the future of brands

Apple, Nvidia, and OpenAI are all leaning into an ambient, multimodal future:

• Spatial Computing: Apple’s Vision Pro is just the start — digital information woven into the physical environment.


• Voice & Gesture: Interfaces are moving beyond glass screens to talk, glance, and movement.


• Proactive Agents: Systems that act without waiting for a typed qu

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The companies thinking furthest ahead are already prototyping for this world:

• Commerce will be conversational, not navigational.


• Brand interactions will be proactive, not reactive.


• The frontline of loyalty will be invisible.

In the ambient future, brands will compete not for screen real estate, but for mental bandwidth and emotional resonance.

“As with the rise of reality TV in the 2010s, personal disclosure became parasocial currency.”

If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.

“What happens when making an image and becoming one align?”

Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a ... See more

In CAPS LOCK , Ruben Pater traces the evolution of branding from livestock to slavery to mass-produced goods. Today it has obviously gone lightyears further, grooming every part of an experience that may not even be associated with a product you can hold in your hands. He writes: “Even a well-designed brand for a museum still uses the same logic of... See more

Good branding signals other things related to class and positionality – if an experience looks good, it’s because it was crafted at some point by a designer and a creative director who had the time, skills, and zeitgeist awareness to know what looks good (one of the founders of the swim club mentioned above is a graphic designer by trade, as an exa... See more

rather than observing and following online trends, brands are fully capable of creating their own, treating social media culture as its peer and equal, rather than a source of culture-mining. What it achieves is a kind of dignity that is hard to come by in the current climate of incessant algorithm-stroking. It reads as effortless, not desperate. (... See more