7 changes in brand world-building

Happy Thursday.

Seven brand surfaces the style guide doesn't cover. We argue about them live today, 1 PM PT.

Runway put out Solaris on Monday. It's a world model that generates the interface frame by frame, in real time. It’s hard to wrap my head around.

But it got me thinking: if a model can stream your UI, how might your brand book evolve?

Ridd and I aren't brand designers. We hire them. So for today’s livestream, we got a bunch of people who do this for a living to weigh in.

Join us live on Dive Radio at 1PM today (and vote for this week’s Designer of the Week).

– Tommy (@designertom)

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Seven evolutions for brand guides

I’ve built brands and products that win in the market through storytelling. And as I’ve been creating media and software, I’ve noticed some new patterns in brand world-building.

With social media came a number of new brand book additions. I think we’re going to see a few more, and I wanted to share a few of the reasons why.

1. Interfaces get generated, not coded. That's Anastasis Germanidis's line for Solaris. World Labs did the same thing for 3D space this week with Atlas: a multimodal world model with pixel-perfect camera control and 3D reconstruction.

2. Portfolios become places. Pablo Stanley doodled a walkable world and made it his portfolio. Thijs turned San Francisco into a playable game out of Apple Maps data. You walk around in these. And your palette has nothing to say about what happens when somebody turns left.

3. Audiences write the next scene. Peter Levels put up Infinite Slop, an AI livestream where the chat decides what happens next. It runs on Fal's fine-tune of MiniMax H3 (they're calling it Max), 50x faster than the base model, which is the only reason the chat can steer live. Glitch does the same thing for anybody: you stream, the audience decides. So now your brand has to hold up while strangers are driving it.

4. A five-minute cartoon in fifteen minutes. Levan one-shot a five-minute cartoon in fifteen minutes with H3 Max and Opus 5 and called it: "cartoons are solved." I'd push back on "solved." But at this speed, how your stuff moves and how long an emotion holds is part of the identity now, same as your logomark.

5. Sound is brand. Every brand guide skips it, and a live show can't, so Perpleixty’s Escha Vera and my co-host Ridd's are digging into this one today.

6. Mixed media has to land in a product. This one's mine, and I’m seeing it often. Every brand I've paid for, I've had to bring to life in a site, a stream overlay, a thumbnail, a film, an easter egg in a game.

7. The toolkit is free and tiny. Brett from DesignJoy put the Playgrnd beta up yesterday. 32 tiny free tools, no signup, animate in one click, dither, SVG export. All-in-one of the micro-tools designers are building. Brand engineering is turning into a pile of little tools you open in a tab. Brett walks us through it today.

There are two buckets here:

1. 1 through 4 are surfaces a model or a crowd controls.

2. 5 through 7 are surfaces a studio controls but there aren’t many guides for (unless you’re Jamey Gannon, who joins us today as well).

So then: what stays the same and what changes in brand world-building?

How to Engineer a Brand Universe

I’m looking forward to hearing from some of the best in the business about how they’re engineering brand universes:

• Myles Palmer (Metalab)

• Mike Smith (Smith & Diction), fresh off the Calendly rebrand

• Escha Vera (Perplexity)

• Amy and Jen Hood (Hoodzpah)

• Nick Pattison (Primary)

• Brett from Designjoy

Ridd's taking sound, I'm taking mixed media into product, and if you've got a mark that broke inside your UI, bring it to the chat.

Watch live on YouTube, Today at 1 PM PST →

See you there,

Tommy