What Happened to Blanding, and Why Brands Are Getting Human Again

If you paid any attention to logos in the late 2010s, you probably noticed that a lot of them started to look alike. Big companies, fashion houses, tech startups and even the gym down the street all landed on roughly the same formula: a clean sans-serif wordmark, plenty of white space, one flat color and, more often than you'd expect, a name written in all lowercase. Designers eventually gave it a name, "blanding," and the name stuck because it described the problem so plainly.

Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Serif typefaces are back, hand-drawn details are showing up in places they haven't been in years, and more brands are trying to feel like a real person made them. In this post we'll walk through where blanding came from, why it's fading, what's replacing it, and the part most trend articles leave out, which is why this swing keeps happening in the first place.

Where blanding came from

Blanding wasn't an accident, and it wasn't laziness. It happened for reasons that made sense at the time.

The biggest one was the phone screen. Around the middle of the 2010s, a brand's most important appearance moved from a storefront or a letterhead to a tiny app icon and a profile picture in the corner of a social feed. Fine serifs, thin strokes and detailed marks get muddy at that size, while a heavy, simple sans-serif stays readable at almost any size. Designers were solving a real technical problem.

The second reason was aspiration. The most successful companies of that decade were tech companies, and most of them looked clean, flat and minimal. For a lot of businesses, looking like a successful startup felt like a shortcut to being seen as one.

The third reason was safety. A simple, neutral logo is hard to criticize. It doesn't offend anyone, it doesn't look dated right away, and it's easy to approve in a meeting. That last part matters more than most people admit.

The clearest example came from luxury fashion, which is usually where you'd expect the most personality. In 2018 Burberry swapped its long-standing serif wordmark and knight emblem for a plain, bold sans-serif, and it wasn't alone. Several of the biggest fashion houses made nearly the same move within a year or two, and side by side their logos became difficult to tell apart.

Why it's fading

The trouble with everyone solving the same problem the same way is that the solution stops meaning anything. When one brand goes minimal in a crowded, busy market, it stands out. When every brand goes minimal, minimal becomes the new background noise.

By the early 2020s, people had seen the same clean, flat look so many times that it started to read as generic rather than modern. In 2023, Burberry reversed course, bringing serif details back into its wordmark and reviving an equestrian knight symbol from its archive. Creative Bloq's coverage of the change captured how many designers reacted: with relief, and with the sense that years of bland uniformity might finally be ending.

There's also a newer reason. As more images, websites and ads get produced quickly and cheaply, a lot of what people see online has started to feel overly polished and interchangeable. In Creative Bloq's roundup of 2026 typography trends, designers described a kind of visual fatigue with that uniform look and a pull toward type that feels grounded, textured and a little imperfect.

What's replacing it

The broad direction right now is warmer and more human. You'll see it in a few specific places:

• Serif typefaces, especially ones with strong contrast between thick and thin strokes, which carry a sense of craft and history.

• Hand-drawn or slightly irregular details that look like a person made them rather than a template.

• Warmer, earthier color palettes in place of the single bright tech blue or flat black.

• Brands that sound like people, with copy that has an actual point of view instead of neutral corporate phrasing.

A lot of this is healthy. For small businesses in particular, a brand that feels human is usually a better fit than one that tries to look like a software company, because the owner and the people doing the work are a big part of what customers are buying.

Why the pendulum keeps swinging

Here's the part worth sitting with. The brands that went warm and serif first stood out because they looked different from the crowd, not because serifs are better than sans-serifs. The same thing was true of the brands that went minimal first a decade ago.

Trends change because everyone makes the same move. A few brands do something different and it works, so others copy it, and eventually the different thing becomes the default. Once every coffee shop, law firm and skincare line has the same elegant serif and the same earthy palette, that becomes the new blanding, and the pendulum starts swinging again.

Bentzion Goldman of Mother Design made a related point in Creative Boom at the start of 2026: the bigger risk for a brand today isn't bad design, it's design that's perfectly competent and completely forgettable. The rebrands he pointed to as working were the ones whose unexpected choices came from who the company really is.

What this means for a small business

If you're a business owner wondering whether your logo looks dated, the takeaway isn't "switch to a serif." It's that following the trend is the move most likely to make you look like everyone else in a few years.

A better question is what's actually true about your business, and whether your brand says it clearly. We wrote more about that in Position Before Style, and about the practical decision of whether to update in Should Your Business Follow the Serif Trend?. Whatever you land on, the brands that last are the ones that pick something true and use it the same way everywhere, long after the trend that inspired it has moved on.

Styles come and go every few years. A clear idea of who you are and who you're for stays useful for as long as the business is open.