Rumble’s New Modular Logo Refuses To Ever Look The Same Twice

Most logos are built to stay still.

You design it once, lock it down, and spend the next decade making sure nobody messes with the spacing or swaps the color without approval. Consistency is basically the whole job. Same shape, every time, everywhere.

Rumble just threw that instinct out entirely.

The Australian sound studio, based out of Sydney, unveiled a completely new brand identity built around a platform it’s calling “Sound is Story,” developed with indie agency Bear Meets Eagle on Fire. The wordmark itself doesn’t hold still. It changes. Each letter in “Rumble” comes with four different mini soundscape stories attached to it, which means the logo can technically assemble itself into thousands of different combinations depending on which version gets used where.

That’s not a metaphor. Thousands is the actual number being thrown around.

Nine months went into building this thing, according to the studio. Nine months for a logo is a long time by most branding standards, but Rumble makes sound design for a living, and sound design apparently doesn’t move fast when you’re trying to get every detail exactly right.

Founder Tone Aston put it plainly enough. The old branding never actually reflected what Rumble does — creativity in sound, storytelling through audio, craft over convenience. A studio built entirely around narrative through sound was operating under a logo that told no story of its own. Kind of an odd mismatch, honestly, once you sit with it.

“This time we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have design and branding experts like Bear Meets Eagle On Fire,” Aston told LBB, “to take what they know about Rumble and crystallise it into this clear concept.”

ECD Michael Gie leaned into a slightly different angle — texture. Tactility, specifically, even in a medium you can’t physically touch. “We’ve always admired the Bear team’s approach to tactility,” he said, “real-world textures that even when you can’t physically touch them, you still feel them.” Translating that idea into sound, rather than something visual you could run your fingers over, is a genuinely strange design challenge. Most brand refreshes are working with color and shape. Rumble’s team was working with feeling something that technically doesn’t exist as a physical object at all.

So how does a modular logo actually function day to day, practically speaking?

Each version gets pulled out depending on the emotional tone of whatever project it’s attached to. Comedy. Suspense. Intrigue. Action. Desire. Michael Gie described the process as matching “the version that reflects the overarching emotion of the project,” which sounds abstract until you consider what Rumble’s actual client list looks like this year. Time-traveling figurines for Telstra. A gold egg-laying goose for SMC. A chaotic family road trip ad for Toyota. Wildly different tones, wildly different sound needs — and now, apparently, wildly different logo treatments to match each one.

That’s a genuinely useful branding tool, if it actually holds together in practice. Most companies fight to keep their logo perfectly rigid specifically because consistency builds recognition over time. Rumble is betting the opposite works better for a sound studio specifically — that variability itself becomes the recognizable trait, rather than any single fixed shape.

It’s not a totally unprecedented idea, either. Google’s occasional Doodle logos have leaned on a similar principle for years, swapping out the standard wordmark for illustrated versions tied to holidays, anniversaries, or notable figures, all while keeping the underlying letterforms recognizable enough that nobody mistakes it for a different company. The core shape holds. The expression around it flexes constantly. Rumble is essentially applying that same logic permanently, rather than saving it for special occasions.

Design lead Lincoln Grice pointed to something specific holding all this variability together — consistent illustration work from artist Adrian Tomine, whose style and palette anchor every version of the story-driven letterforms. Without that kind of visual glue, a logo capable of thousands of combinations risks just looking like chaos with a company name loosely attached. Tomine’s involvement seems designed specifically to prevent that outcome.

“It’s really about boiling down what Rumble believes,” Grice explained, “and that is about sound being so critical to storytelling.”

Creative director Mark Carbone added a smaller but genuinely charming detail. The written mini-stories attached to each letter aren’t purely decorative — they function almost like Easter eggs for clients, and doubly as an actual creative brief for sound design itself. “You’d tailor sound differently if the story went a different way,” he said. Change the narrative attached to a letter, and the audio treatment built around it shifts too. Story and sound, feeding directly back into each other, rather than existing as two separate layers slapped together after the fact.

Whether a modular, story-driven identity like this becomes something other sound and creative studios start borrowing from remains to be seen. But for a company whose entire business is built on the idea that sound tells stories, a logo that refuses to sit still and tell just one feels less like a gimmick and more like the branding finally catching up to the actual product.