Three rebrands at three wildly different scales landed this week: a global motorsport championship, a fintech giant rewiring how it handles AI and trust, and a poetry institution reaching for more play. Around them, two studios made loud, public cases for keeping human hands on the work while the AI conversation gets louder. We finish on a showcase full of new faces. Here's the week.
Formula E rebrands with MOX and calls its own logo a "Marmite icon"
Formula E unveiled a new identity from creative practice MOX, timed to its GEN4 era. The centrepiece is a logomark that fuses a stylised "F" and "E" resting at a 30-degree angle, described as a visual double entendre. A bespoke type family developed with All Purpose Studio, built on a customised cut of AP Gavel, does the heavy lifting: a condensed italic "Turbo Mode" for headline momentum, "Micro Mono" for timestamps and technical data, Inter for body copy. The palette runs on a bright purple, orange and lime, grounded by a track grey, per Creative Bloq.
Naming your own logo a "Marmite icon" before anyone else can is a clever bit of expectation management, and MOX's Matt Bolton is right that anything instantly comfortable dates fast. The system itself is sharp, the type work especially so. What sells it is the timing: a GEN4 car, a Disney+ deal and a new race format all arriving at once. A brand that has to work across live sport, streaming and gaming needs a kit this flexible, and this one reads like it was built for exactly that.
Intuit rebuilds its brand architecture with JKR and gives AI its own identity
Intuit, the fintech parent behind TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp, partnered with JKR on an overhaul built around the idea of "One Intuit," pulling the whole portfolio under one shared visual and verbal system. The work introduces a redesigned wordmark, a new "i" mark, a custom typeface called Tally, an evolved palette, fresh photography and iconography, a motion language and a rebuilt Intuit.com. It also launches "Intuit Intelligence," a distinct name and identity for combining the company's AI with human expertise, covered by PRINT Magazine.
The house-of-brands problem is a hard one, and JKR's brief of making connections visible without erasing the equity in each sub-brand is the right read. The eyebrow-raiser is "Intuit Intelligence." Spinning up a whole sub-identity to reassure people when AI touches their tax data is a design response to a trust problem, and it half admits the anxiety is real. Watch whether the branding earns the confidence or just names it.
The Poetry Foundation returns to Pentagram and lets Pegasus loose
The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine revealed a new identity, debuting with the October 2026 issue. It was developed with Pentagram, specifically partner Andrea Trabucco Campos and his team, with Foundation creative director Fred Sasaki leading from the Poetry side. This is a reunion: Pentagram and the Foundation first worked together in 2016, when Michael Bierut redesigned the identity. The refresh grew out of internal conversations wanting more range, expression and play, and delivers an expanded colour palette, bold typography and a dynamic new rendering of Pegasus, per the Foundation's announcement.
A studio returning to a client a decade on to loosen up its own earlier work is a rare and honest thing to watch. The 2016 system was clean to the point of restraint; asking for more play and bringing back the Pegasus myth suggests a brand comfortable enough to have fun with itself. For anyone doing arts and culture identity work, this is a smart study in how a mark evolves without discarding its own history.
Joseph Clark keeps AI out of Oh Studio, and the protest film went viral
Joseph Clark, who runs London's Oh Studio, has said plainly that AI has nothing to offer his work. His credits include MARS!, a Royal Television Society Award winner, and A Self Compassion Exercise, scripted by Alain de Botton, which has passed 2.5 million YouTube views. This summer he directed "We Are Better Than This," a protest film against generative AI's encroachment on creative work, made with illustrator Chris Haughton, a group of children's book authors and artists, and actress Miriam Margolyes. It went viral, as Creative Boom reports.
The pressure Clark names is the one every freelancer feels: if anyone can make anything with a click, why pay a specialist? His answer is to make the specialism visible and put a stake in the ground about it. You don't have to agree with the hard line to respect the clarity. In a market drowning in sameness, a studio that stands for a point of view is a studio clients can remember.
LAIKA brings Wildwood's handmade puppets to London's Design Museum
LAIKA, the Portland-area stop-motion studio behind Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, is bringing puppets and sets from its new film Wildwood to London in an exhibition tied to the Design Museum. The studio, founded in 2005, builds its films from real physical puppets on real physical sets, moved by hand a fraction of a millimetre at a time and shot one frame at a time. Art director Matthew Maldonado spoke to Creative Boom about why the studio keeps building everything physically.
Maldonado's framing is worth sitting with: software has become powerful enough that decades of skill are no longer required to make something look decent, and so most animated output now looks the same. LAIKA's whole existence is an argument against that flattening. Seeing the puppets in a museum is a reminder that the labour is the point, and that visible craft is a competitive advantage in a market flooded with sameness.
It's Nice That launches Ones to Watch 2026 with 72 new names
It's Nice That has launched its Ones to Watch 2026 talent showcase: 72 emerging creatives spanning graphic design, illustration, animation, art, filmmaking and photography, drawn from 16 countries. The applicant pool was double the size of the 2025 intake. The full directory is live and filterable by discipline, and the list is framed explicitly as a call to action for creative directors to consider these names for commissions and collaborations, per It's Nice That.
An applicant pool doubling year on year says something about how many people are pushing to make a living in this field right now, which cuts both ways given the week's other stories. Still, a curated list that puts faces and portfolios in front of the people who hand out briefs is one of the more useful things a publication can do. If you commission, go dig through it.
A tidy week, in the end: three brands figuring out who they are at very different scales, two studios insisting the hand still matters, and a fresh cohort ready to be hired. If the rebrands have you in a branding mood, we've got plenty of type and mockups worth a look. Back next week.
