In one sentence
Across design, culture, and commerce, the pursuit of broad appeal and efficiency has produced widespread stylistic convergence. Because entire categories now follow predictable conventions, deliberate originality has become both rarer and more commercially distinctive.
Overview
Murrell opens with Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice paintings: surveys in different countries produced nearly identical blue landscapes, suggesting that supposedly individual preferences are more alike than people admit. He uses this as a model for the present: industries repeatedly generate their own “people’s choice”—the safest, most familiar version of a creative solution.
The essay moves through interiors, architecture, cars, physical appearance, media, advertising, and branding. Airbnb-style interiors spread globally; coffee shops and restaurants adopt reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and industrial-minimalist cues; apartment developers repeat five-over-one plans; aerodynamic testing, shared platforms, regulation, and global manufacturing narrow car design; cosmetic procedures, filters, and makeup tutorials create an “Instagram Face”; films, books, and games rely increasingly on franchises and recognizable formulas; and brands converge on flat logos, sans-serif typography, pastel palettes, stock illustrations, repeated ad compositions, and interchangeable taglines.
Murrell suggests several causes: turbulent times may increase demand for familiarity; quantification and optimization reward safe choices; globalized inspiration makes the same references available to everyone; testing eliminates unusual ideas; and corporate consolidation encourages reuse. His conclusion is intentionally strategic rather than merely nostalgic: when every category is crowded with sameness, originality becomes a route to attention and memorability.
Core ideas
Sameness is produced, not accidental
The repeated look of modern culture comes from interacting systems: market research, testing, regulation, cost reduction, platform incentives, shared production infrastructure, and imitation. Different decision-makers can independently arrive at similar results because they face similar constraints and copy the same apparent successes.
Optimization favors the middle
Designing for the broadest audience, the safest test result, or the most efficient manufacturing process tends to remove sharp edges. What is acceptable to many people can become indistinguishable from everything else.
Global reference pools narrow creative thinking
The internet provides more imagery than ever, but designers often draw from the same platforms, moodboards, trends, and visual memes. Abundant references can therefore create narrower ideation—the essay’s “moodboard effect.”
Convergence affects both products and meaning
The problem is not limited to visual style. Franchises, repeated book-title formulas, generic brand language, and similar social-media presentation reduce cultural variety and make experiences less rooted in place, history, or personality.
Distinctiveness is a strategic opportunity
Murrell’s main practical turn is that a saturated category makes difference more valuable. If competitors all behave conventionally, a recognizable departure can earn attention, memory, and positioning—provided it is meaningfully distinctive rather than merely eccentric.
The essay is a pattern catalogue, not a causal proof
Murrell assembles examples and arguments from many writers rather than presenting one systematic empirical study. Its strength is perceptual synthesis: it helps readers notice convergence. Its causal claims remain suggestive, and some examples may reflect changing preferences, safety requirements, or economic trade-offs rather than avoidable creative cowardice.
Practical takeaways
- Audit your category for repeated visual, verbal, structural, and experiential conventions before beginning a project.
- Separate true constraints—safety, accessibility, usability, cost—from inherited habits and copied aesthetics.
- Build inspiration outside the immediate category, platform, and current moodboard ecosystem.
- Ask whether research and testing are measuring immediate preference while accidentally eliminating memorability.
- Use local context, history, materiality, and specific human detail as sources of distinction.
- Treat brand distinctiveness as a system: distinctive form, language, behavior, and customer experience should reinforce one another.
- Do not confuse novelty with differentiation. A strange execution that lacks relevance or recognizability may be less effective than a clear, category-relevant departure.
- Look for “average” competitors as an opening: when everyone promises individuality in the same language, the promise itself may need replacing.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The article sometimes treats visual similarity as cultural decline, although convergence can also reflect useful standardization, accessibility, safety, affordability, or improved function.
- Its examples span many fields and rely heavily on observations and secondary quotations; they illustrate a pattern but do not establish that all categories are becoming less diverse.
- Some claims are time-bound. For example, the article discusses film and automotive trends using data and brand examples available around 2021–2023, not a comprehensive picture of every market today.
- The conclusion is aimed primarily at creative professionals and brands. Deliberate distinctiveness is not automatically ethical, useful, or commercially successful.
- The essay’s tone is polemical: it emphasizes sameness more than counterexamples, subcultures, regional variation, or forms of creativity that are less immediately visible.
Questions worth revisiting
- Where in my own work am I optimizing for approval rather than recognition?
- Which conventions in my category are genuine user requirements, and which are simply copied precedents?
- What would a locally specific version of this project look like?
- Am I using research to discover an opportunity—or to justify the safest familiar answer?
- What distinctive feature could people recognize without seeing the name or logo?
- Would my proposed difference still matter if competitors copied its surface style?
- Which unrelated disciplines, eras, or places could provide more original references?
Return to this when…
Return to this essay when a brief, brand, product, or creative review begins to sound interchangeable with the category around it. Its most useful reminder is simple: the safest answer is often already present everywhere, so distinctiveness must be designed deliberately.