The Great Blanding
3 mins 15 secs
Line up the logos of ten companies you've never thought about together: a bank, a fashion house, a wellness app, an airline, a tech startup, and try to tell them apart.
You can't.
They're all the same now. The same clean geometric sans-serif. The same flat black wordmark on the same white background. The same tasteful, breathable, nothing. Somewhere in the last decade, every brand on earth quietly agreed to look like every other brand on earth, and we all just… let it happen.
We call it the Great Blanding. A decade where companies spent millions of dollars to become harder to remember.
How an entire industry erased itself
It started, like most bad ideas, with a good reason.
Screens got smaller. Logos had to shrink to a favicon, sit inside an app icon, work on a watch face, survive being a 16-pixel browser tab. The serifs got fiddly at small sizes. The mascots looked dated. The color didn't pop on a dark-mode UI. So one by one, the distinctive bits got sanded off in the name of "scaling across platforms."
Burberry torched its equestrian knight. Saint Laurent dropped the "Yves." Balmain, Berluti, Balenciaga…a whole row of fashion houses flattened into nearly identical capital-letter sans-serifs you genuinely cannot tell apart at a glance.
Google retired its serif. Johnson & Johnson straightened out a 130-year-old script. The mascots, the ornament, the hand-drawn weirdness…gone, replaced with the corporate equivalent of beige.
And here's the lie everyone told themselves while doing it: that this was the safe choice. Modern. Clean. Future-proof. Investor-friendly.
Sure, it was safe. But “safe” never made legacy.
Minimalism stopped being a choice and became a hiding place
Real minimalism is brutally hard. Stripping a brand down to one perfect, irreducible idea takes more conviction than piling stuff on, not less. Done right, it's a flex.
But that's not what most of the Great Blanding was. Most of it was minimalism as camouflage. Blandness is the natural output of a room full of people trying not to be wrong.
The problem is that branding has exactly one job: to be distinctive. To be the thing a person's brain reaches for in a crowded shelf or a crowded feed without having to think. Distinctiveness is the only asset that actually compounds.
The world got bored. And the pendulum is swinging hard
Here's the good news, and the reason this isn't just a complaint: the appetite has already turned.
People are exhausted by the sterile, the flat, the safe. You can feel it everywhere. The return of color, of ornament, of expressive type that has a personality instead of a personnel file. Gradients are back. Serifs are back. Texture, illustration, the gloriously loud, and the deliberately weird are back. A generation raised on Y2K maximalism, characterful internet culture finds the corporate beige genuinely boring (and boring is the one thing a brand cannot afford to be).
Look at who's actually winning attention right now. Liquid Death sells water like it's a heavy metal album and built a cult doing it. Oatly covers its cartons in hand-scrawled, opinionated, borderline-unhinged copy and people read every word. These brands aren't winning despite breaking the minimalist rulebook. They're winning because they did. Because in a world of identical wordmarks, the loudest thing in the room is the one with a personality.
Even the giants are reversing course. Burberry brought back its knight and its heritage flair, publicly walking back the very blanding it once led. And whatever you think of Jaguar's color-drenched relaunch, the entire internet had an opinion. After a decade of rebrands nobody noticed, a brand did something brave enough to start a fight. That's pulse.
Flair was never the risk. Sameness was.
A bold color you own becomes a shortcut into someone's memory…they see it from across the street and they know it's you before they read a word. A distinctive shape, a recurring character, an unmistakable typeface, these are the things that make a brand recognizable at a glance, which is the only kind of recognition worth paying for.
Maximalism coming back is the market correcting for ten years of brands quietly disappearing and rewarding the ones brave enough to:
Take up space
At IYRN, we think the bravest thing a brand can do in 2026 is look like itself and nothing else. Pick a color and marry it. Have a shape only you own. Say something a committee would flinch at. Take up space loudly enough that someone could spot you with the logo cropped out of frame.
The Great Blanding made everyone safe and forgettable.
Be unforgettable instead. It was always the braver bet…and now it's the smarter one too.
