Is studio branding getting more flexible? With Frontify, we go behind the scenes at three studios

Welcome to The Shift, a series presented in collaboration with one of the world’s leading brand-building platforms, Frontify. Here, we’ll dive deep into the realm of flexible, dynamic branding. We’ll be tapping into the sharpest minds in design – from visionary studios to leading independent designers – to understand what it takes to build a dynamic identity. For chapter five, we look at the swelling wave of design studios adopting fluid, flexible identities for themselves, defying the long-standing thought that a studio’s identity should hide behind the quality of its work. Why are studios leaning towards expressive identities that turn the lens towards them? And what do these identities tell us about the changing landscape of studio branding? We picked the brains of the teams at MullenLowe, NOT Wieden+Kennedy and Mother Design to find some answers. For many of us, it might have been hard not to come across MullenLowe’s global rebrand. The company’s reimagined octopus, in all its moving, shifting glory, has caught many eyeballs. In many ways, the company’s rebrand began with the octopus itself, which, for many at MullenLowe, seemed outdated. When the project began – initially not meant as a global rebrand but as an opportunity to unify MullenLowe’s three offices in LA, New York, and Boston – the team quickly realised that the octopus couldn’t be abandoned completely. “It didn’t take long to realise that, with just a bit of rethinking, the octopus was actually the perfect symbol for what the agency could become,” Head of Design João Paz tells us. “The more we explored it, the more we saw how naturally it aligned with the future of the agency. The octopus isn’t just fluid and adaptable – it literally rewrites its own genetic code to survive. That idea became the foundation for the new identity – a brand that evolves in real time, just like the creature that represents it.”