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POV Budapest is back for a third edition with an identity made to move
The third edition of POV Budapest emphasizes a dynamic identity that evolves with its environment, reflecting the conference's theme 'The Act.' This approach suggests that brand strategy should focus on creating identities that not only represent a visual aesthetic but also embody values and behaviors that adapt and respond to real-world contexts.
The Brand Identity: POV Budapest is Hungary’s first design conference, founded by two local studios – CM.SUPPLY and COMET – who saw a gap in their own city, rich in culture yet without a platform to gather its design community.
It debuted in 2024 to 700 attendees from over 50 countries, and returns for its third edition at the National Dance Theatre in Millenáris Park, on the greener Buda side of the river. On the conference’s identity, CM.SUPPLY’s Mátyás Czél tells us that it “works like the city – it accrues, it doesn’t reset.” Most of what has been established in 2024 and 2025 is present, such as the bright red-orange, the type-forward system and the institutional socialist-modernist character that’s there with a bit of irony. What the 2026 update adds is behaviour.
“An identity that only looks a certain way feels incomplete,” Czél continues, “ours should also act” – so instead of redrawing the system, the team gave it a disposition, a way of moving with intent. That thinking follows the conference’s 2026 theme, ‘The Act.’ Design systems built to scale have begun moving out of controlled environments and into cities, organisations, services and daily routines, where they run under real conditions and take their shape from use, interpretation and circumstance.
Guidelines become values and values become behaviour – how a service responds under pressure, what it prioritises, how its principles drive decisions at scale. To give a thing an identity, the theme proposes, is now partly to give it a way of acting, and to accept that it will act beyond its makers. To find that way of acting, CM.SUPPLY looked back to the defining figures of Hungarian modernism – László Moholy-Nagy, Lajos Kassák and Victor Vasarely – three designers spanning different generations, media and visual languages who all held one thing in common.
“An image isn’t something to look at, it’s a system, a force, something that does work in the world,” Czél observes. From Moholy-Nagy came motion as a force in itself; from Vasarely, kinetics in the act of looking; from Kassák, the image as something built and operating, whose “colours and forms live; they live their own real lives.” Rather than feed a machine instructions, the team reconstructed each of their voices and asked how they might have moved the work with today’s tools, then turned the answers into prompts that set the compositions moving.
“As much tribute as method,” Czél notes, “and a rhyme, since each worked through his own upheaval, as we do now.” Underneath that motion, the type system stays the same as before, with Dinamo’s chunky Gravity typeface doing the expressive work and KOMETA’s Stabil Grotesk sitting quietly beneath it. The single adjustment is in how Gravity’s variable axes are handled, now used to keep the type spatially consistent so it flexes to fill its space the same way, whether a line runs short or long.
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The article discusses a unique approach to brand identity that emphasizes adaptability, which is increasingly relevant in today's fast-paced market, making it significant for brand strategy professionals.