Why every new brand looks exactly like the last one.

There is a particular kind of beauty that has come to dominate contemporary brand design. It is clean. It is confident. It uses one of about twelve typefaces. It has a muted palette that sits somewhere between warm grey and off-white. It is almost always well-executed. And it looks almost exactly like everything else.

If you work in branding, you know the aesthetic we are describing. It has various names — the direct-to-consumer look, the millennial brand, the Pentagram-adjacent school. Whatever you call it, it is everywhere. And its ubiquity is, at this point, a genuine problem for the industry.

01 — How we got here

The democratisation of design tools and the narrowing of taste.

The short answer is that the internet made design more visible, and visibility created convergence. When every designer can see every other designer's work in real time — when the same references circulate on the same platforms and the same award shows recognise the same aesthetic decisions — taste converges. The problem is that brand design is not supposed to converge. Its entire function is differentiation.

The result is a landscape in which a craft beer, a therapy app, a fintech startup, and a direct-to-consumer skincare brand can all use the same typeface, the same colour palette, and the same layout principles — and no one in the client meeting questions it. Because it looks right. It looks like what a brand is supposed to look like. The question of whether it looks like this specific brand, and no other, is rarely asked.

"A brand that looks like every other brand in its category is not a brand. It is a category placeholder."

02 — Why clients accept it

The safety of the familiar.

Brand design carries a particular kind of organisational risk. A brand identity is visible to everyone — customers, competitors, employees, investors. Getting it wrong is embarrassing in a way that few other business decisions are. And so clients, rationally, gravitate toward the familiar. They approve work that looks like what they have seen before because they know what that work is supposed to do.

This is not stupidity on the client's part. It is risk management. The problem is that it produces a category of work that is competent, credible, and completely forgettable — which is, in brand terms, a failure. A brand identity that blends into its category is not safe. It is invisible.

03 — The studios fighting back

Who is doing it differently, and how.

The work coming out of the studios doing genuinely distinctive work tends to have one quality above all others: it looks like it could only have come from the specific company it represents. The typeface is not a safe geometric sans that any brand could use. The colour is not a muted off-white that reads as premium in the abstract. Every element is specific. Every element earns its place.

What these studios have in common is less about aesthetic than about process and conviction. They are willing to make choices that cannot be justified by reference to what everyone else is doing. They are willing to defend those choices. And they are working with clients who understand that the brief is not to look like a well-designed version of the category average.

04 — The question worth asking

Before you brief anyone.

If you are about to commission a brand identity, there is one question worth asking before you do anything else: do you want to look like a credible version of your category, or do you want to look like yourself? These are different briefs. They require different conversations. They produce very different work.

The first brief is easier to deliver and easier to approve. It will produce something that looks right in a pitch deck and fades into the background in the real world. The second brief requires more honesty — about who you are, who you are not, and what you are genuinely willing to commit to visually. The best brand work being done right now is being done by studios and clients who are willing to have that second conversation.