Award-Winning Branding Is Getting Less Perfect. Good.

I spend a lot of time looking at branding.

After enough years in design, you start recognizing the formulas very quickly. Premium brand? Elegant serif. Technology company? Geometric sans serif. Wellness brand? Soft beige, gentle photography and something resembling a leaf.

Everything is beautifully executed. Everything is strategically justified. And occasionally, everything is painfully boring.

That is why I found this year's Brand Impact Award winners interesting. Creative Bloq announced the results on September 23 after 41 shortlisted projects from 29 agencies were judged across the competition.

Looking through the winners, I noticed something encouraging. Some personality is coming back.

We Became Too Good at Making Brands Behave

Modern branding systems are incredibly sophisticated.

We have responsive logos, digital design systems, motion guidelines, photographic principles, illustration libraries, tone-of-voice documents and enough templates to ensure nobody in marketing ever moves a headline four pixels without permission.

This solved a real problem. Large brands need consistency. But somewhere along the way, consistency became control. Everything started behaving perfectly.

And when everything behaves perfectly, things can become strangely forgettable.

A brand is not a military formation. Occasionally something should move out of line.

The Winning Work Feels More Alive

One of the Gold winners, Dash Water's “Refreshingly Good” identity by Magpie Studio, deliberately avoids the obvious visual language of the category.

Instead of predictable fruit photography and functional health messaging, the identity creates illustrated worlds based around water: oceans, rain, sunlight and quiet lakes. The illustrations use loose, handcrafted linework with visible imperfections.

That sounds like a small detail. It isn't. Those imperfections tell you someone made a decision. The identity could have been cleaner. They chose not to make it cleaner. That distinction matters.

Imperfection Has Become a Design Tool

For decades, digital tools pushed design toward perfection. We could align everything exactly. Smooth every edge. Correct every photograph. Make every curve mathematically beautiful. Naturally, designers did.

Now perfection is available almost instantly, so imperfection has started carrying more meaning.

Designer Daily's 2026 packaging analysis points to the same movement, describing handwritten typography, ink illustration, physical textures and handcrafted irregularities appearing as a deliberate reaction to automated visual production.

I do not think this means we are going to start deliberately designing badly. There is a difference between imperfection and incompetence.

A crooked line can feel human. Bad kerning is still bad kerning.

Sorry.

Even AI Branding Is Becoming More Physical

One of the more interesting Silver winners is Squarespace's Blueprint AI – Human Powered, created with ManvsMachine.

Instead of presenting AI as futuristic magic, the film traces the creation of a website back to a designer's sketchbook. Illustrations, typography and environmental elements were built in-house, combining practical effects with 3D animation.

I like the contradiction.

An AI product explained through physical craft. That feels much more interesting than another glowing interface surrounded by particles.

We have enough particles.

Good Branding Needs Something You Can Describe

There is a simple test I like. Can I describe the identity without mentioning the logo?

If the answer is no, the system may not have enough personality. Think about strong brands. You remember behavior. Color. Photography. Sound. Writing. Motion. Attitude.

The logo is important, obviously.

But the identity needs to survive without somebody constantly holding the logo in front of your face. That is when branding starts becoming a language rather than a badge.

My Take

I think branding spent too long trying to become perfectly systematic. We needed systems. But then the systems became the work.

The 2026 Brand Impact winners suggest the pendulum is moving somewhere healthier. Systems are still there. The craft is still there. But there is more room for illustration, motion, physical texture, strange ideas and imperfect details.

In other words, more room for designers. I am very comfortable with that direction.