Happy New Year! We’re back and taking a look at what we think will be the big brand trends for the year ahead.
AI Creative
Since the release of OpenAI and tools like MidJourney in 2022, designers have been constantly looking at how they can implement AI into their designs. I think 2026 will be the year where we see a significant increase in creatives using AI, but to a point where you don’t know it’s AI. Some of the early stuff over the last few years has looked like it comes from AI. Now, it’s getting so good that I genuinely see stuff and can’t believe it’s AI.
All you have to do is see the latest changes in Nano Banana in the last few months of 2025. This is really pushing the boundaries of how we can create communications and content at speed. Smart creatives understand AI’s leverage, how to bend it to their will and the impact it will have in the next few years. The best creatives will get better, the average ones need to be careful.
The Human Touch
There’s going to be many creatives that fight back on AI and looking at trying to integrate the human touch into their designs. In turn I think a tactile, hand-drawn, human feel is going to be more prevalent in branding work this year and we will see brands adopting more ‘real’ expressions, and expressing this too. They’ll say it’s created by a human, drawn by a human – the opposite to brands that signal their imagery is created by AI.
I think there’s going to be a real rise of people fighting against the digital creative trends using a human touch. A good example of this is bakery Jolene in London. They’ve gone all out on humanity, with a logo designed by a six year old.
Flexible Identities
In the early 2010’s, designers developed flexible identities with the power of new tech. There was a huge trend in brands changing their logos to suit different applications. These flexible logos came from designers fighting back against consistency and striving for variation. Given creatives have a toolbox like never before, I can see this trend coming back.
Back in 2009, FutureBrand branded the City of Melbourne with a flexible brand identity – imagine how seamless this could have been with the power of AI.
Liquid Glass
Whenever Apple releases a new user interface design, designers tend to follow this. I remember when the first version of the iPhone came out, there was a design pattern called Skeuomorpishm, which was basically apps or icons looking exactly like the real thing (so a notebook having a notebook texture, paper having a paper texture). Every time Apple changes the UI, designers and digital brands seem to get inspired by this, so we’ll see a lot of the Liquid Glass UI come more into fruition this year for sure. It’s a futurist design style that aligns with where we are culturally.
On a side note – I don’t particularly think the Liquid Glass design update works, I think they’ve complicated things a bit too much. Dieter Rams talks about less is more but Liquid Glass creates more out of less – it distracts, sometimes confuses, and is hard to navigate.
The Rise of the Serif
Fonts are the voice of a brand. Over the last few years, everyone’s been picking the same fonts; probably because designers want to recreate designs of their favourite designers, and clients feel more comfortable with aligning with the status-quo.
This has meant there’s been an epidemic of the sans-serif.
When the world’s most famous brands use certain fonts (Sans-Serif typefaces), this means that it filters down to designers and clients alike. It becomes a norm in culture, and looks like the right thing to do.
But then everyone does the same thing, and this is where the problem lies.
The last few years has been ever-present with sans-serif logo types and typography, and again, this is usually driven by famous brands out there. In 2023/24, there was a great visual of high-end fashion brands such as Burberry and Tom Ford using stripped-back sans-serif typefaces. Then, all of a sudden, Burberry pivoted and said we’ve lost what our soul is; this is who we are and this is the kind of vibe we’re going for. So, serifs are starting to come back in again when everyone’s a sans-serif, people start to think how can we break those design patterns to stand out. Trends come and go, but this is something that I’m seeing come back into play a lot more.
