Why Everything Looks the Same in the Age of Average
The Story
Everything looks the same because entire industries now optimize for the average, and the sameness runs from coffee shops and cars to faces, films and logos.
The convergence has a precedent: over 11 days researchers polled 1,001 Americans about the art they wanted, and when Komar and Melamid painted the answer the same blue landscape came back from Russia, China, France and Kenya.
The category evidence stacks up fast, with monochrome cars climbing from about 40 percent of sales in 1996 to 80 percent twenty years later, fillers at an average $683 a syringe pulling millions of faces toward one profile, and sequels and reboots rising from a quarter of top grossing films before 2000 to more than half every year since 2010.
None of it requires a conspiracy, because wind tunnels, building codes, shared vehicle platforms, reused floor plans and moodboards drawn from the same online sources all reward the safe option.
Consumer testing does the rest, and Steven Soderbergh blames it directly for the identical posters outside every cinema, since anything genuinely odd scores badly with a research panel and never survives to production.
The losers are the designers and directors whose stranger work dies in a research panel, and the readers and viewers left choosing between near identical options.
That leaves an opening rather than a lament, because a category where every rival has settled on one look is a category any brand can own by refusing to match it.
The convergence has a precedent: over 11 days researchers polled 1,001 Americans about the art they wanted, and when Komar and Melamid painted the answer the same blue landscape came back from Russia, China, France and Kenya.
The category evidence stacks up fast, with monochrome cars climbing from about 40 percent of sales in 1996 to 80 percent twenty years later, fillers at an average $683 a syringe pulling millions of faces toward one profile, and sequels and reboots rising from a quarter of top grossing films before 2000 to more than half every year since 2010.
None of it requires a conspiracy, because wind tunnels, building codes, shared vehicle platforms, reused floor plans and moodboards drawn from the same online sources all reward the safe option.
Consumer testing does the rest, and Steven Soderbergh blames it directly for the identical posters outside every cinema, since anything genuinely odd scores badly with a research panel and never survives to production.
The losers are the designers and directors whose stranger work dies in a research panel, and the readers and viewers left choosing between near identical options.
That leaves an opening rather than a lament, because a category where every rival has settled on one look is a category any brand can own by refusing to match it.
Why It Matters
Sameness is a pricing problem, not an aesthetic complaint. A category where every rival has settled on one look is a category where only discount competes, which is why the argument landed harder in marketing than in design criticism. Not everyone accepts it. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution called it one of the best essays of the year, then argued it underrates the heterogeneity the internet and GPT models build at the edges, where niche supply pushes the mainstream middle to conform harder. Murrell has kept pressing the case, reworking it for brands at Branding Strategy Insider in July 2026. Watch whether the next wave of generative design tools, which average their training data by construction, proves him right.
Go Deeper
Read the original reporting at Alex Murrell.
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