Design awards are often seen as destinations — moments when the world pauses to applaud what’s been made. But for COLLINS, they’re more like mirrors, reflecting how far curiosity and conviction can take you when you decide to build what doesn’t yet exist. In the iF DESIGN AWARD 2025, independent strategy and design agency COLLINS earned four honors in the Branding & Communication Design category as varied as their ideas, with each project serving as a provocation, a question mark, and a quiet act of rebellion.
Since 1953, the iF DESIGN AWARD has stood as one of the industry’s most trusted barometers of excellence, recognizing work that balances imagination with intent. But beyond form and function, its true power lies in surfacing the ideas that dare to move culture forward. For COLLINS, that recognition is about witnessing how the echoes of their experiments take shape in the real world.
As the November 5 deadline for this year’s entries approaches, we spoke with the team at COLLINS about what drives their pursuit of the unexpected, how fear often signals they’re on the right track, and why the best work never fits neatly inside the lines. Co-founder, designer, and creative leader Brian Collins shares how imagination and risk-taking drive the team’s pursuit of work that makes the future irresistible.
Bose x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
Awards often serve as a moment of reflection. When you look back at the four projects that won an iF DESIGN AWARD 2025, what do they reveal about COLLINS’ philosophy and approach to design?
If you line up the four winning projects and squint, what I hope you’ll see is the same pulse running through all of them: our curiosity disguised as discipline.
We don’t design to redecorate what already exists. We design to expand what’s possible. COLLINS work always begins with a question that has no polite answer—we want to make sure it ends up looking like something no one expected.
Different as they are, I think these projects share a single trait: they refuse to behave. They have no interest in fitting in. Bose, Andmore, Sustana, and Guild all started with someone in the room saying, “What if we tried the thing we’re not supposed to try?” If the work doesn’t make us slightly nervous, it’s not worth doing.
But none of this happens without our remarkable clients. Good work isn’t a miracle; it’s a collaboration with a client confident enough to say, “Okay, let’s go!” Good clients are the alpha and the omega. New possibilities, new frontiers start with them. Otherwise, we’re just a group of well-dressed philosophers, talking to ourselves.
Together with those brave people, we try to build what doesn’t exist yet—and make it so vivid, so irresistible, that it eventually becomes inevitable. That’s how COLLINS drives brand transformation: not by predicting the future, but by designing one people can’t help but want. That future becomes inevitable precisely because it’s too compelling to ignore.
Bose x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
Bose x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
The value of public recognition varies from studio to studio. For COLLINS, what makes entering and winning an award like iF DESIGN meaningful, beyond the accolade itself?
Awards don’t define us. Some of our most celebrated, lasting work—Spotify, Mailchimp—won little to no awards. Still, when we do win, awards make us pause, like suddenly catching your reflection in a shop window and thinking, “Oh, so that’s what we look like, now. Fascinating.”
The minute you assign value to the trophy, it’s over. The value is in the interruption. It forces you to stop long enough to notice that the work survived its own complexity and chaos. It means all those months of tiny arguments—over the right music, a shade of yellow, an animation that felt too assertive, an elegant interface, the readable signage system, or finding language that could make someone cry—weren’t madness after all. They were love.
Any applause just means our peers saw what we saw, too. That’s always rewarding for any designer.
Sustana x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
Winning work often comes with hidden stories. Can you share a behind-the-scenes moment from one of your awarded projects that captures the human side of the creative journey?
There was one project that terrified everyone. We showed it to the client, and they just stared at us like we’d thrown a brick through their window. Total silence.
Finally, one of our designers—someone who never talks—said, “This scares you because it’s right.” And just like that, the air changed. And it was a hit. That’s the moment I remember, not any award. Every creative act starts as a small panic attack disguised as inspiration.
Guild X COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
Awards spotlight innovation, but they also set benchmarks. How do honors like the iF DESIGN AWARD which addresses the criteria of Idea, Form, Function, Differentiation, and Sustainability push COLLINS to keep evolving while staying true to its core principles?
Let’s get real: Form and function are like that tired, old couple that refuses to break up, even though everyone wishes they would. They’ve been together since the Bauhaus—still telling the same old stories, still showing up to dinner uninvited.
We’re over it.
Those two words have been used so much they’ve become design’s version of small talk—pleasant, harmless, and utterly useless. Every object on Earth now claims good form and solid function. Congratulations, you’ve achieved adequacy.
Enough.
At COLLINS, form doesn’t follow function. Here, form follows the fantastic.
Function asks: What is? It makes sense. The fantastic asks: What if? It makes trouble. We’ve always preferred trouble.
What actually matters now—what keeps us up at night—is differentiation and sustainability. In a world where everything looks like everything else, and half of it’s on fire, those are the only two ideas left worth designing for. Differentiation is how you stay alive; sustainability is how the planet does. The tension between them is where design still feels dangerous—and still worth doing.
Awards like iF are valuable when they remind us of that—not when they reward the latest style ponies on parade, but when they celebrate ideas too stubborn, too unruly, to disappear.
Andmore x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
For younger studios and emerging designers who might be hesitant to participate in a large international design award, what advice would you give about the process of submitting and the potential impact it can have on their trajectory?
Don’t enter awards to win. Enter awards to figure out what you actually believe. The process alone is clarifying—you either find your voice or realize you don’t have one. Both are gifts.
Enter PRINT. Enter The Art Directors Club. Enter ADC Young Guns. The Type Directors Club. Learn how it all works. See how your work holds up when it’s sitting next to a hundred other bright, delusional geniuses.
Then, once you’ve got a few bruises, one or two awards, and some perspective, spend the money on something big and global like iF. Awards aren’t about validation—they’re about visibility. You’re not saying “Please like me.” You’re saying, “Here’s what I see. Here’s what I think matters.”
If the award world claps—lovely.
If not—go make something impossible to ignore.
And try again.
And keep trying.
That’s the only way better futures are designed.
Andmore x COLLINS — 2025 iF DESIGN AWARD winner: Branding & Communication Design
iF DESIGN has been a symbol of design excellence and an active member of the international design community since 1953.
Today, the iF DESIGN AWARD is the world’s largest independent design award and among the most prestigious, with nearly 11,000 entries from 70 countries submitted each year across nine design disciplines. These include Product, Packaging, Branding & Communications, Service & Systems, UX, UI, Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Concepts. The incredible iF DESIGN AWARD Jury is made up of over 130 industry professionals from across the world who come together in a rigorous and transparent two-step process to recognize and celebrate the best in global design and innovation.
Take your chance: Register your project by the Final Entry deadline on November 5th!
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