Building new tools
for today’s needs.
How AI-powered customization elevates and accelerates our work.
Written by Jack De Caluwe & Seth Akkerman
For a long time, brand systems came in one form: final, fixed, often trapped in a PDF. You’d design it once, hand it off, and hope for the best. They had rules and grids and sometimes a friendly “how not to use the logo” page. And for a while, that was enough.
But that model doesn’t hold up anymore.
Today, brands live in motion. They flex across formats, devices, regions, and teams. What once felt durable now feels rigid. The speed of culture has outpaced the tools we used to document it.
At Instrument, we’ve always been drawn to the friction—the moments where a bit of invention can unlock something bigger.
That’s especially true when it comes to scaling design systems, where creativity and repetition exist in a constant push and pull.
There’s been a lot of noise about AI—what it means for creativity, for craft, for the future of design. But useful applications—the kind that quietly enhance the work rather than overhaul it—are still surprisingly rare. So we’re building our own.
We’re experimenting with emerging tech to see how it can scale, accelerate, and even elevate the creative process—without compromising what matters: taste, clarity, and intent. To us, these aren’t just tools—they’re instruments of the industry’s future. Let us introduce you to a few of them.
Starting with Friction
In a recent rebrand for a legacy fashion retailer (more on that soon), we developed a custom layout tool that automates and scales design across sizes and ratios. Powered by a model that’s trained on a robust brand identity system and a series of intelligent inputs, the tool allows the in-house team to roll out the rebrand faster and at scale—without losing consistency or creative integrity.
Not to remove the human touch, but to protect it. As designers, we wanted to keep the inventing part—the thinking, the experimentation, the taste—firmly in human hands. When you’re not stuck adjusting margins or resizing templates, you can focus on shaping how a brand actually lives in the world.
We paired that with a brand voice assistant that helps generate everything from product copy to newsletters and social posts. It gets smarter over time, learning from feedback and evolving to match the brand’s tone—confident, aspirational, precise. It’s not just a shortcut. It’s a way to preserve the craft of writing, even as the content demands grow.
When we identify repetitive production tasks and create tools that anyone can use with minimal training, we democratize the creative process. This approach frees us up to focus on innovative work that truly moves brands forward—ultimately creating greater impact for our clients and their customers.
Automation with intention
For the rebrand of an iconic entertainment company, we reduced the overhead of generating logo variations. Once the brand guardrails were set, we built a web app that allows anyone to create sub-brand logos—across colors and formats—using a simple text input.
We also created a Figma plugin that applies palette rules to an ever-expanding catalog of IP and automatically integrates the result into the design system. And we used AI to crop and position key art within consistent brand shapes online—transforming a once time-consuming task into something anyone can do in minutes. While similar tools exist, building bespoke models allows us to train and tailor the technology to the specific need, versus general use, which enhances the output.
For one of our social clients, we built a suite of tools to support designers, producers, and strategists alike. Parsing global analytics can be overwhelming, let alone turning them into creative insights. So we built a tool that analyzes every video in a campaign—over 2,000 so far—cross-referencing creative elements with technical data. This helps teams understand what’s working, and why, so they can make smarter, faster, data-informed decisions.
At the same time, we made transcreation easier by connecting localized content variations directly into Figma—so the right version is always just a click away.
At the end of the day, it’s all about problem- solving. These common challenges—like scale, adaptability or consistency—might stay the same, but the way we think about solving them is ever-evolving. That’s what keeps us on our toes.
This isn't in the brief. (And that's the point.)
The most meaningful solutions often emerge in the margins—in the space between what's asked and what's needed. None of these solutions were in the brief. They were born out of friction—of seeing the same bottlenecks show up again and again. At Instrument, we’ve addressed this by embedding creative technologists into our project teams—folks who bring fresh perspectives and inventive solves others might overlook. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder with designers, writers, and strategists, looking for unexpected ways to remove friction and unlock flow.
Their role isn’t to chase novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s to build things that make the work better. Sharper. Faster, yes—but also more thoughtful. More consistent. More alive.
Because the truth is, these aren’t just technical solutions. They’re creative ones. They carve out space for human judgment. For taste. For experimentation. For the kinds of ideas you can’t automate.
That’s what we’re investing in. Not just better tools—but better conditions for creativity to thrive—for our teams, and for the clients who trust us to push the work further.
