “We’re at a point with variable fonts that they are more what we have come to expect from a workhorse family, rather than an experiment, an add-on, or a nice-to-have,” explains says Sara Soskolne, previously senior designer at Hoefler & Co., now executive creative director at Monotype and lead designer for Gotham Variable.
“Reverse engineering variability into an existing and very widely used family is a trickier task than creating a new family that’s conceived as variable from the start. Since Gotham was not designed with variable functionality in mind, I think it made sense to wait a little to make sure variable fonts had reached a critical mass of adoption and expectation before embarking on creating a variable version of a family like Gotham.”
(Image credit: Monotype)
Gotham was also an obvious choice for an upgrade. “Gotham has spent 25 years earning an extraordinary kind of trust, from political campaigns to billboards, and across some of the world’s most iconic brand identities,” explains Sara.
“With Gotham Variable, we tried to imagine what this typeface could become without losing sight of its powerful legacy. Many of the styles in Gotham Variable have never existed before. Making them feel like they always belonged was the hardest part, and the most essential.”
(Image credit: Monotype)
As well as its technical improvements, Gotham Variable features expanded language support, including Vietnamese, supporting complex diacritics, stacked accents and tone marks. It also includes enhanced Cyrillic and Bulgarian.
“Adding language support to an existing typeface family is no quick and easy task. Getting the proportion and style right for these new glyphs was essential to stay true to Gotham’s DNA. Particularly for the hook and horn, matching Gotham’s expressiveness was key,” says Jordan Bell, senior type designer at Monotype.
For Sara, the connection to Gotham was personal: “My relationship with Gotham stretches back nearly 20 years, which is when I first started collaborating on expansions to what was then still quite a small family. This progressed from smaller initial forays, like adding extended numeric sets and expanded Latin language support, to filling in the width range between Gotham’s original and Condensed extremes to create what became its full 66 styles that were released in 2009; and then to expanding that entire family to cover the Greek and Cyrillic scripts for its 2015 release.
“More recently, I worked with Manual Creative on several bespoke decorated styles of Gotham Condensed for the Obama Foundation, which was a lovely way to reconnect to the family and sort of test the limits of how far it can be pushed while still feeling like Gotham before leading this new Variable expansion.
“And, living in NYC this whole time, on a personal level I’ve had the good fortune of living with some of Gotham’s vernacular sources in signage around the city, to the extent these still exist.”
(Image credit: Monotype)
In terms of challenges on this project, there were a few key issues: “To my mind, the main challenges came from the fact of grafting things like variability and Vietnamese language support onto an existing family,” says Sara.
“In adding variable functionality, suddenly all the spaces in between Gotham’s static styles – which were where we hid the sleight of hand involved in making them look the way they do – are now visible and completely accessible to users. So we had to be very intentional and critical about how that was handled.
“In adding Vietnamese support, because it’s a language that includes stacked accents (which often require more vertical space to incorporate), but we couldn’t go changing the line height of Gotham, we needed to include these across the whole design space without them feeling cramped or crowded.
“Underlying all of this is the temptation, once you’re opening up the hood, to turn this into a Gotham 2.0 and revisit some of those very early decisions that are causing some trouble later on. But we agreed very early on to keep this new expansion fully backwards compatible and only expand what’s available to users, not to change anything that existed previously, which I think was absolutely the right call.”
I asked Sara which element on Gotham Variable she was most proud of: “I’m probably most proud of how this all came together to create a variable version of such a beloved family that still feels utterly like Gotham at every moment.
“Since I wasn’t one of the original designers of Gotham, but have increasingly become its custodian over the years, I have a deep sense of responsibility to the intent behind it and the DNA that was created by those original designers. That can make some decisions (such as adding new styles) feel more challenging, but it also means it feels more rewarding when I get it right.
“So, I’m particularly excited about the new Compact width we’ve added in between the original and Narrow widths, which is meant to visually look just like the original width but set more efficiently in text.
“And even after staring at it for months, I never get tired of playing with the variable width slider and watching those stroke endings change their orientation in between the Extra Narrow and Condensed. There’s still plenty sleight of hand in this version, we just had to find different places to hide it!”
Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Rosie Hilder is Creative Bloq’s Deputy Editor. After beginning her career in journalism in Argentina – where she worked as Deputy Editor of Time Out Buenos Aires – she moved back to the UK and joined Future Plc in 2016. Since then, she’s worked as Operations Editor on magazines including Computer Arts, 3D World and Paint & Draw and Mac|Life. In 2018, she joined Creative Bloq, where she now assists with the daily management of the site, including growing the site’s reach, getting involved in events, such as judging the Brand Impact Awards, and helping make sure our content serves the reader as best it can.
The new era of creative content platforms is here.
The rapid rise of influencer media, the fragmented media landscape, and our always-on culture have given way to a new content beast that brands now must tackle. Today, most brands race to produce free, entertainment-first content for platform algorithms that prioritise and reward engagement above all else, often at the expense of brandconsistency.
As a result, brands often adopt a “shotgun” approach: producing lots of posts, formats, and trend-chasing content that may momentarily spike engagement but rarely compounds into durable brand meaning. This is exacerbated by audience fragmentation across countless niche platforms and communities. Traditional brand identity systems, optimised for static expression and centralised control, struggle to keep pace with these demands.
The brands that are successfully breaking this cycle are shifting their thinking from “what we look like” to “how we behave and enable others to create.” This means evolving briefs, toolkits, and governance models to support deliberate, scalable content production that serves both human audiences and platform discovery algorithms. Flexible identity systems and strategic content franchises are essential, and brands that fail to adapt risk irrelevance or incoherence.
Corporate identity to channel identity
(Image credit: NYT Cooking)
We’re in a new era of corporate identity building. What was once driven by an iconic logo, graphic simplicity, and an architecture signalling brand ownership, must now be adaptable across channels, for an audience that includes a constantly evolving AI persona. A new hybrid challenge has emerged: how to deliver on the engagement opportunity while maintaining coherence.
We see some of the more effective working models of this in traditional media brands such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The BBC. They retain the fundamentals of an iconic masthead and build everyday relevance by developing a variety of content franchises (NYT Cooking, Wirecutter, The Athletic, etc.), some evergreen, and some of which change from day to day and season to season.
Similarly, today’s brands need to evolve from thinking in terms of type, colour, and photography that lives within a single brand to how those same devices stretch across content franchises and media channels. Brand management must balance formal visual consistency with a dynamic editorial content platform that can flex, experiment, and occasionally challenge visual norms.
This combination of a visual constant, paired with variable systems and storytelling, allows the brand to stay recognisable while flexing to engage as the news and entertainment cycle evolves.
Platform and content thinking
(Image credit: Red Bull)
Many brands have a difficult time freeing themselves up from their “corporate identity.” However, reframing your marketing mindset for today’s channels and audiences can pay enormous dividends.
Red Bull is a clear exemplar: through Red Bull Media House, the company has built a full-fledged media ecosystem – Red Bull TV, The Red Bulletin, and creative hubs like Red Bull Studios – that produces everything from live events and music programming to cinematic sports films. By owning distribution, investing in long‑form storytelling, and operating physical and digital studios for creators, Red Bull has transformed product marketing into a portfolio of content franchises that build community, loyalty, and distinctive cultural positioning.
Every brand should be looking at its portfolio of people, ideas, events, sponsorships, and philanthropy through a similar lens: what could become a repeatable content franchise that audiences recognise and return to? And how can we think dynamically about how we use and engage with content from each of these sources?
Creating dynamic systems
From a visual perspective, the franchises you create should not be cookie-cutter replicas of each other. Your identity systems need a strong and purposeful foundation of typography and colour that can flex to support a broad content platform, from the serious and analytical to the playful and humorous.
Take The Guardian,for example, whichhas a distinct typographic family and colour palette, yet allows for a vast array of photographic and illustrative imagery, including political cartoons. It also flexes how these are used across channels, including Instagram and YouTube. Contrast the formal structure of the print and digital edition of the paper with the street voice of Instagram. This is exactly what modern brands need: a consistent core identity that can shift tone and format by channel and moment.
In comparison, Liquid Death’s identity is rooted in character versus the more traditional graphic guidelines. While a newer, more niche brand, it understands that “principles,” not rules, give it the flexibility and creativity to build its tribe.
In each case, a strong core identity supports diverse content series, rather than constraining them.
Now what?
It can be challenging for traditional brands to pivot how they think and act with their identity; they often have large management structures that resist newer, more reactive media models and antiquated design systems. The skills and aptitudes required to manage a brand are quite different from those needed to create it.
To start, marketers should ask themselves clear questions from a content and design perspective:
Content
Where and with whom is the brand driving engagement?
What can we learn from others inside and outside of the category?
What if we did the opposite of our competitors?
Can we dig deeper into a topic to broaden the range?
How might we atomise components for quick consumption?
We’d also recommend carving out specific time to continually play and experiment with new topics and elements to gauge interest.
Design
Are we leading or following? For example, if everyone in the category is, say, blue, do we break through by using a different colour?
Does our logo and system, or how we are using these elements, allow us to be alive in culture? What elements and rules need to change?
Where can we introduce new tools and automation to free up thinking time, and speed execution?
The shift may require a rebalancing of power, from linear campaign planning and management to zig-zagging dynamic content creation, and from a primary focus on “what we look like” to “how we behave and enable others to create.” But from this shift, we can usher in a new era of iconic design built for cross-platform success.
Brendán is a senior partner in design based in Lippincott’s New York office. A native of Dublin, Brendán has over 25 years of experience at Lippincott spanning identity design, brand voice, campaign development and customer experience innovation. Brendán has led and designed programs for a wide spectrum of clients including Aer Lingus, Ameriprise, BD, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bombardier, CIBC, CityMD, Comcast, DuPont, Hearst, Intuit, Liberty Mutual, Morgan Stanley, MSK, Samsung, SK, The New Yorker, Toys ‘R’ Us, The Weather Channel, TimeWarner, Wells Fargo and Vale. His pro bono work includes NYC Pride, The NewYork Historical, Be The Match and Lighthouse International.
One of the most iconic marks ever created, Pepsi’s logo has been on a fascinating and tumultuous journey spanning more than a century.
From a medical tonic brewed behind a pharmacist’s counter, to one of the biggest and most recognisable brands with one of the best logos on the planet, Pepsi has been on quite a journey since its beginnings in 1893.
On the way, its logo has been through more than a few incarnations. The classic red, white and blue Pepsi globe is an instantly recognisable symbol, and the classic Pepsi-Cola wordmark was immortalised in a famous neon sign in New York City – but it wasn’t always quite so smooth. So, let’s take a closer look on a journey through more than a century’s history as we see what we can learn from all the eras of Pepsi’s logo – the good, the bad, and the downright baffling.
1893-1951: From Brad’s Drink to Pepsi-Cola
The evolution of the early Pepsi logo from 1989 to 1906. (Image credit: Pepsi)
Pepsi did not begin life as Pepsi. It was invented by North Carolina pharmacist Caleb Bradham and sold over the counter at his drugstore as a medicinal drink, initially simply called ‘Brad’s Drink’. It combined kola nut extract with vanilla and sugar as well as various herbs and spices, and was advertised as a relief for dyspepsia. A cola for dyspepsia… Pepsi-Cola! You can see how ol’ Brad got there.
Some spurious unsourced logos for ‘Brad’s Drink’ are floating around online, but I’m sceptical to say the least. The first logo proper arrived with the new name, in 1898, and well, it sure is a logo – let’s take a closer look.
It’s certainly something. (Image credit: Pepsi)
One of history’s all-time rough drafts, it looks a lot like someone who wasn’t particularly skilled at drawing attempted to make their own legally distinct version of Coca-Cola’s famous Spencerian script – and it’s quite possible that this is exactly what happened.
Over the following decades the logo would be considerably refined. The script would gain its familiar looping shape and the letters their distinctive curling serifs – though to be fair, the double-loop underline from the original would remain consistent. The ‘C’ also gained its stylish flag, echoing the shape of the underline, in which the instruction ‘Drink’ would sometimes be written.
This version from 1934 is one of the most famous. (Image credit: Pepsi)
This mark had reached its final form by the early 1950s, in a refined and rather lovely piece of lettering that achieved immortality when it was used on the illuminated Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens, NYC. This mark would stick around on and off for the next couple of decades.
1951-1971: Bottle cap era
Classy. (Image credit: Pepsi)
By the 1940s, Pepsi had started experimenting with distinctive bottle cap designs, and this resulted in the launch in 1951 of the distinctive red, white and blue bottle cap that would go on to become the Pepsi ‘Globe’ – one of the most famous logos in the world.
The original introduction of the bottle cap has been varyingly described in the historical record as an attempt to create something unique to differentiate the brand from copycats, and a bit of tri-colour WWII-era patriotism. It was quite possibly both.
In the 1960s, the bottle cap would be updated with a strikingly modern flat sans-serif typeface, and shortly after that, the word ‘Cola’ would be omitted from the branding for the first time. This was reportedly an attempt to appeal to younger people, who apparently don’t like too many words.
1973: The Pepsi Globe
The 1970s version (left), and a typographical refresh in 1986 (right). (Image credit: Pepsi)
The circular logo proved so successful that in the 1970s, it was able to be divorced from the bottle cap entirely and stand on its own; clearly, people no longer needed subconscious reminding that Pepsi was a drink.
Throughout the next two decades this logo would go through a few minor tweaks and refinements, with the ‘Pepsi’ wordmark being set in the typeface Handel Gothic.
1991-2008: Going 3D
Varyingly radical nineties-ified versions of the logo from (clockwise from top left) 1991, 1997, 2003 and (briefly) 2008. (Image credit: Pepsi)
Another big shake-up arrived in the nineties, when the ‘Pepsi’ wordmark was divorced from the globe entirely. This is a time-honoured sign of runaway success for a logo, as enjoyed by the likes of Starbucks and McDonald’s – when it is deemed strong, distinctive and familiar enough to signify a brand on its own.
This was also the point where subtle suggestions of three dimensions started to be introduced into the globe. Slight shading on a version introduced in 1997 gives it the appearance of a ball, as do shining white highlights on a versions used from 2003, and stylised water droplets on a version that was used very briefly in 2008, before something big happened.
2008-2023: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity
The famous dramatic rebrand of Pepsi from 2008, which underwent a slight refresh (bottom right) in 2014. (Image credit: Pepsi)
Okay. This. You knew this was coming.
In 2008, Pepsi decided it was time for a rebrand. Nothing wrong with that. For this million-dollar endeavour, the company contracted the New York-based Arnell Group, who produced the skewed form of the Pepsi Globe, with the white line at an angle suggestive of a smile.
However, the real story was the group’s design memo, which leaked in 2009 – and is so deliriously unhinged that some people quite credibly think it could be a hoax. Over 27 exhaustive pages, the memo’s writers talk about how the Pepsi logo is inspired, obviously, by the earth’s self-sustaining magnetic field. It discusses how ‘emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity’. It compares the Pepsi logo to the Mona Lisa.
Not now sweetie, Daddy’s shaping the gestalt of brand identity. (Image credit: Arnell Group)
If you’ve ever sat in a design meeting and felt that the people around you were getting a bit high on their own supply, read our write-up of this infamous memo for a much-needed reminder that things could always be worse.
Also, if you’ll forgive me for editorialising for a minute – hate this one. Hate it. Hate the way it takes the beautifully simple and distinctive Pepsi globe and twists it into something that just looks… wrong. Hate the reedy, wafer-thin typeface that is, of course, all lower case. Bad. Get rid. Next.
2023-present: Return of the King
That’s better. (Image credit: Pepsi)
Credit where it’s due, Pepsi stuck with the bad redesign for more than a decade (they’d paid for it, to be fair). But in 2023, it was finally time to kick the bums out and go back to basics, and the company did that with a glorious reinstatement of the 1970s-style flat globe, with the Pepsi wordmark in the centre where it belongs.
No gimmicky ‘3D effects’. No looping scripts. No invocations of the earth’s geodynamo. Just one of the most iconic logos of all time, together with the simple mark of the brand that created it. And breathe. Isn’t that more relaxing?
Want more insights into how logos have changed over the years? See our rundown on the YouTube logo history, and see our guide to how to design a logo if you’re inspired to take a run at it yourself.
Jon is a freelance writer and journalist who covers photography, art, technology, and the intersection of all three. When he’s not scouting out news on the latest gadgets, he likes to play around with film cameras that were manufactured before he was born. To that end, he never goes anywhere without his Olympus XA2, loaded with a fresh roll of Kodak (Gold 200 is the best, since you asked). Jon is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq, and has also written for in Digital Camera World, Black + White Photography Magazine, Photomonitor, Outdoor Photography, Shortlist and probably a few others he’s forgetting.
In the past year you will have seen many a big brand lean on nostalgia and heritage rather than radical reinvention. It feels like a retreat from bold and daring reinvention, as we snuggle up to nostalgia like a security blanket
Take the case of the poster child of this new-age caution in Cracker Barrel Old Country Store. In August 2025 the chain attempted to modernise a brand rooted in roadside American. Immediately it saw a tsunami of political and social-media uproar. Soulless … bland … lacking resonance. Not long later, the company quietly dumped the redesign and reinstated its classic 70s-era emblem featuring “Uncle Herschel” beside a barrel. Cracker Barrel serves as a costly lesson in caution, with Cracker Barrel’s market value briefly falling by about $100 million before rebounding when the old design returned.
(Image credit: Cracker Barrel)
A similar story has been unfolding at midmarket fashion label Vera Bradley. Long known for its quilted bags in florals and paisley, Vera Bradley launched a brand “refresh” in 2024 aimed at attracting younger buyers. This makeover downplayed the company’s signature prints in favour of solid colours and sleeker lines. But many loyal customers rebelled. By early 2026 the company announced a course correction and its new “Project Sunshine” pivot doubled down on the vintage florals that made the brand famous. The Wall Street Journal reported that Vera Bradley’s executives admitted they had “lost track of what made Vera Bradley special”. The brand reversed its own makeover and leaned into nostalgia, acknowledging that its heritage patterns were, perhaps, core to customer appeal.
(Image credit: Vera Bradley)
These high-profile U-turns indicate a broader motive. We exist in an age of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, and many companies seem to be betting on familiarity. Designers and marketers note that nostalgia isn’t just sentimentality – it’s a strategic comfort zone.
Brand Genetics, a human centred insight and innovation consultancy, argues that research shows that nostalgic branding provides comfort during uncertain times and this helps consumers feel familiar and trustworthy with a brand. Nostalgia creates continuity between past and present, acting as a psychological anchor for weary customers. Familiar cues, such as old logos, classic patterns act as anchors.
When the world feels unpredictable, a gool old logo and pattern on your breakfast cereal might, on some level, make you feel a little bit safer.
Brands also face a much-more immediate cautionary environment. Social media and 24/7 news cycles mean that even small design changes can spark big reactions, when the name of the game is click bait. A new logo can be framed as a woke political statement, and any misstep is magnified online. In Cracker Barrel’s case, just removing an old cartoon figure became ammunition for a culture war. That kind of instant, vocal feedback encourages companies to play it safe.
(Image credit: Jaguar)
Think of one of the most radical examples of not playing it safe, Jaguar’s EV pink explosion. Last month The Telegraph reported: “The designer behind Jaguar’s controversial “woke” rebrand has reportedly been dismissed from the carmaker just days after a new chief executive took over…”
Where does all this leave designers? Innovation still matters, but maybe it should be cautioned with authenticity. Be sure change is kept close to the client’s DNA. Strip away at your risk, be mindful around signature elements that customers love – the very things that can alienate the audience a rebrand seeks to excite. Think colours, patterns, characters or typography as an echo to remind people what they already loved.
For many brands, nostalgia has become a safe space to hide from the judgement of a volatile world. For designers, maybe it’s a reminder that rupture without purpose can be a big bang of hot air. So tread carefully, there are landmines in the market.
Simon is a writer specialising in sustainability, design, and technology. Passionate about the interplay of innovation and human development, he explores how cutting-edge solutions can drive positive change and better lives.
We all love a good advertising fail, and no more so than on LinkedIn, where piling on to deride the latest from adland is quite the sport.
The latest advert to get people talk comes from drinks brand Courvoisier. The advert shows band Ezra Collective sitting around in what I suspect is meant to be a cosy scene. For some reason only one of them has an instrument and that instrument is a drum kit.
Text says ‘Toast the year with Ezra Collective’ and then there’s a second tagline that says ‘To the moments that make us’. The logo also appears twice, as well as on the bottle and there’s a random mention of ginger ale in there that’s very easy to miss. I doubt that this offering will make it on to our best billboards list.
The ignorable and ignored “serving suggestion” line???
The mandatory bottle AND glass inclusion?
The second headline that means even less than the first?
The third feature of logo and brand just in case you didn’t notice it the first two times, on the left or bottle?
The pointless lower case/script in French to suggest sophistication? (😂😂😂)
Note to self: why are the words in the meaningless headline underlined.”
He went on to say he is assuming it was done by AI, and he’d give it a zero out of ten.
The commenters then piled on, with most agreeing with Kevin.
“Such a generic looking ad” said one person. “It’s also just a BAD photo” said another, who went on to talk about the eye lines – who/what are they looking at?
“This is actually disorientingly bad” said another commenter, while someone else called it “an absolute shocker”.
Rosie Hilder is Creative Bloq’s Deputy Editor. After beginning her career in journalism in Argentina – where she worked as Deputy Editor of Time Out Buenos Aires – she moved back to the UK and joined Future Plc in 2016. Since then, she’s worked as Operations Editor on magazines including Computer Arts, 3D World and Paint & Draw and Mac|Life. In 2018, she joined Creative Bloq, where she now assists with the daily management of the site, including growing the site’s reach, getting involved in events, such as judging the Brand Impact Awards, and helping make sure our content serves the reader as best it can.
In an extract from his book Boost Your Creativity, Steve Brouwers argues why rest and relaxation are the creative’s best friend.
Today most people fill every spare moment with distractions.
Scroll. Swipe. Tap.
And this is killing our creativity.
Dr Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist and the author of The Creating Brain, studied the brains of highly creative people and identified a surprising and striking pattern in their lives.
They all took time to do nothing.
Einstein would stare out of the window for long stretches of time, letting his mind wander.
Mozart composed with astonishing speed, but that speed was likely made possible by long, quiet periods of internal processing – not visible ‘doing’.
It might feel like you’re doing nothing in these moments – but your brain is actually hard at work.
Doing nothing isn’t passive – it’s active recombination.
(Image credit: Boost Your Creativity, published by Luster)
Beneath the surface, a network of regions called the Default Mode Network (DMN) lights up. This is your brain’s backstage crew, quietly preparing the next act of inspiration while the spotlight is off. The DMN is activated when you’re not focused on a specific task.
It thrives in the in-between spaces when you’re daydreaming, reflecting, thinking about the past or future, or imagining someone else’s thoughts. It’s the engine of empathy, memory, and mental time travel. Most importantly, it’s where creativity begins to simmer.
When you’re solving a clear-cut problem, your brain switches to a different mode: focused, logical, linear. But when you loosen your grip and let your attention wander, the DMN kicks in. That’s why your best ideas often sneak up on you when you least expect them: mid-shampoo, on the toilet, while doodling, or as you’re drifting off to sleep.
You’re not trying – and that’s the point.
The DMN connects ideas, stirs memories, and forms new patterns in those quiet moments when you’re not looking directly at the problem.
This is why some of the most powerful creative tools are the simplest: rest, reflection, movement, play, and purposeful pauses.
When you stop pushing your brain and let your mind wander, you’re not wasting time – you’re opening the door to insight.
This isn’t just theory. Creatives across several disciplines have noticed it too.
It appears that I have my best ideas just as I wake up. When my mind is not thinking about daily stuff yet and I am still lingering in that twilight zone of wondering.
Paul McCartney wrote Yellow Submarine in that twilight zone, as he was drifting off to sleep.
Designer Massimo Vignelli explained that he gets his ideas while shaving, which he emphasises, is the reason why he doesn’t have a beard.
So remember: sometimes the best way to create is to stop creating – just for a moment – and let your backstage brain take over.
Isn’t it wonderful that some of your best works are created while you’re ‘not working’ at all?
Steve is a Belgian creative director, teacher, author and speaker with over 25 years experience in the media industry. In his inspiring talks, Steve shares his insights and experiences with audiences around the world. He is known for his candid stories about imposter syndrome and procrastination – topics that resonate deeply within the creative community. He is the author of Creatives on Creativity, published by Luster in 2021.
Emotion sells, and few carmakers have leaned into that truth (sometimes gracefully, sometimes aggressively) quite like BMW. Sliding into a BMW isn’t meant to feel like entering a machine; it’s meant to feel like slipping on an identity, an emotion, a story.
From its iconic car designs to its slick campaigns, BMW has spent decades engineering not just vehicles but vibes. Over time, it has perfected what many premium carmakers attempt but rarely sustain: an emotional brand world where the product is less about horsepower and more about aspiration, belonging, and that intangible spark known simply as “joy.”
(Image credit: BMW)
This festive season, BMW pushed that idea harder than ever. You may have seen the campaign insisting, “We didn’t invent the car… We created a feeling,” for the brand’s all-electric BMW iX3 – to a world increasingly defined by silent motors and software screens. It’s BMW trying to humanise the algorithmic future of driving, a future where “The Ultimate Driving Machine” risks being reduced to just another rolling gadget.
Of course, emotional storytelling isn’t new territory for BMW. Long before the tech-luxury wars, the brand was selling Freude am Fahren (joy of driving). Even the 1974 tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” which at first sounds like a performance flex, was really a coded identity pitch: buy a BMW, and you become the kind of person who values mastery, confidence, the feel of the road.
The First of a New Era | Introducing the New BMW iX3. – YouTube
But that narrative has had to evolve. In recent years, BMW’s marketing has shifted gears from taking the driver-as-hero route to the softer sideroad of lifestyle-as-feeling. The brand no longer just sells torque curves; it sells a sense of freedom, empowerment, and success. From cinematic social shorts to immersive, multisensory showrooms, BMW engineers every touchpoint to reinforce the idea that owning its vehicles is an experience on a very human level, not a mere transaction.
This is the classic playbook of emotional branding, which connects with people’s desires, anxieties, and self-image. Customers buy the feeling they hope the product will unlock. And BMW has doubled down on this playbook, threading emotion through everything from its design language to its retail choreography.
But here’s the tension: in a market where EVs are quiet, digital, and increasingly similar under the skin, can a brand still sell emotion as a differentiator? When the visceral growl of a straight-six becomes an algorithmically tuned sound profile, does “joy” hit the same? It’s a contradiction BMW is actively wrestling with.
(Image credit: BMW)
Designing Emotion in Every BMW
Each new model is crafted to elicit a reaction, sometimes delight, sometimes debate. From sculpted lines to wraparound cockpits, BMW treats design not as ornamentation but as emotional triggers. The brand knows customers aren’t buying A-to-B transportation. They’re buying confidence, pride, and a little theatre.
This also explains the polarising design decisions in recent years, the giant kidney grille, for example, which sparked a miniature design civil war. But even that controversy shows BMW’s intent: emotional impact beats universal approval. BMW would rather make you feel something than nothing.
And when hardware isn’t enough, BMW turns to narrative. A 2023 electric-i4 campaign, “Father & Son. Freude Forever,” shows a father passing the joy of driving to his son. The nostalgia is dialled up deliberately: driving becomes family, freedom, legacy. Likewise, this year’s holiday film uses a child and a grandmother reconnecting through a BMW to argue that the joy of driving can bridge generations, even in an era of range anxiety and touchscreen fatigue.
It’s emotionally effective. It’s also a bit of a gamble. BMW is selling joy at a time when driving, especially urban driving, has never felt less joyful. Congestion, cameras, automation, and rising insurance costs all threaten the fantasy. The brand is essentially promising a feeling that the real world increasingly refuses to deliver.
(Image credit: BMW)
What Designers Can Learn
For designers and brand strategists, BMW offers a compelling blueprint: build products that earn trust at a functional level, then build stories that elevate them to something people can feel. But the blueprint comes with caveats. Emotional branding only works when the product experience supports the claim. BMW’s engineering heritage gives it leeway here, but not infinite leeway.
Because if emotion becomes a veneer over a commodity product, people notice. And the EV era, flattening performance differences, muting mechanical character, makes this risk more acute than ever.
In that sense, BMW’s evolving strategy isn’t a departure but a recalibration. The machines are changing; the promise can’t. The brand seems determined to argue that even if the future is quieter and more digital, the feeling of driving doesn’t have to be, whether consumers believe that is the next chapter.
Simon is a writer specialising in sustainability, design, and technology. Passionate about the interplay of innovation and human development, he explores how cutting-edge solutions can drive positive change and better lives.
Elon Musk has been promising X’s transition into an “everything app” for some time now, but finally, we might have a breakthrough – behold X TV. An offshoot of the social media app, X TV is set to be an all-in-one entertainment app for your smart TV, bringing X’s “high-quality” content to your home.
The X overlord teased the new app via a cryptic video, debuting the new X TV logo design. With the X icon considered one of the worst new logo designs of last year, the launch of X TV was Elon’s chance to redeem himself. I’m sad to report that the result is a little underwhelming, to say the least.
Now I’m aware that for the sake of continuity, we can’t stray too far from the original logo design, but it feels like there could’ve been a little more consideration put into the new look. It seems that X (and now X TV) is caught up in the aesthetic of being edgy and fresh, and in turn, it’s giving us soulless minimalism.
Design aside, the new app is set to be an innovative form of media consumption, using tailored algorithms and AI-powered organisation to bring you the “immersive entertainment experience” that you deserve. My reservations will be held until I can make a fair judgement.
For more Elon-related news, check out why the Cybertruck’s latest design fail looks like the beginning of the end. For the logo buffs out there, take a look at the logo design quiz that has stumped the internet.
Natalie is Creative Bloq’s staff writer. With an eye for trending topics and a passion for internet culture, she brings you the latest in art and design news. A recent English Literature graduate, Natalie enjoys covering the lighter side of the news and brings a fresh and fun take to her articles. Outside of work (if she’s not glued to her phone), she loves all things music and enjoys singing sweet folky tunes.
