Line up the logos of ten startups in any hot category. Same geometric sans-serif wordmark. Same friendly rounded terminals. Same safe blue or brave gradient. If you covered the names, could anyone match logo to company? The industry has a name for this: blanding.
How everyone ended up identical
Nobody set out to be generic. Blanding is the sum of individually reasonable decisions:
- The same tools. When thousands of founders use the same template libraries and the same font menus, convergence is not a risk, it is the default output.
- The same references. Every rebrand deck cites the same five admired tech brands, so every rebrand walks toward the same spot.
- Risk laundering. A distinctive mark has to be argued for. A safe mark approves itself, because it looks like everything that already got approved.
- Legibility worship. "Clean and simple" became "interchangeable" one small good decision at a time.
Why it costs real money
Distinctiveness is not an aesthetic preference. It is the mechanism by which advertising compounds. Every impression of a distinctive mark deposits into an account only you can withdraw from. Every impression of a generic mark deposits into a category-wide account that your biggest competitor, the one with the larger ad budget, withdraws from more often than you do. Blanding means paying to build someone else's memory structure.
A logo that could belong to anyone in your category effectively belongs to the market leader.
The test for sameness
Pull the logos of your ten nearest competitors onto one screen next to yours. Squint. If yours does not survive the squint, you have a distinctiveness problem regardless of how much you like the mark. This is exactly why the Lab grades distinctiveness against your actual competing market rather than against design trends in general. "On trend" and "invisible" are frequently the same grade.