Brands have almost always been static—no change of a logo or a tagline unless a designer was at hand, ready to revitalize a dying or incompetent identity—and the thought of dynamic, changing designs hasn’t been seen as a viable idea. MTV was a forerunner; the different styles and funky textures applied to the channel’s logo gave it a culture that fit its young, music loving demographic. Recently AWARD (an Australian organization) got its own constantly changing look:

The logo is comprised of numerous dots, each dot representing a member of the organization. The logo taps into the AWARD membership database to recreate itself whenever needed, be it online in the web site designed by Deepend or for print purposes.

I am getting addicted to these living identities — like last month’s Namics — and I wonder if there will be a day, much like the day when a cell phone without a GPS map is obsolete, that a logo that doesn’t live in real time will be obsolete. But you don’t come here for my futuristic predictions, so let’s get to the design. Static, it’s hard to discern that the “A” is made of dots and not just of rounded debris, which is not entirely bad, but I wonder if allowing a few of the dots to stray on their own would help make it clear that these are a bunch of dots, not just a distressed “A.” However, online, the logo is amazingly convincing and engaging, bringing the concept to life, and I guess that will always be the challenge of bridging the ease of portraying real time online with the hardship of translating it to print, but it’s nice to see that AWARD is taking advantage of digital printing to move this living identity concept forward.

These kind of designs don’t become stale (simply look at the gorgeous site of the organization) because they can change and evolve without direct input; they are entities within themselves, living and breathing on their own terms.

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