For a decade, brand identity got quieter, safer, and harder to tell apart. Now the design press is documenting a real swing back toward color, texture, and visual conviction. We look at what changed, who is doing it with intent, and why "more" only works when it is built on a reason.
The decade of blanding
For most of the last ten years, brand identity got quiet. Sans-serif logotypes flattened into the same three or four typefaces. Pastel gradients replaced photography. Mascots and illustration disappeared in favor of geometric marks built to survive as an app icon rather than stand for anything. Put ten unlabeled fintech logos in front of a room of designers and watch half of them guess wrong. That was the point. Nobody wanted to look weird. Everybody ended up looking the same.
British brand strategist Alex Murrell gave this era its clearest diagnosis in his widely read 2023 essay "The Age of Average." He tracked the drift toward sameness across categories that had nothing to do with each other: interior design converging on the same white walls and Edison bulbs, car buyers moving toward monochrome so fast that black, white, and grey climbed from 40 percent of vehicle sales in 1996 to 80 percent by 2016, and tech brands lining up behind an aesthetic so consistent it earned its own name, "blanding" (Murrell). He counted 27 companies running some version of the tagline "Find Your X." None of it was an accident. It was cheaper, safer, and easier to test.
We have said some version of this since we opened our doors. Safe doesn’t survive here. Turns out the design industry agrees. It just took a very quiet decade to say it out loud.
“When every supermarket aisle looks like a sea of sameness, when every category abides by the same conventions, when every industry has converged on its own singular style, bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course.”
Alex Murrell, "The Age of Average"
The swing back
By 2023, the correction was already showing up in trend forecasts. Creative Bloq’s roundup of that year’s graphic design trends flagged a shift its editors called "more is more," designers mixing analogue and digital techniques, clashing colors, and layering expressive type over photography as a direct rebellion against "the wellness industry’s embrace of minimalism, with its overuse of sans serif typography and muted colour palettes" (Creative Bloq). Beverage and lifestyle brands led the charge first, trading soft neutrals for the surreal and the loud because their category had gotten the most boring the fastest.
Writer Elizabeth Goodspeed traced a parallel swing back to nostalgia in AIGA’s Eye on Design, pointing to a wave of 1980s-inspired branding built on condensed type, saturated color, and dense, text-heavy layouts. Her read on why it was happening went beyond a style cycle. It was a mood.
“It’s grim out there and we’re all craving a bit more pleasure and wit to make us feel alive again.”
Elizabeth Goodspeed, "The ’80s Are Back, Baby," AIGA Eye on Design
By late 2024, the swing reached the biggest, safest, most heritage-bound category there is. In November, Jaguar unveiled a rebrand under the banner "exuberant modernism": a new wordmark, a pink and yellow palette nobody associated with the marque, and a concept car that looked nothing like anything the company had built in a century. The reaction was loud, some of it furious, most of it impossible to ignore, and that was rather the point. A brand built for a century on English restraint chose to be talked about over being liked by everyone at once. Whatever you think of the execution, it is proof the appetite for distinct over default has reached the boardroom, not just the mood board.
Dezeen’s coverage of maximalist interiors and installations through early 2025, from a Musée d’Orsay exhibition on Norwegian maximalist design to a Trondheim museum built around saturated color, points to the same current running well past branding, into architecture, furniture, and space. This is not one industry catching a trend. It is design culture correcting itself at the same time, from several directions.
Loud isn’t the same as bold
Here is where the trend piece usually stops, and where the strategy conversation needs to start. Maximalism without intent is just noise, and noise is its own kind of sameness once every brand is shouting at once. The industry didn’t swing from minimal to maximal because bright color came back into style. It swung because sameness stopped converting, and somebody had to be the first to notice out loud.
Look at Liquid Death. Canned water was, by definition, one of the most minimalist categories on a shelf: clean labels, blue and white palettes, quiet promises of purity. Founder Mike Cessario built the opposite on purpose: a heavy metal aesthetic, a tallboy can that looks like it belongs on a tour rider, and a name that admits its own absurdity before anyone else can point it out. "We chose the dumbest possible name for water," he has said of the brand. By March 2024, the company was valued at $1.4 billion, built on $263 million in the prior year’s retail sales, entirely on the decision to refuse to look, sound, or behave like anything else on the shelf (Wikipedia, "Liquid Death"). That is not decoration. That is a strategic bet on distinctiveness, backed by a business result a spreadsheet can measure.
That is the difference we hold our own work to. Bold has to answer a brief before it answers a trend. A palette that fights, a texture doing real work, a piece of type louder than it strictly needs to be, all of it earns its place only if it moves a brand closer to unmistakable. Otherwise it is just last year’s minimalism wearing a brighter coat.
Old made dangerous
We have been building this way since day one, long before a design blog gave it a name. Where the Defiant Reign is not a mood board direction. It is the whole premise: the market rewards brands willing to look like themselves instead of like everyone else in their category. Maximalism, built with intent, is one more way to make that case. Take a convention the industry treats as settled, a hushed palette, a shy logo, a category nobody has dared to shake, and make it dangerous again for the audience standing in front of it today.
The correction the design press is documenting right now, this swing away from blanding and back toward brands with real visual conviction, is not a costume change. It is the market catching up to something the defiant already knew. Safe doesn’t survive here. The brands willing to take up space on purpose, with a reason behind every choice, are the ones people remember walking past the ones that blend in.
That is the build we do for every founder who walks through our door, whether they are a nonprofit trying to be heard over louder budgets or an enterprise brand tired of looking like its competitors. We don’t chase a trend line. We build the identity standing underneath it.
