DATE
AUTHOR
Matvej Korba
CATEGORY
Content
READING TIME
6 min
The homogenization problem in contemporary visual identity
Open ten DTC brand websites in a row. Sans-serif logotype. Neutral palette. Soft photography with natural light. Plenty of whitespace. They're all beautiful. They're all interchangeable. The current wave of brand design has optimized for taste so aggressively that it's eliminated the one thing a brand actually needs — distinction.
Good taste is not a strategy. If your brand could be swapped with your competitor's and nobody would notice, you don't have an identity — you have a style.
How we got here
The culprit is efficiency. Design tools got better, templates got more accessible, and the same handful of foundational references — Celine, Aesop, Kinfolk — filtered through an entire generation of designers at the same time. Add algorithm-driven inspiration feeds that reward what's already popular, and you get a visual monoculture where everything converges toward a shared median of good taste.
Distinction vs. disruption
The fix isn't to be louder or weirder for the sake of it. It's to root every visual decision in something specific to the brand — its origin, its audience, its point of view. Distinction comes from specificity, not from breaking rules. A brand that makes industrial workwear should look nothing like a brand that makes ceremonial jewelry, even if they share an audience and a price point.
The brands getting it right
The brands that will endure this era are the ones brave enough to look like themselves. Look at what Corteiz has done with scarcity and rawness, or how Jacquemus uses scale and humor as identity tools. Neither brand follows the minimal playbook, and both are instantly recognizable. The common thread isn't aesthetic — it's conviction.
