By the early 2000s, that thinking had moved beyond entertainment and cultural brands. More dynamic identities emerged, such as AOL, City of Melbourne and PwC... Living identity became a serious answer to a serious problem: How do you create one coherent brand for an organisation that has to show up in an ever-growing range of situations?

Today, that question has only become more relevant. Channels and touchpoints fragment and diversify further, and so do identity-creating tools. And yet the promise of the living brand identity feels somewhat unfulfilled.

I think this is because we are still underestimating what it takes to make them work. Making living identities truly living requires extraordinary focus on 3 things beyond design: sharing clarity in strategy, an identity system designed for variation and, perhaps most importantly, paying attention to the people.

1. The strategy has to be crystal clear (for designers too)

Old-school guidelines are good at removing decision-making: The logo is placed here. This is the typeface. These are the colours. This photograph is acceptable, that one is not. Nobody becomes a designer because they are passionate about placing a logo exactly two units from the edge of a layout. But let’s be honest: there is quite a bit of comfort in that easy certainty.

A living identity system deliberately removes some of that certainty. Instead of saying “Do this”, it says “Make the right decision.” Which is a much bigger ask.

The more freedom you introduce in design, the more clarity you need to share in strategy. Teams need to understand what the brand is fundamentally trying to express and how it should behave. Brand positioning, competitor analysis and target group insights all become relevant to a designer applying a living identity: What are we trying to make people feel? Where is our brand trying to move to? What are the competitors doing? What makes something unmistakably ours?

If strategic layers are unclear, decisions become subjective. “This is right for us” is too easily replaced by “I like this one more.” Eventually, someone’s taste replaces brand logic. And while taste is crucial in judging brand applications, relying on it is not a good long-term design strategy.

2. The identity system needs to be designed for variation

It is surprisingly easy to create a flexible-looking identity rather than a genuinely flexible one. Lots of colours, layouts and animated graphics do not make a system flexible.

A true living identity needs variation built into its foundations. Typography should be able to go from understated and editorial to huge and expressive - but needs to keep on showing a distinct personality. Layouts might compress, expand or overlap. UI and motion design can take countless different forms. Underneath all that variation, there has to be visual DNA holding everything together.

One of the most useful questions when designing a living identity is: What survives when everything else changes? That will often be the main design challenge. Without a core design idea that glues all variables together, there is no identity in a living identity.

Furthermore, a living identity needs to have a user interface. Designers applying it need to have the right access to the right assets and tools. And more than ever before, tools and guidelines need to feel intuitive, even seductive, to keep their users engaged.

3. A living identity is as alive as the people using it

And then there are the people. This is somehow the least glamorous part of the conversation around living identities. And I find it to be the most important. Without the right brand introduction and coaching, the right team structure and the right skills, a flexible identity evolves in one of two directions.

The first is contraction: Faced with too many choices, people gradually retreat towards the safest possible version of an identity. They use the same colour, the same layout, the same crop. Within a few years, the living identity becomes remarkably static.

The second is expansion: Everybody interprets the flexibility slightly differently. New layouts start to appear. Then someone adds a second illustration style. Social media team develops its own visual language. Employer branding develops another. An external agency invents additional layout devices for a campaign. Many of these things can be quite good. But over time, the identity becomes a mess of well-intentioned improvisation.

To keep a living identity on the right track between those two directions, brand management needs to be constant and it needs to be close to creative direction. When evaluating a piece of design, the question becomes “Is this a good expression of the brand in this context?” or “Does this set us apart from our defined competitors in the right way?” These are hard questions to answer. Understanding the strategy helps, but still it’s hard.

This is why I increasingly think that the organisational design around a flexible identity is almost as important as the brand design itself: Who has the authority to evolve the system? Who decides whether a new expression is an interesting extension or a dangerous deviation? Who coaches new designers? Who keeps external agencies aligned? Who notices that a certain visual habit is becoming repetitive?

The people working with a brand will always need sharp, perfectly designed assets. But they also need confidence. They need to understand the thinking behind the system. They need to see good work regularly. They need constructive feedback. They need permission to experiment, and someone to tell them when experimentation has gone too far. There should be opportunities to learn: Workshops, design reviews and open sharing of good and bad examples can be much more valuable than another twenty slides of guidelines.

Ideally, this also changes the relationship between branding agencies and internal teams. The handover of a finished identity should be a beginning rather than the end.

Taking people along for a living identity ride

During my time in the Belgian branding world, the overall quality of design has risen significantly. The standard of identity concepts, typography, digital design and motion is even dramatically higher than it was 15 years ago. Strategic capability has improved too: most organisations now understand that an identity needs to emerge from a meaningful positioning. Custom plugins and AI expand the possibilities of flexible identity systems at an incredible rate.

But I am less convinced that our thinking around the people operating those systems has progressed. When we present a new identity to a client, perhaps we should spend more time showing how they are going to keep producing good work five years from now. Maybe identities should be measured by how capable the organisation becomes at making good creative decisions independently.

Because living brand identity systems are indeed living. And nothing living thrives without some continuous loving care.