Design thrives on the thrill of the new. So what happens when a studio is asked to work on a brief again, and again, and again?
These “returning briefs” ask creatives to revisit the same event, festival, or framework, year after year – tasked with delivering something recognisably on-brand, and yet entirely new.
But how do you sustain creativity when the parameters stay mostly consistent? Where’s the line between evolution and repetition? And what does long-term collaboration reveal about the creative process itself?
Few studios know that tension better than From Form, who have designed the campaign for Amsterdam Museum Night for five years in a row.
What began as a single commission has evolved into a creative partnership, and a kind of annual ritual. Each year, the Rotterdam-based studio is asked to reinvent the look and spirit of a night that celebrates the city’s museums, without repeating itself or breaking what already works.
When they crafted the 2021 campaign, the studio introduced the idea of a flipbook as a vessel for storytelling. This concept evolved through the years and culminated in the 2023 campaign titled DIT DAT, DAAR (This, That, There).
From Form’s 2023 campaign for Amsterdam Museum Night, titled DIT DAT, DAAR (This, That, There)
The flipbook – filled with images of the city’s museums and their objects, and plastered with 500 custom stickers – became the star of the show. But last year, the team chose to retire it, and wipe the slate clean.
“That felt truly refreshing,” says Ashley Govers, co-founder and creative director.
Under the surface of each chapter, the studio has built a visual lexicon that endures.
“We believe we’ve crafted a Museum Night universe over the years – a language that speaks in colour, imagination, and rhythmic movement,” says co-founder and creative director Jurjen Versteeg.
The Collector’s Edition, From Form’s 2025 campaign for Amsterdam Museum Night
Texture was key to this vocabulary, as was the analogue warmth From Form has become known for, both threads now re-emerging in the 2025 campaign, The Collector’s Edition.
To mark Museum Night’s 25th anniversary, the team returned to the idea at the heart of every museum – collecting.
The campaign celebrates that notion by treating Museum Night itself as “a collection of collections,” since the event brings together dozens of museums, each with its own archives, objects, and stories, into a single, citywide experience.
To flesh out the visual world, From Form looked to the 1990s, the decade the event began, and an era synonymous with collector culture.
They wanted the theme of collecting to feel approachable rather than academic. “When you think of a museum as a carefully preserved collection, it can feel quite overwhelming,” Versteeg explains. “But we wanted to make collecting more accessible than that.”
So instead of focusing on institutions and archives, the campaign draws from the simple joy of 1990s collector culture – Flippos, Tamagotchis, Happy Meal toys, football cards – the everyday treasures that anyone could covet and trade.
The Collector’s Edition marks a continuation of a collaboration that keeps finding new ways to resonate.
Each year’s work strengthens the client’s trust, and with that trust comes greater pressure from within the studio to deliver something unexpected.
Yet that repetition has its upside – familiarity with the brief has evolved into creative fluency, giving the team the confidence to keep pushing ideas further each year.
“Working on something that returns each year means building a long-term relationship, not only with the client, but with the project itself,” says Versteeg.
The Collector’s Edition, From Form’s 2025 campaign for Amsterdam Museum Night
“You get to know its character, its rhythm, and what feels right for it. That familiarity brings confidence, but also the challenge of keeping things fresh and surprising yourself. With a one-off project, you define, create, and let go; a recurring one feels more like a conversation that evolves over time.
“Each edition adds a new layer, pushing you to see it from new angles every year.”
With this familiarity comes a shared language, and with trust, the space to take creative risks without second-guessing every move.
“Instead of presenting multiple options, we deliver a single vision each year,” says Rabbithole’s creative director, Tim Dee, describing the studio’s approach to its ongoing work for the Leeds International Festival of Ideas (LIFI).
Rabbithole’s identity for LIFI 2025
Since the partnership began in 2021, the Leeds-based team has been crafting identities that unpack both the complexity and the vibrancy of LIFI – which unites thinkers, writers, creatives, and experts across science, technology, politics, and culture – while striking the right chord every year.
As the relationship has matured, so too has the narrative core of each edition, evolving in step with the festival itself.
“Five years ago, the themes leaned more scientific and highbrow, which we realised risked feeling too academic and less welcoming to the diverse audience the festival wanted to reach,” says Dee. “Since then, the art direction has steadily become more accessible and fun, creating a much broader appeal.”
Rabbithole’s 2024 identity for LIFI centred on abstract metallic faces
It’s true. In 2024, Rabbithole created a suite of metallic faces that mirrored the audience’s expressions seen in the festival’s footage – an idea that immediately landed with clarity and impact.
Building on that success, the 2025 edition introduces a gang of “squidgems” – cherubic, balloon-like characters.
“Although our client trusts and accepts our reasoning for changing the identity each year, there can still be a natural reluctance to move on from something that has worked so well,” says strategy director Mark Martin.
Rabbithole’s identity for LIFI 2025
“This year’s campaign, therefore, became more of an evolution than a complete departure. We chose to build on what made the 2024 faces so impactful, while still introducing something new. The squidgems strike that balance – both a continuation of what audiences especially connected with last year, and a fresh direction.”
Giving the squidgems ears, legs, and a fuller anatomical form opened up playful new possibilities. They can now take on collective behaviours that bring them to life, whether that’s gathering in herds, or lining up for a conga.
While every edition must feel fresh, a recurring brief isn’t a licence for unfettered experimentation.
Rabbithole’s identity for LIFI 2025
To keep each chapter connected to the one before and after it, certain anchors stay fixed, giving everything else room to evolve.
Across LIFI’s identities, a few pillars remain the same – the logo, the typeface, the bright pink hero hue, as well as the 3D artistry of Joseph Töreki, who returns as a collaborator each year.
This gives the work its stylistic continuity, while the thematic art direction brings constant motion.
Continuity, then, becomes less of a limitation and more of a language – one that lets studios retain tone, rhythm and philosophy, while freely changing the visual vocabulary.
But sustaining a language year after year demands systems and rituals, and not just inspiration. Creativity, at scale, depends on the steady architecture of process.
STUDIO HERRSTRÖM’s rebrand for Spotify’s Front Left
STUDIO HERRSTRÖM has been putting this philosophy into practice through its long-running collaboration with Spotify, developing more than 30 playlist brands to date.
The project subtly reframes what a returning brief can be – not the evolution of one identity over time, but the repeated challenge of building new ones within the same creative structure, across vastly different cultural contexts.
Though every commission begins from the same premise – design a brand for a playlist – the studio treats each as a cultural problem to solve. Guided by its THE ECHO design framework, the studio immerses itself in the world of each playlist, uncovering local references, histories, and visual codes, before ever putting pencil to paper.
“Because the foundation changes each time – different audience, region, genre, local visual codes – each playlist earns its own visual logic,” says founder and creative director Eric Herrström.
As distinctive as they are, each playlist must still operate within Spotify’s global design ecosystem, a structure that connects them through shared principles of clarity, hierarchy, and recognisability.
STUDIO HERRSTRÖM’s identity for Aquarela Brasileira
This underlying order binds the work together, even as the studio stretches its expressive potential.
“Our freedom lives in texture, custom lock-ups, application, cultural motifs, local visual references, and colour combinations,” says Herrström.
“We’ve pushed in areas like custom graphic systems, hand-drawn illustrations, or 3D graphics, and culturally tied patterns, while always still respecting the Spotify framework.”
When working on the identity for the Top México playlist – a collection of the country’s biggest tracks – this act of cultural mining led the team to an image of a sarape de Saltillo, a traditional textile known for its bright colours and layered lines.
A symbol of national pride, cultural heritage, and craftsmanship, the textile not only served as a conceptual goldmine, but its weave also lent itself to graphic interpretation.
STUDIO HERRSTRÖM’s identity for Top México
“Everything clicked when we realised we could use the line thicknesses to reflect the vast diversity of artists and music that’s featured on the playlist,” says Herrström. The colour-blocked lines, which move and shift in motion, became the structural backbone of the visual system.
As Herrström explains, it’s this process of narrative discovery that keeps the work from repeating itself.
Grounded in cultural insight, the team avoids slipping into stylistic reflex, and with each success, that clarity feeds confidence.
“It gives us permission to push further,” says Herrström. “Because we’ve proven we can do meaningful and culturally attuned work, we also dare to present directions that we may not have considered earlier.
“In that sense, our long-term partnership has made the work much better.”
Behind the work’s consistency and success is a clear conviction that inspiration alone can’t sustain creativity over time; process is what keeps it alive.
“You can’t rely on moodboards,” says Herrström. “You need a rigorous structure, team discipline, and relentless curiosity about context. By systematising how we approach each project and always starting fresh, we preserve creative vitality even under repetition.”
Source