Why everything looks like a copy of a copy of another copy

It’s curious that arriving in a new city no longer seems to mean discovering new worlds. Quite the opposite. Everything starts to feel increasingly familiar.

The patterns repeat themselves. The speciality coffee shop has the same stainless-steel counter as the one back home. The hotel has the same low-hanging lamp over the bedside table as the place you stayed last time. The restaurant on the corner has irregular ceramics, serif typography and a menu that looks as though it was designed by the same person responsible for the ones in Lisbon, Copenhagen and Mexico City.

The bottles are prettier. The websites cleaner. The brands more sophisticated.

And yet, it is becoming harder and harder to remember which was which.

It isn’t that design has become worse. If anything, we have become extraordinarily good at recognising what well-designed things are supposed to look like.

Good taste travels fast

A reference that felt unexpected a few years ago takes very little time to become part of a shared language.

A hotel appears on Dezeen. A restaurant starts circulating on Instagram. A small brand goes viral for an unusual campaign. Someone saves it. Someone else adds it to a moodboard. Someone else shows it to a client.And little by little, a decision that belonged to one very specific place becomes an aesthetic available to everyone.

Nobody needs to copy anyone. It is enough to look in the same places.

Pinterest. Instagram. Are.na. Behance. The same newsletters. The same studios. The same references that have already been selected because someone, somewhere, decided they deserved our attention.

The result isn’t bad.

It is correct.

Which may be more dangerous.

The problem with getting it right: the ham-and-cheese toastie paradigm

Some brands have nothing objectively wrong with them.

The typography works. The palette is beautiful. The art direction is considered. The tone is friendly, but not too friendly. The photography has natural light. The website breathes.

Everything is fine.

That’s it.

It could belong to twenty other companies.

And, unfortunately, several direct competitors.

Because being a copy can become surprisingly expensive.

Once a category learns what sophistication is supposed to look like, those codes begin to work like a uniform.

In beauty: off-whites, restrained typography and friendly science.

In hospitality: wood, linen, ceramics, food photographed with a carefully controlled degree of imperfection.

In technology: gradients, very large words and people who seem remarkably happy to be looking at a screen.

In new food brands: naïve illustration, unexpected colours and a voice that seems to have simultaneously discovered that brands are allowed to make jokes.

None of this is wrong.

But when everyone uses it in the same way, it stops communicating anything genuine.

We started looking sideways

There is a fairly logical reason for this.

When a company wants to build an identity, it normally begins by looking at other companies doing something similar.

A hotel looks at hotels.A bank looks at banks.A fashion brand looks at fashion.

It makes sense.

It is also a very effective way of ending up doing much the same thing.

Looking at a category helps us understand its rules. It is less useful when trying to discover how to move beyond them.

Sometimes the best reference for a hotel is not another hotel.

It might be a private club. A family home. A Japanese ritual. An Éric Rohmer film. The way a village organises its summer celebrations in August.

Not because those references are more original.

Because they force us to look at the problem from somewhere else.

We believe in unlikely connections

But an unlikely connection is not about putting an unexpected image into a presentation.

It has to change something. If a film enters the project, it should help us understand what kind of intimacy we are trying to create. If we talk about a city, it should help us think about rhythm, belonging or memory. If we study a ritual, it should eventually influence a decision.

Algorithms don’t like edges

There is something else. The systems that help us discover things tend, by definition, to show us more of whatever we have already paid attention to.

We look at an interior. Ten similar interiors appear. We save two. Tomorrow there will be twenty. And without really noticing, a preference begins to turn into a worldview.

Not because anyone decided everything should look the same. Simply because recognisable things circulate well.

Platforms understand patterns.

Markets understand categories.

Clients understand references.

Character, on the other hand, often begins exactly where something does not quite fit.

A combination that feels slightly uncomfortable but means something to the brand. A colour someone would remove in round two. A story that is too specific. A strange building. A habit that does not fit what a company in that category is supposed to do.

Very often, the first thing we do when professionalising a brand is correct precisely those things.

We clean.

We organise.

We standardise.

And without meaning to, we remove the very thing that might have made it recognisable.

Distinctive doesn’t mean different for the sake of it

This is not about being strange, either. Being different is relatively easy. Being recognisable is much harder.

A distinctive brand does not need to contradict its category at every turn.

Sometimes it is enough to understand which things genuinely belong to it and which things it has simply learnt from everything around it.

Sometimes the answer already exists.

In a peculiar way of treating customers.

In a founder’s obsession.

In the way the business began.

In a phrase everyone on the team uses without noticing.

In something they have been doing for twenty years and never considered important because, to them, it was simply normal.

That is what makes looking backwards before looking outwards so interesting. Many brands begin an identity process by asking what they could add. Sometimes they should be asking what they stopped noticing.

Maybe sameness isn’t an aesthetic problem

Perhaps the problem is not that everyone uses the same typefaces. Or that there are too many microcement walls. Or even that half of Europe seems to be drinking coffee from the same chair.

Visual similarity is simply the part we can see.

Underneath it is usually something deeper: companies making decisions from the same references, the same categories and the same ideas about what a contemporary brand is supposed to be.

Which is why changing the aesthetic is rarely enough. You can replace a serif with a grotesk. Swap beige for electric blue. Shoot everything with flash.

In two years, there will probably be another fifty brands doing exactly the same thing.

The interesting question is not:

How can we look different?

but:

What can we genuinely defend as our own?

That is where something else begins.

Because once a brand finds a perspective that genuinely belongs to it, difference stops being an aesthetic exercise.

It starts affecting decisions.

What it does.

What it does not do.

How it speaks.

Where it appears.

What it chooses to keep, even when someone suggests making it a little more correct.

And perhaps that is the paradox.

In a world full of tools helping us find references, inspiration and answers faster than ever, building something of our own may require doing exactly the opposite.

Closing a few tabs.

Looking away, for a moment, from what everyone else is doing.

And looking a little closer.

Or a little further back.

Or simply from somewhere else.

The surface is never the whole story.