Juicebox at Perth Design Week

As part of Perth Design Week 2025, our Creative Director Pete Sampson had the opportunity to talk about a concept that is shaping the way brands are built, managed, and experienced today:

Your Brand Is a System

This isn’t a new idea—brands have always functioned as systems, whether we recognised it or not. But the way we create, engage with, and experience brands has evolved drastically. In an increasingly digital world, brands are becoming more systematic at every step, whether through design, communication, or technology.

And yet, despite all these advancements, one thing remains unchanged: the power of branding lies in emotion, culture, and human experience. The challenge we now face is how to maintain that authenticity while embracing new tools, platforms, and technologies that push branding into the future.

We’re now seeing ‘generative interfaces’ challenge the way we design for digital—forcing us to move from a mindset of a single experience for all to individual experiences generated on-the-fly. Our interactions with AI are shifting from a chatbox in the bottom-right corner to be seamlessly integrated into our websites and apps.

We’re used to seeing AI respond to our prompts with more text, but what if it could curate digital components and interface elements to better frame that content for the user? How do we prepare our brand systems so we trust AI as a creative partner rather than a rogue agent bringing inconsistency and muddled thinking?

Good Systems vs Bad Systems

As we embrace systematic brand management, it’s important to recognise that not all systems are designed well.

Some systems create structure, while others create friction.
Some systems encourage creativity, while others restrict it.
Some systems evolve naturally, while others become outdated.

Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System designed by Dieter Rams in 1960 is an example of a well-designed system that’s simple, modular, beautiful, and high quality. It’s an adaptable, flexible system that still sets the standard for shelving systems sixty years later.

Systems have been a rich area of exploration for artists who have embraced constraints to stimulate their creativity—often relinquishing creative control over to a system. They become architects of that system more than creators of static outputs. This is an area that’s particularly relevant as brands have become increasingly systematic, through mechanisation, digitisation, and now with AI.

Postmodern writers Georges Perec and B.S. Johnson explored and exposed narrative structures in their writing, deliberately imposing constraints on themselves (Perec wrote a novel without using the letter E) or removing regular structures (Johnson wrote a novel with loose chapters placed in a box—inviting the reader into the creative process).

Avant-garde composer John Cage was deeply influenced by the I Ching (Book of Changes), using it as a tool for chance operations in his music and artistic process. The I Ching’s system of random generation aligned with his desire to remove personal preference from composition, letting chance dictate musical decisions such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics.

A well-designed brand system should enhance creativity rather than limit it. It should allow brands to evolve without losing coherence. Constraints can be limiting—but they can also be liberating.

Complexity Demands Simplicity

As branding becomes more systematic, it also becomes more complex. Brands today must function seamlessly across:

Websites, mobile apps, and digital platforms.
Social media, video content, and interactive experiences.
AI-driven customer interactions and automated brand touchpoints.

With so many moving parts, complexity can feel overwhelming. But here’s the paradox: complexity demands simplicity.

The more intricate a brand system becomes, the more important it is to design for clarity, usability, and efficiency. This is why modern branding isn’t just about defining how a brand looks—it’s about designing how a brand works.

Designing for Digital: A Systematic Approach

As digital experiences become central to how brands are experienced, the way we design brands is evolving.

In the past, brand assets were often treated as finalised designs—fixed layouts that dictated exactly how a logo, website, or campaign should appear. But today, this approach no longer works. Instead, branding must be modular—built from reusable components and flexible templates that can be adapted across different platforms.

A component-based approach to branding means:

Thinking in systems rather than individual designs.
Creating flexible building blocks that can be reconfigured.
Ensuring consistency while allowing room for evolution.

The power of design systems lies in their foundational structure, using the principles of atomic design to break everything down to the core building blocks and ensuring a consistent connection between those elements as they are grouped into larger components.

This approach makes it simple to make changes at the foundational level and see those changes push across the entire system. We see this play out with features like enabling dark mode or adapting to languages that read from right to left—all at the touch of a button.

This component-based approach also helps to bridge the gap between design and development, allowing teams to work more efficiently while maintaining a brand’s integrity.

Knowledge as a Brand Asset

Our brand systems are made up of assets (logos, colours, typefaces, imagery) and rules (guidelines, principles, tone of voice, motion). And we’re now building these into structured design systems for consistent digital experiences. We also need to consider the content we create (products, articles, events, videos) as a part of our brand system, feeding back into a dynamic, evolving system.

But if we are to trust AI to create experiences on our behalf then we need to start seeing our brand’s knowledge as a core part of that system. AI is hungry for data, and the better informed it is, the better its output is. The more internal knowledge we can feed into it, the more it can understand about our brand, and the more we can trust it as a partner.

From Brand Systems to Brand Operating Systems

What happens when AI understands a brand as a system?

If AI can interpret brand knowledge then it can do more than just automate content and generate interfaces—helping on the front stage of our brands. It can also ideate, strategise, and plan, becoming an internal knowledge worker—helping out back stage.

This is where the idea of a Brand Operating System (BrandOS) comes into play. Instead of rigid guidelines, brands could have intelligent systems that:

Generate AI-powered content that aligns with brand identity.
Adapt branding across multiple platforms instantly.
Assist in strategic decision-making, ensuring alignment with the brand’s core values.

AI isn’t just a tool for execution—it’s becoming a co-pilot in the creative process.

The Role of Emotion and Human Experience

At the heart of branding, beyond all the systems, frameworks, and technologies, lies one undeniable truth: The power of branding lies in emotion, culture, and human experience.

No matter how systematic branding becomes, we should never lose sight of what truly makes it meaningful—its ability to connect with people.

We are moving towards a future where brand experiences are increasingly generated, personalised, and automated. But the brands that succeed will be the ones that use these systems not just for efficiency, but for creating genuine, memorable connections.

As we continue this journey, the challenge is clear:

How do we design brand systems that allow for both consistency and creativity?
How do we embrace AI and automation without losing the human touch?
How do we ensure that branding remains adaptive, meaningful, and relevant in a constantly changing world?

These are the questions we must explore as branding continues to evolve.