Look around you. Your phone case. Your desk lamp. Your water bottle. The font on the café menu. The lobby of that coworking space you pay too much for. Everything looks the same. Everything looks like it was designed by the same person who also happens to have a muted color palette for a personality.
But if you go back and look at industrial design, graphic design, even architecture from the 20th century (and honestly centuries before that), things were decorative. Objects had detail. Buildings had ornamentation. A chair was not just a chair. It was a whole moment. There was texture and personality and visual richness baked into the stuff people used every day.
Now, we’re surrounded by smooth rectangles in varying shades of oatmeal.
How did we get here?
Blame modernism. And I say that with love, because it made sense at the time.
In the early 20th century, modernism kicked off as an art and design movement that basically said: “Hey, maybe we should stop decorating things that don’t need decorating.” Strip away what’s not functional. Let the form follow the function. Remove the excess.
And for the era, that was a reasonable take. Industry was scaling, resources were limited, design needed to catch up to the demands of mass production. Ornament for the sake of ornament started to look wasteful and impractical when you’re trying to build things at scale for actual humans.
So designers said goodbye to the flourishes. Architecture went clean (this is basically how we ended up with those “glass boxes” that all look the same btw). Product design went sleek. And graphic design followed. The idea became: the more stripped down something is, the “better” it must be. (boooooringgggggggg 😩)
Which… sure. In 1925. When the alternative was putting gargoyles on a toaster.
Why do all brands look the same? Because it’s not the early 1900s anymore (& we probably took modernism a bit too far)
The logic that made sense a hundred years ago somehow became gospel forever. And the design world just… never moved on. We took “remove unnecessary decoration” and turned it into “remove all personality whatsoever and slap a wayyy too thin sans-serif on it.”
Minimalism became the default, but not overnight. It was a gradual process that unfolded over decades. Rational color palettes slowly replaced… everything that’s fun about color, basically. Ultra-sleek fonts became the mark of “serious” design. White space evolved from a tool into a whole identity. And somewhere along the way, the idea took hold that if something looks empty enough, it must be premium. 💀
Plus, mass production made it worse. Today we produce at levels those early modernists could never have imagined. Resources are even more strained, so the “strip it all down” approach doubled down on itself. Which is wild, because the world is louder and more saturated than ever. And brands are out here responding to that by getting quieter?
It’s like walking into a packed nightclub and whispering your name. Good luck with that.
Let’s talk about what this really is
I don’t think this is just a design trend. I think there are ideological reasons why we’ve ended up in this sea of sameness.
The message being sent is that minimalism is refinement. That self-expression is excessive. That keeping everything neutral and beige and wide open with no detail and no decoration is the “sophisticated” choice. Like personality is a design flaw.
And I think that’s completely wrong.
This isn’t sophistication but “elevated” looking suppression. It’s telling brands (and the people behind them) to tone it down in order to be taken seriously. And if you’ve built something bold and unapologetic, you’ve probably been told exactly that at some point. “Maybe make it a little more… clean? A little more… minimal?”
Translation: make it a little more like everyone else.
What I’m actually trying to prove
Here’s where I come in and ruin everyone’s refined beige parade (lol).
What I want to show with my work is that we don’t have to strip everything away from a brand in order for it to feel premium and functional. We took the minimalism thing too far and now everyone’s brand looks like a doctor’s waiting room.
You can have design with detail. With texture. With personality that hits you in the face. With storytelling that actually stands out and makes people stop mid-scroll. And you can have all of that while keeping things strategic and functional.
The two are not enemies. Decoration and function are not in a fight. They never were. Modernism just told us they were and we believed it for a century llike gospel we never thought to question.
Whether it’s architecture or everyday objects or branding: you do not have to gut the soul out of something to make it work. You don’t need to choose between “beautiful” and “functional.” That’s a false choice we’ve been taught to accept without question.
So what now?
If your brand looks like it could be anyone’s brand, you’re not the only one. In fact, a LOT of brands all look the same because they follow the same design script. Some call it “elevated”, to me it’s just lazy minimalism. And your audience can feel it too.
The brands that actually land with people are the ones brave enough to bring personality back. Not random excess or chaos for the sake of chaos. Strategic, intentional, full-of-personality excess that says “we have a lot to say and we’re not sorry about it.”
You don’t have to whisper to be premium. You just have to be precise about how loud you get.
Your brand looks expensive but also like it could belong to anyone?
That’s the problem.
Eyes On You is my brand personality + creative direction intensive where I diagnose exactly what’s “off,” call out the blind spots you’re not seeing, and give you a clear, personality-driven direction forward, without a full rebrand.
Because you didn’t build this business to blend in with the beige. → Find out more
