Don't build your brand on whatever's hot right now

There's this thing that happens every few years in design. A trend catches fire. Everyone sees it. Everyone wants it. And suddenly, every deck, every website, every rebrand looks like it came from the same fever dream.

Right now, maybe it's those AI-generated gradient meshes. Or brutalist typography that looks like it's screaming at you. Or whatever microtrend is burning through Twitter this week. And I get it. It looks fresh. It looks now. You want your brand to feel current.

But here's what nobody tells you: building your brand on a trend is like building your house on sand. It feels solid until it isn't.

Remember when everything went flat? When Apple killed the drop shadow and suddenly every designer on earth was scrambling to flatten everything like we were all preparing for the apocalypse? Before that, it was glossy buttons. Everything looked wet. Like someone had sneezed on the internet. Now everything is about liquid glass again.

Trends come and go.

Go look at a website from 2005. You can tell exactly when it was made. Not because it's bad design, some of it was genuinely good for its time. But because it's so married to that specific moment that it can't exist outside of it. It's a time capsule.

That's what happens when you chase trends. You're not designing a brand. You're designing a timestamp.

I've been doing this for thirteen years. I've watched trends rise and fall like empires. And the brands that survive? They're not the ones that looked coolest in 2015. They're the ones that still make sense in 2025.

Here's what works: build your core identity on something timeless. Something that represents what you actually stand for, not what's hot on X this month. Focus on clarity. On distinction. On looking like yourself instead of looking like right now.

Then, and this is where it gets interesting, take all that experimental energy and pour it into your campaigns.

Marketing campaigns are meant to be temporary. They're supposed to live for a few months and then disappear. They're the perfect playground for trends. You can be bold. You can be weird. You can tap into whatever's happening culturally right now without handcuffing your entire brand to it.

Look at Nike. The swoosh has been the same since 1971. That core identity hasn't changed. But their campaigns? They're constantly evolving. They play with new styles, new cultural moments, new visual languages. They get to be relevant and timeless because they know where to be permanent and where to be flexible.

Your brand identity is the truth. It's the foundation. And once you've got it right, you don't blow it up every time Pantone announces a new color of the year.

But your campaigns? That's where you get to play. That's where you can be of-the-moment without your entire identity depending on that moment lasting forever.

I've designed for airlines that needed to feel trustworthy for decades. For startups that needed to feel fresh right now. For rock festivals that needed to capture a specific cultural second. The ones that worked weren't the ones that tried to look like 2023 or 2024 or whatever year we're in. They were the ones that looked like themselves, clearly and consistently, while their campaigns did the heavy lifting of staying culturally relevant.

So yeah, I'll help you build a brand that lasts. Something that won't make you cringe in three years when the trends have moved on. Something that's so clearly you that it can't go out of style because it was never in style to begin with.. it just was.

And then we can go wild on the campaigns. We can chase trends. We can experiment. We can tap into whatever's happening right now. Because that's what campaigns are for.

Your brand is your foundation. Your campaigns are your wardrobe. One stays consistent. The other changes with the seasons.

Know the difference, and you'll never look dated.