Designers Should Think Like DJs When Developing New Brand Systems

The pace of modern branding is relentless. Campaigns, content and culture all move in real time, and the way we create and activate brand assets has to move with them.

Yet many brands are still shackled to static rulebooks, PDF manuals gathering dust on shared drives. They’re great at defining what a brand is, but not how it moves or evolves. By the time the manual’s written, designed and gone through the rounds of approvals, culture’s already moved on.

Our founding partner, Charles Vallance, has a saying that’s always stuck with me: “Only the paranoid survive.” Slightly menacing… but what it’s really about is never getting too comfortable. Staying switched on, curious, and always looking for ways to make the work better.

Which brings me to the work itself. The world of creativity can feel like the Wild West at times. Every week there’s a new process, platform or piece of software promising to make our creative lives easier. But through all that noise, having an underlying framework is what really helps us stay focused and build better work.

As a designer, I’ve always liked frameworks. They help focus your thinking and give structure to how you build. Our favourite, Fixed and Flexible, has long been one of the most effective.

Fixed assets bring consistency through logo, colour and type. Flexible assets let you play through shape, illustration, photography and motion. Together, they’ve given structure and freedom to many of the brands we’ve developed over the years.

But lately, our interpretation of fixed feels like it’s holding us back. Fixed shouldn’t mean frozen. It should mean anchored. Something you can stretch and shape while keeping it recognisable.

The most distinctive brands understand this. Nike recently remixed Just Do It into Why Do It?, twisting its most famous line into something new. That’s not breaking consistency. It’s remixing recognition. And as a result, makes us lean in.

BA’s Reflections campaign does the same. No logo, no headline, no copy. Just a beautiful view of what you might see on one of their flights. Our recent Walkers work reimagined the logo as the flavour itself. Both show how Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs) can flex in unexpected ways while still feeling unmistakably part of the world they belong to.

And you don’t need decades of equity to play at this level. Pip & Nut have led with that confidence from day one. With headlines like “IYKYK” and “Relationship status: P&N”, they don’t feel the need to spell it out. Even the logo hides in plain sight as a twinkle in the squirrel’s eye. Every element adds to the mix, and when the audience catches the beat, everything clicks.

You see the same kind of conviction in relative newcomers like Lucky Saint and Tony’s Chocolonely. Lucky Saint built its brand around provocative imagery of nuns drinking alcohol-free beer. Tony’s went another way and built fame with out-of-category typography and an unapologetic tone of voice to make its mission impossible to miss.

These young brands have designed fame into existence by using their DBAs with confidence long before they were household names. Because in truth, your DBAs don’t sit in boxes. They sit on a spectrum – and that’s where the Brand Mixer comes in.

Think of your DBAs as the channels with the sliders on a music producer’s mixing desk: vocals, bassline, drums and synths that make up your brand’s sound. Each has its own role, texture and energy. You don’t turn them all up at once; you mix them. Market-leading brands know when to strip everything back so one asset lands clean, or when to layer multiple elements to build intensity. And when a brand hits the right mix, it doesn’t just show up – it drops. You feel it. You know it’s theirs before you even see the logo.

Consistency still matters, but the pace of modern communications means that sometimes we’ve got to jump on the decks and mix in real time. But like any good DJ, if we want to keep the party going, we need to know our records inside out and know how to read the crowd.

Maybe it’s time to swap the manual for the mixer.

Jordan Blood, head of design at Girl&Bear, the makers of VCCP

Image created with the support of Emma Houlston and Olivier Beaugrand.