EQV (Eww Quit Vanilla)

WHAT: With the rise of the social media feed that constantly spits up posts from a preferred bubble, art promotion and in fact content promotion became a game to please the Algorithm.

Everything (strangely) looks similar, familiar. This is not only a clever marketing trick , it's neuroscience 101. Our brain prefers the familiar, even to our detriment. Less challenge, more stupor, more scrolling.

WHERE: From packaging, luxury fashion houses to tech company logos - they all started to look strangely similar. Many brands have swapped out their unique fonts and heritage design elements for clean, minimal sans serifs, soft color palettes, especially the dreaded Millennial Pink (as the one-of-a-kind Morticia Addams would say: [...]but Debbie... Pastels?) and friendly illustrations. (YSL started the trend, proceeding to ditch Yves and the recognizable font for a bland sans serif, then came Celine, Burberry, Balmain, Berluti, Balenciaga) This shift, sometimes called "blanding" or the "millennial aesthetic" was meant to feel modern, approachable and digitally optimized. But instead of standing out, brands have ended up blending in—creating a visual culture where design feels flat, forgettable, and safe, vanilla. This modernist visual brutalism infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives: from advertising to product design to living. The fact of the matter is this: content is created for the widest audience. The wider the audience, the bigger the profit.

HOW: The erosion of distinctive aesthetics has dulled the emotional and sensory experience of design, making it feel less like an art form and more like a formula.

A 2020 study finds that colors in our everyday objects are steadily getting desaturated. High Chroma hues are replaced with toned down nuances (marketed as neutral) and grey became the most highly used color in newly released products in 2020!

It’s also sparked creative fatigue, both among designers who feel constrained and audiences who crave authentic expression in a hyper-commercialized landscape. Aesthetic uniformity in the name of coherent brand identity made some public places exceptionally dull, uniform and without any sort of site specific or cultural identity. Coffee shops are a strange example: being a cultural meeting point for creatives, an aesthetic analysis reveals, they all look similar. In the name of modern minimalism and familiarity, they have given up individuality, personality and even quirkiness, becoming instead clean, curated, and oddly impersonal. (Hint, the worlds most recognizable and talked about public places are exceptionally individual, unique.) Another scary example is modern architecture's and interior design's obsession with minimalism. Unfortunately this resulted in millions of apartments looking like showrooms with rectangular furniture in muted (presented as "timeless") colors.

This sameness isn’t just a design issue—it’s a cultural one. Across the board, creators are feeling pressure to make work that fits into this formula. As platforms and algorithms favor what’s already familiar, artists and designers are nudged away from originality and toward what’s most likely to perform, so work that challenges the norm often gets ignored and forgotten. Over time, this has worn down creative energy. (Haven't we all seen those "how I sell my art on instagram" videos?)

Optimizing artistic or cultural content to perform devalues art from it's intent of self expression and/or social commentary. Corporate profit demand art that sells, not art that challenges. The quest for instant profitability means companies favor work “guaranteed to appeal to the largest audience,” breeding “a culture of sameness” where innovation is sidelined. The result is a corporate “one-size-fits-all” approach that “neutralizes aesthetics at scale,” effectively creating a “homogenization of art” or “cultural cleansing” of creativity: artists are pressured to fit their vision into safe, templated formats to ensure market success.

It's not by accident that aesthetes and critics alike remember with warm nostalgia the times when fashion used to mean something, when fashion shows brought audiences to tears. Where are the times when silent meaning was enough (Kawakubo, Miyake, Yamamoto), when social commentary was acceptable even if it hurt (McQueen), when fun mixed with wit (Lacroix)? WE treasure those pieces of fashion because they represent an era of individualism that today in replaced with mass production and profitability. Today, these once revolutionary ideas are constantly recycled, things are referenced, house codes are reinterpreted, reissued, redone.

QUESTION:

How does design actually reflect our shared values and how our created environment shapes our mental wellbeing?

Are chromatic desaturation, monotone and repetitive visual inputs desensitizing us and slowly dumbing down our generation and future generations alike?

Fortunately some brands are beginning to move away from this generic look and return to what made them distinctive in the first place - custom typography, bold storytelling, and designs with a little more personality. Personalized retail, eclectic homes, individualized wellness, all point to a growing trend of introspection and an innate need for self expression, comfort, care and intimacy.

There’s a growing realization that authenticity and individuality are more memorable than trend-chasing sameness. In a world overloaded with polished visuals, the new standout might just be something a little weirder, rougher, honest, more REAL.

Originality at this point is a rare bird, but still not extinct! Trailblazers, black sheep and disruptors and here to stay and ready to shake things up.