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“The age of imperfection – why brands are embracing flaws as features”

In Italy, we argue endlessly about pasta shapes – whether rigatoni holds more sauce than penne, or if spaghetti should ever meet ragù.

But my grandmother once revealed to me a secret that cut through all that noise – minuzzaglia.

A humble mix of broken pasta pieces, once considered poor people’s food in old Neapolitan homes. No elegance, no uniformity, just scraps gathered together.

And yet, when she served it, it was a feast of surprises.

Every spoonful was different – ridges, curves, twists, smooth bites, a feast of textures and tastes. What looked imperfect was, in truth, a hidden luxury – one dish, infinite variations.

That day, I learned that imperfection is not the opposite of beauty. Sometimes, imperfection is alive, playful, and generous.

“Imperfection isn’t a lack – it’s a point of view.”

In that bowl of broken pasta, I first tasted a truth that later followed me into design – perfection is overrated.

I’ve spent most of my life working in design, and if there’s one thing I’ve grown suspicious of its perfection. Perfectly polished visuals. Perfectly balanced campaigns. Nice, yes. Safe, sure.

But just like a dish of pasta where every piece looks the same, safe never made anyone fall in love.

That’s why I hold onto a different idea: take the word imperfect. Now shift one small mark and create a space, and it becomes “I’m perfect.” Nothing added, nothing removed.

That apostrophe? That’s you! The perspective, the human touch, the spark that changes everything. That’s design in a nutshell – the power to reframe imperfection as meaning.

That tiny apostrophe opens a bigger conversation – how brands today are using imperfection not as a compromise, but as a strategy.

Imperfection as a way of thinking

Fashion designer Martin Margiela taught me that imperfection can be a philosophy. He flipped fashion inside out, showing seams, raw hems, and labels exposed.

His work was never about polish but about honesty, chaos, and wit. Margiela revealed what brands often hide: process, fragility, the unfinished. He showed that imperfection isn’t a lack. It’s a point of view.

Imperfection as sustainability

Patagonia expresses imperfection differently. For them, it’s about durability. Their jackets tell stories through patches, repairs, scars. They run ads that literally say “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” They remind us that imperfection is proof of life lived, of respect for resources, of responsibility.

I see Patagonia’s approach as radical honesty. They don’t pretend their products last forever or stay pristine. Instead, they embrace wear-and-tear as value.

A stain isn’t a flaw; it’s a memory. A patch isn’t a fix; it’s pride. In a market obsessed with the new, Patagonia’s imperfections become their strongest badge of authenticity. And they help you to keep it that way.

Imperfection as generosity

Too Good To Go takes imperfection and turns it into care. Meals that supermarkets would discard, portions that vary, surprises in the bag. Nothing polished, everything human.

Here imperfection becomes generosity, the simple act of saving food instead of wasting it.

Every imperfect meal tells a story: someone noticed, someone cared, someone chose to act. That small gesture transforms imperfection into a moral choice, a kindness made visible.

Imperfection as lifestyle

Then there’s Vans. No skater wants clean, perfect sneakers.

Perfection, in their world, holds no meaning. Shoes need scribbles, tape, torn soles. Every scrape is a badge of honour. The more battered, the better.

Vans built an entire lifestyle brand on this truth. They don’t sell pristine sneakers; they sell rebellion, chaos, and energy in motion.

Imperfection here is not just tolerated, it’s the very identity of the culture. I love how raw that is. Vans says, “Go ahead, ruin me.” That’s how I become yours.

Imperfection as nature

Aesop’s imperfection is quiet, almost meditative. Step into one of their stores, and nothing is standardised.

Uneven walls, rough textures, natural irregularities. No two spaces are the same. In a world of glossy sameness, Aesop creates environments that feel alive, tactile, and rooted.

Their philosophy is steeped in wabi-sabi – the beauty of the incomplete, the transient, the raw.

Walking into Aesop doesn’t feel like entering a branded machine; it feels like entering a space shaped by nature and humans alike, with respect for place, time, and imperfection.

Imperfection in process

My most personal encounter with imperfection came while filming a campaign for Baxter inside the Gipsoteca Antonio Canova.

The museum is filled with plaster prototypes of Canova’s sculptures, not flawless marbles, but works in progress, alive with motion and human touch. Standing among them, I felt electricity.

The prototypes carried more life than perfection ever could. Baxter understood this: the unfinished is not a flaw, it is a process. Imperfection carries honesty, momentum, and genius in motion.

Imperfection in living

A furniture catalogue is not a showroom. It’s a portrait. Most interior design brochures show flawless, staged homes, polished but lifeless.

For Zanotta, a different path was chosen – 12 real homes, belonging to architects, DJs, artists, lawyers. Full of objects, rituals, clutter, laughter, and love.

The only rule: move just one or two pieces to introduce a Zanotta object. That small act sparked a dialogue between design and life, elegance and reality. Even the shoot broke convention; flash captured immediacy, spontaneity, and the luxurious vitality of living.

Beauty is not in flawless display, but in conversation with life itself.

Imperfection in design

Even the most iconic brands carry imperfection in their very symbols. Take Apple – the logo is not a perfect apple; it has a bite taken out.

That bite is everything. It breaks symmetry, gives the mark a narrative, and makes it unforgettable. A flawless apple? Just an apple. The missing piece is what made it legendary.

When the myth of perfection fades, what remains are these imperfect gestures I choose to live by:

People over polish. The best logos feel like friends – familiar enough to trust, surprising enough to love.

Art, not just design. Design solves problems and art stirs the soul. Let feeling and poetry break the grid wide open.

Make a symbol. Not just a logo, but a living mark – a heartbeat, a song, a sketch. Strong enough to be remembered, gentle enough to smile back.

Designed to be redesigned. Nothing is sacred or fixed. Bend it, break it and let others redraw it. A system is alive only if it mutates

The smile factor. Because nothing disarms like joy. Design is braver when it smiles at you first.

When I see the word imperfect, I don’t see failure anymore.

I see Patagonia jackets with patched elbows. Vans shoes – torn and taped. Too Good To Go’s meals saved.

The apostrophe in “I’m perfect” is more than punctuation; it’s the reminder that what makes us human is what makes us matter. Here’s the truth I’ve come to believe – perfection is admired, but imperfection is loved.

Angelo Ferrara is creative director and partner at global brand design agency Robilant.

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How is Studio Dumbar using AI?

Studio Dumbar is a Dutch agency that works on strategy, branding, design and motion for clients like OpenAI, Instagram and the Utah Jazz. Here the studio, as a collective, tells us how they use AI, and how they feel about it.

You can see all the articles in this series here.

Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry, or nervous?

Definitely excited. We’ve always looked for ways to create outside our mainstream design software.

We have embraced motion and 3D early on, and we love finding interesting concepts using tools that are not specifically made for design. That is also the reason why we started using creative coding in our design process – so we could make our own tools, but also come to and embrace unexpected results.

Of course, there are things about AI that we need to solve before we fully welcome it, like ownership and claiming your own creative input while using i., But it opens so many more doors than it closes.

Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?

We are a part of DEPT®, and as such, we have a Digital Ethics Advisory Board to analyse the societal impact of our craft, to develop our perspective, to align results with our values and goals, and to collaborate with our clients in all matters related to AI.

Next to this we have global AI guardrails, which we check every time we want to use a new tool to make sure it’s safe. Lastly, we always ask our clients for their AI policies, to make sure we are sticking to those as well.

When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design?

Our first real introduction to AI was around 2018 when image-generation GANs came on the scene. It was before the current AI boom, and the quality and usability was nothing compared to what we are used to now.

Still, there was something magical about watching images appear that were drawn by a non-human. They carried a distinct aesthetic where one image would dissolve into another, which we wanted to replicate for a project we worked on at that time.

We never got it to work because the outcome was unpredictable and impossible to control. It needed immense training time – that we didn’t have.

The struggle with control is still there, but transformers have changed the scale and quality of what AI can do. The question is no longer about generation itself, but about how much ownership we hold over the results.

Have you undergone any AI training, either as a studio or individuals?

As a studio, we did not do any official AI training, but we definitely had work sessions where we all experimented with AI in image, video and sound generation, as well as vibe coding explorations.

Some people in the studio have a natural interest in AI and delve way deeper into how it works, and how we can apply it in our design process.

How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?

The obvious uses are there – brainstorming, generating images or video for early inspiration, or coding experiments that help us explore ideas quickly. We also use upscaling and editing tools to move faster and often to get better results than we could otherwise.

For all technologies we use in the studio, we believe the more you understand how it works, the better you can work with it.

So, using AI to speed things up is all fine. But to make actual strong work using AI, we either want enough control to shape the details exactly as we want, or treat the AI as a partner in the process.

This goes beyond typing a clever prompt and waiting for results. It’s about knowing how to push, guide, and play with the system until the work feels truly ours.

Do you think clients care if/how you use AI in your work?

Yes, most of our clients – around 80% – strictly forbid us to use AI in the end product, due to potential legal issues.

Even clients that are in AI themselves, as a business, often still want bespoke manual work that fits their question better. However, we also see more and more specific demand for AI-generated work, where the generation of images and video is part of the assignment.

What matters most to us is the final result. We don’t limit ourselves to one process, so if AI gives us something unique or impossible otherwise, we’ll embrace it when we have the chance.

Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running your business?

Yes, we use it to review quotes, check mails, analyse research and for investigative strategy work for new clients

Beyond the best known tools, what is one AI tool that you would recommend to other design studios?

We like tools where it still feels like we’re the ones steering, not just AI doing its thing.

For example Flora, where you can chain genAI models together and build images or videos in steps, feels closer to design work than just prompting 20 random variants and picking one.

Lately we’ve also been trying out training our own models and messing around with set-ups in Automatic1111 or ComfyUI. It’s about putting AI into our workflow, not turning the workflow over to AI.

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Contagious designs dot-dash bottle for feminist whisky FEDDIE

Contagious has created a striking bottle design for a Norwegian whisky brand funded entirely by women.

The Edinburgh and Glasgow-based studio created the brand world and packaging for FEDDIE, using design to capture and communicate the movement that drives the company.

It was, FEDDIE’s CEO Aina Lemoen Lunde explains, a challenging brief.

For a start, Norway has “the strictest alcohol legislation in the world when it comes to advertising,” so there is a lot of pressure on the product.

“You can’t really express the brand anywhere else, except from the packaging, which makes that space crucial,” Lunde explains.

Secondly, the distillery is located in Fedje, a remote island off the west coast of Norway. It takes Lunde ten hours, using train, car and ferry, to get there from her home in Oslo, but it’s worth the trip.

She says the “crazy wild beauty” of its home had to shape the brand, with a strong focus on sustainability, as did its relationship with the people who live there.

Contagious’ brand work for FEDDIE whisky

And thirdly the brand needed to communicate the gender politics behind founder Anne Koopang’s vision. Only women are allowed to invest in FEDDIE, in a bid to encourage more women to develop portfolios.

“Even though Norway is ranked as the most gender equal country in the world, 80% of the stock exchange is owned by men,” Lunde says. “The founder wanted to nudge more women to start funding companies. Today we have 1,000 – soon to be 1,200 – female investors, and they are a really important part of our identity.”

“It was certainly a challenge,” laughs Contagious’ creative director James Hartigan. He says the first phase of the work was to clarify the portfolio architecture, and to identify the core pillars of the brand.

“They were all there, but there wasn’t a clear framework,” he explains.

As the work developed, they also had to think about building Norwegian whisky as a category, both in its homeland, where it launched in 2023, and abroad. FEDDIE just last week launched in the UK, and is also available in Sweden and Switzerland.

The team visited Fedje, where the challenges facing the local community reminded them of the issues closer to home on the Scottish islands. But ultimately it was the investor angle they decided to hone in on.

“The island story didn’t really stand them apart, because they are lots of island spirits,” Hartigan says. “But there was a lot of strength in this idea of it being powered by women, especially in the spirits world.”

For the brand design, Hartigan says they wanted to stay “very true to the brand’s Nordic roots, to create something that felt very utilitarian, but also modern and progressive.”

Contagious’ bottle design for FEDDIE

The main target audience for the whisky is men, but they wanted to burnish the brand’s feminist credentials too.

“Sometimes with brands that are very forthright in saying that they’re female-owned, there is a misconception that they’re just for women,” Hartigan says, “We wanted to be very clear from the beginning that it wasn’t just for women – it’s for everyone.

“But we were quite steadfast in having the line, ‘Powered by women” on the packaging, knowing that that would be divisive to some people. If that was a problem to someone then fine, they’re not our people.”

To bring the brand story to life, the bottle features 750 dots, which was the number of investors at the time of production, and 521 dashes – one for every Fedje resident.

Detail of Contagious’ bottle design for FEDDIE

People often think the design references the movement of the waves, Hartigan says.

“But what we were actually trying to get across is the movement of FEDDIE, in terms of the women, and what it’s doing for the island.”

In the future, when the bottle mold needs to be renewed, these visual elements will be expanded to reflect the up-to-date numbers.

“We are committing the cause of the brand into the glass, into the actual fabric of the packaging,” Hartigan says. “Over time, these bottles will morph and grow as the brand morphs and grows as well.”

This texture also creates an immediate interest designed to catch shoppers’ attention. “It has to look beautiful,” Hartigan says. “Becasue as soon as you get someone to pick it up, you’ve won the battle. You need a sense of intrigue to draw people in, and then they can engage with all the storytelling.”

The design team also worked hard to ensure the product’s carbon footprint was as low as possible.

There’s an aluminium screw-top instead of a cork – because cork can cause issues in recycling chains – and they made the bottles as light as possible, even though that goes against the traditional luxury codes in premium spirits, where heavy glass signals quality.

The challenge was to combine these design elements, which are usually associated with cheap own-brand spirits, in an elegant and engaging way.

When it launched in Norway, FEDDIE sold out in two weeks, and this year sales are already up 50%. For Lunde, the packaging has been a key part of this initial success.

“It feels like everything falls into place,” she says. “They have managed to make the full story very intuitive for customers.”

Contagious’ brand work for FEDDIE whisky
The FEDDIE distillery

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