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Design trends, studio spotlights, and industry insights.
Six identity stories from one unusually human week: Tinder rebuilds for Gen Z, Bartine turns neighborhood investment into a bakery brand, BAFTA begins with physics, and Lacoste lets its crocodile become a goat.
Seven cases about the human mark in 2026: Granola rejects AI polish, Obama's words become architecture, and Wimbledon proves that an almost invisible redesign can still be ambitious.
Seven identity projects about character under pressure: Stack Overflow faces the AI era, Imperial survives a student revolt, and a London butcher pays its design studio in Christmas meat.
Suki, Robin, Cohere, Faculty, Pienso, Diffblue, Heidi, Parloa, Sierra, LangChain, Rogo, Cresta — twelve smaller AI identities that refuse the gradient-and-sparkle template.
Perplexity, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Copilot, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI, Grok, Notion AI — the brand identities of the AI era are splitting into two opposing camps.
Koto rebrands the hidden software that runs your hotel stay. Mucho reopens MACBA at 30. Base Design sells Birkenstocks for 7am and 7pm. illo makes YouTube's backstage notifications feel alive. Hello Comrade launches a protein drink with a hipster-device aesthetic, Stink makes HR funny, and Found turns a lens launch into a neuroscience film. Seven projects about the design work nobody was supposed to notice.
Buck turns the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's outer screen into a character stage. Saint-Urbain builds a soda brand around a gap-toothed smile. Hello Comrade wraps a Bose speaker like a giant candy. And DixonBaxi turns a creative festival into a cultural institute. Four projects about brands that refuse to take themselves too seriously.
Nothing launches a phone that looks like nothing else. DixonBaxi bites a corner off TikTok. Koto gives a calorie tracker a Yeti mascot. And a 165-year-old Russian embroidery factory gets an identity built on invisibility. This week's roundup is about heritage, evolution, and knowing what to keep.
A running brand builds a retail temple in Shenzhen, Bleed gives Sanity a system that speaks to both developers and designers, and a Melbourne eyewear shop turns architecture into identity. Plus two projects from Toronto studio newkid that show what quiet conviction looks like.
From a 200-year-old botanical garden in Geneva to a hand-drawn cinema alliance in New York, this week's roundup covers identity work that deals with heritage, place, and the tension between preservation and reinvention.
We scanned the websites of 400 design studios to find out what they actually use. jQuery is alive and well, Rive has overtaken GSAP, and 64% don't write code at all.
Framer has gone from prototyping tool to full website platform. We looked at the studios building with it and what it means for web design.
After reviewing hundreds of studio websites, here's what separates the portfolios that convert from the ones that don't.
