Why Logos Are Getting Weird Again (And Who's Leading It)

Screens Killed Flat Design (It Just Took a While to Show)

For a long time, flat design made sense. Clean edges and simple shapes reproduced reliably across different formats, loaded quickly, and gave brands a sense of modern confidence. It was optimised for a world of print, desktop websites, and relatively static digital environments.

That world no longer exists.

A logo today lives on a loading screen, an app icon, a YouTube bumper ad, a Reel, a smartwatch face, and a billboard simultaneously. It needs to animate, morph, scale, catch light, and hold attention in contexts that simply didn't exist when minimalism became the default.

Flat design doesn't behave well in motion. A simple two-colour mark on a white background looks dated the moment it tries to do anything. Dimensionality, texture, and depth,  the very things flat design stripped out are exactly what make a logo work when it moves.

Designers have known this for years. As Roy Terhorst of Amsterdam studio Thonik told The Brand Identity: "When you start from motion, there's more space to explore new angles. It gives a sense of spatial freedom — you can literally look at different perspectives, create edits, give typography and shapes behaviours, and arrive at more surprising possibilities."

The result is a generation of brand identities that are built to move first, and look good standing still second.

AI Changed What's Possible Before Anyone Noticed

The other force reshaping logo design is less visible but arguably more significant.

AI tools haven't replaced designers. What they've done is collapse the cost of experimentation. Testing 50 directions for a logo identity, including animated and dimensional versions, once required weeks of studio time and a significant budget. Now it doesn't.

That shift matters because experimentation is where unusual ideas get made. When the risk of trying something bold drops, more bold things get tried. Brands that previously defaulted to safe and simple because exploration was expensive now have the option to go somewhere more interesting.

This is showing up in the work. Motion concepts get tested earlier. Texture and dimensionality get explored before anything is finalised. According to Design Sphere analysis of the top logo design trends for 2026, AI-assisted design sits alongside motion-first branding as one of the defining shifts reshaping brand identity, not because it replaces human creativity, but because it accelerates the path from idea to execution.

For smaller brands and agencies especially, this is levelling a playing field that was previously tilted heavily toward those with the biggest budgets.

The Brands Already Doing It

Netflix — When the Logo Becomes the Experience

Netflix is perhaps the clearest case of a brand where motion is the identity.

The static "N" mark is recognisable, but it's not really what Netflix is. The ta-dum sound, the ribbon animation on load, the way content transitions and fills the screen,  these are the brands. The logo exists to anchor the experience, not carry it alone.

This is motion-first branding taken to its logical conclusion. The mark is designed to move, and everything around it is designed to reinforce a feeling, premium, cinematic, immediate. When you see that red ribbon animate, you know exactly where you are.

Spotify — Bold Enough to Get It Wrong

In 2026, Spotify did something most brands wouldn't dare. For their 20th anniversary campaign — "Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s)" — they swapped their iconic green logo for a glittering disco ball. No half measures.

The timing was calculated. Drake had just dropped three albums simultaneously (Iceman, Habibti, Maid of Honour), claiming the top three spots on the Billboard 200 and breaking Spotify's single-day streaming record in the process. The platform was already the centre of a cultural moment. The disco ball leaned into that energy.

Users were divided. Some loved it. Others called it cluttered and distracting. The logo came back the following week, as planned from the start.

And that's the point. Spotify knew it was temporary. They did it anyway. Because a brand that's been around for 20 years and still willing to replace its logo with a disco ball isn't playing it safe, it's reminding you it's still alive.

Google — Systematic Evolution at Scale

Google's approach is different from the others, and in some ways more interesting because of the scale involved.

In May 2026, Google announced via the Google Workspace Blog that it was rolling out a fresh visual identity across the entire Workspace suite: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Chat, and more. The stated aim was to give every app "a more distinct identity" while driving "consistency and cohesion across the product suite."

That's a different kind of challenge to what Netflix or Spotify are doing. Google isn't just evolving a single mark, they're managing a visual ecosystem across dozens of products used by billions of people. Every icon needs to feel like it belongs to the same family while remaining instantly distinguishable from everything else.

The result is a logo system built for the modern screen: richer, more expressive, and designed to remain recognisable at the size of a phone notification dot and the scale of a conference room display simultaneously.

Motion Branding Is the New Standard, Not the Exception

We'll use ourselves as an example here.

Our logo is cursive. And when you land on our website, you're not greeted with a static mark sitting in the corner, the word lala runs across the screen, repeating, flowing, alive. lalalalalala. It's not decoration. It's the brand doing what it was designed to do.

That decision wasn't accidental. A cursive logo already carries movement in its letterforms, the natural flow from one letter to the next is motion waiting to happen. Building a website that lets it actually happen wasn't a complicated brief. It was the obvious one.

That's the shift happening across brand design right now. The question is no longer what does the logo look like? What does the logo do? How does it behave when someone first arrives? What does it communicate in the half-second before anyone has read a single word?

The brands winning on this aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who thought about motion at the start, not as an afterthought once the static version was signed off.

If your logo only works standing still, it's only working half the time.