When a brand outgrows its system

Every brand I have worked on for more than two years eventually outgrows the system I designed for it. This is not a failure. It is what happens when a small business does well, and the system that was right for ten people on one floor stops being right for forty people on three.

The signs are usually quiet, then loud.

The quiet signs come first. Marketing starts using a typeface that wasn’t in the original kit, because the original kit had no italic display weight and the new campaign needs one. The hex code for “primary blue” begins drifting, because three different freelancers have all been picking it from a screen reference rather than a tokenised value. Someone on the team uses an icon set that does not match the existing iconography, because the existing iconography did not include the thing they needed to show.

These are not problems on their own. They are signals. The system was sized for the work the company was doing two years ago, and the work has expanded.

The loud signs come later. The website starts to feel inconsistent across sections, because different teams have built different sections at different times. The logo has acquired several “versions” for “different contexts”. Pitch decks no longer feel like the website. The internal Slack thread about “should the wordmark be all caps for this lockup” has run to thirty messages.

When this is happening, the temptation is to commission a redesign. Sometimes that is the right move. Often it is not. A redesign starts a new system from scratch, which means absorbing the cost of unfamiliarity all over again, while leaving the underlying problem (the system was not designed to grow) unaddressed.

The better move, most of the time, is to extend the system rather than replace it. This means going back to the original brief and asking, in good faith, what the system was designed to do and what it now needs to do as well. The answer is usually a smaller list than people fear. A new italic. A defined secondary palette. A clarified rule for how the wordmark works at small sizes. An icon system that is properly versioned and owned by one person.

The work on extension is less glamorous than redesign work and harder to sell. Designers tend to prefer redesigns because they are easier to publicise. Clients tend to prefer redesigns because they look like a fresh start. Both are mostly wrong. A system that grows with the company is more valuable to the company than a system that is replaced every three years, however many design awards the replacements collect.

The exception, worth naming. When the company itself has materially changed. A new audience, a new market, a new product category, a meaningful merger. Then the question is not whether the brand has outgrown its system but whether the brand is even the same brand. That is a different conversation, and a different post.

The brand identity systems I most respect for handling this kind of growth gracefully: Mailchimp’s evolution under Collins, the Pentagram-led repositioning of Slack, and Stockholm Design Lab’s long-running work for Aesop. All three are systems that have been extended over years rather than replaced.