The Art of Everything: What if the Strongest Brands in 2026 aren’t Singular at all?

The Art of Everything: What if the Strongest Brands in 2026 aren’t Singular at all?

For decades, marketers and branding agencies have preached consistency like gospel. One logo. One typeface. One tone of voice. One tightly controlled version of the brand, rolled out everywhere, all the time. 

Consistency is seen as safety. As professionalism. As the antidote to confusion. And breathe ouuuuuut…..

But in 2026, a different branding question is quietly surfacing: what if consistency, as we’ve defined it, is no longer the point?

With excitement building in my hometown of LA toward the 2028 Olympics, it’s perhaps an opportune moment to pause and look at how brands really behave. 

The Olympics have always been a masterclass in shifting identity. Yes they all tie back to those iconic master rings, but this parent brand has endless, noisy children. 

Every host city introduces a new visual language, a new emblem, a new cultural lens—and yet the brand endures. Not despite the change, but because of it.

That logic can be found in some rare examples of mainstream branding.

Google’s ever-changing doodles. Nickelodeon’s anarchic splat era. MTV’s (RIP) endlessly reinterpreted logo. These brands didn’t abandon recognition; they softened the idea of a fixed mark. Identity became something flexible, responsive, and alive. 

More recently, the MIT Media Lab took this even further, generating hundreds of algorithmic logos that behave less like a badge and more like a living system.

In New York, the mark for The Whitney Museum stretches and morphs; but the mark for Visit Nordkyn (Norway’s tourism board) is this on steroids. It shifts and dynamically responds to live weather data (such as wind direction with speed, and temperature with colour) which is updated regularly, via an online generator. Superfuckingcool. 

Of course, all these brands have strong wordmarks (so a level of consistency) associated with them too—but at first glance—it still feels radical.

But, on reflection, perhaps it feels inevitable. Might we soon be seeing more?

Because brands today don’t live in stable environments. They live in feeds, interfaces, memes and moments. They’re jostled around in motion, extruded in 3D, squished on small screens and battered about in cultural conversations that shift daily. Culture now moves faster than brand guidelines ever could.

So it’s no surprise that marketers are asking for brands that can keep up. Brands that can respond to context, flex with culture, and show up differently across platforms without feeling like they’re repeating themselves. Multi-logo systems promise exactly that: flexibility, freshness, and a sense of cultural fluency.

But of course, there’s always a tension. Flexibility without strategy (or indeed a fixed grid) is just chaos with cooler typography.

Clients want brands that behave like ecosystems, not monolithic monuments. Marketing teams still need recognisable assets that perform at speed and scale. Performance still matters. Attention is still scarce. And simplicity, despite everything, still wins.

The risk with multi-logo systems isn’t that they change—it’s that they change without a centre or locus. When everything flexes, nothing anchors. We’ve all seen identities that look brilliant in theory but collapse in practice: systems that require endless explanation, campaign logos that don’t ladder up, brands that feel expressive yet strangely forgettable. My little graphic designer heart is palpitating anxiously at the very thought of it.

So the real question isn’t whether brands should have multiple logos. It’s how much flexibility a brand can afford before it starts leaking meaning.

This is where things get uncomfortable, because flexibility is hard to measure. You can track recall, conversion, and performance by asset. But how do you measure expressiveness? How do you calculate the ROI of cultural responsiveness or creative freedom? Mmm, exactly.

Faced with that uncertainty, many organisations retreat to what feels safe: a single master logo, locked down and immutable. But safety is increasingly starting to look like stagnation. The smarter move isn’t abandoning consistency—it’s redefining it.

Consistency doesn’t have to mean sameness. It can mean recognisability of intent. The strongest multi-logo systems aren’t random; they’re rule-based. They’re built around clear principles—shape, movement, tone, attitude—that remain constant even as the surface expression changes. Think less “one logo everywhere” and more “one idea, many expressions”.

Perhaps we should think of it closer to jazz than classical music. The melody holds, even when the solos stretch.

For agencies, this shift challenges something deeper than visual identity. It challenges authorship. We were trained to design finished things, to deliver definitive answers, to control outcomes. Multi-logo systems don’t behave like that. They require brands to participate rather than present, and to adapt rather than consistently repeat.

As generative tools and adaptive systems become more common, control gives way to orchestration. Agencies are no longer just designing logos; we’re designing conditions. Frameworks. Guardrails. Ways for the brands we put out into the world to evolve without unraveling.

That demands a different mindset. It means letting go of perfection. Trusting systems. Accepting that brands, like culture, are never truly finished.

So are multi-logo systems the future of branding? Well, um, not necessarily. If they’re rooted in strategy, have a clear centre of gravity and are designed to be used, not just admired—then this could be a very enthusiastic and exciting YES.

But when flexibility becomes a substitute for clarity, they fail fast.

The strongest brands in 2026 won’t be the most expressive or indeed even the most rigid. 

They’ll be the ones that know exactly what must stay the same — and what can change without breaking trust. Because the goal isn’t to build brands that endlessly reinvent themselves. It’s to build brands that can move, adapt, and respond, without losing who they are.

That’s not inconsistency. That’s maturity. It will be interesting to see how the Olympics’ 34th Angeleno child will come of age.

Cat How is Founder & ECD at branding agency How&How. She is Jury President at the D&AD 2026 Awards and lives in Los Angeles.

This article was originally published in The Drum.