Recovering from Minimalism
In recent years, minimalism has reigned supreme in the world of branding and design. Emerging and established brands alike embraced clean lines, simplicity, and stripped-down aesthetics across various touchpoints, particularly packaging and design guideline toolkits. However, a shift in the culture is quietly rumbling as brand identities have been compromised in the pursuit of being on-trend.
The allure of cleanliness has taken brand-stripping to a new level, with even century-old luxury brands discarding their iconic typeface serifs in favor of simple, blocky, sans-serif lettering. This shift has created an ownability crisis where brands risk blending into the sea of sameness. While minimalism continues to have its place, there is a growing recognition that design has abandoned the tried and true for full-throttle simplicity.
Where minimalism works
Before delving into the changing landscape, it's important to acknowledge the merits of intentional minimalism. In certain contexts, such as online storefronts and webpages, simplicity remains crucial. Streamlined designs help customers navigate effortlessly, minimizing distractions and focusing attention on key elements. Websites should guide visitors seamlessly from point A to B, while storefronts should facilitate swift transitions from product listings to cart to checkout. In these functional settings, minimalism has proved effective in driving sales conversions and facilitating high-level communication.
Brand dilution
However, the overzealous adoption of minimalism has led to a sacrifice of brand identity. In an attempt to stay modern, many brands have abandoned their unique visual language and distinctive characteristics. We’re witnessing the erosion of brand heritage and diluting its essence. One of the first casualties of this strategy is differentiating themselves from competitors.
With Gen-Z growing in buying power, they bring a new outlook to shopping and self-expression. If every brand becomes stripped back, there’s less of a draw toward brand loyalty. If they all look the same, the incentive of purchasing based on uniqueness is no longer an option in the buying decision. It robs the consumer of a range of designs. The unique quirk-filled glass bottle is traded for a textureless one with clean lines and non-ownable type. Shelf power disappears.
Correcting the overcorrection
Thankfully, the tides are changing— as they always do— and are sending out early signals of a departure from the clutches of extreme minimalism. Some brands are starting to identify the overcorrection and bring back classic branding elements from decades prior.
Looking at Pepsi, it has started to pull from its legacy design for the 2023 refresh. The beverage giant made its largest brand refresh in 15 years. The most obvious change— moving the brand name back into the logo itself. They also reintroduced black into the logo’s palette, last present in 1962, bringing the in-logo color count to four. In general, early brand logos tend to be more complex to start and then simplify with time. Pepsi is taking a half step back into its visual identity archive while still keeping designs tidy.
For the past decade, Pepsi’s bottle wrapper included the following: a solid color backdrop, the logo, and the brand name in proximity in a simple thin font. Now the font brought into the logo itself is bolder with more complex, ownable typeface quirks.
The best example beyond the logo is Pepsi’s flavored beverage packaging— more detailed than its previous iteration, utilizing small textures and renders. Pepsi is reaching back.
Pepsi hasn't swung back into presenting itself as maximalist, but rather brought classic elements back into the fold and allowed detail previously barred out by minimalism to become more expressive. It’s a slow, purposeful reintroduction, not a drastic overhaul.
More complex cherry renders, detailed textures, reduction of negative space, and wallpaper-style backgrounds
Another place to look is interior design catalogs as designers and brands are shifting back to pushing eclecticism instead of hyper-unified capsule collections. In January of 2023, BBC called it “relaxed minimalism”. It’s about reintroducing personality lost from minimalism while retaining functionality and visual digestibility. There’s a desire for simplicity without it coming at the expense of personality and comfort. Hyper-unified, minimalist styles are univocal to a fault. While interior design is a broader category and not a specific brand, it has a lot to tell us about the shift. It shows what’s happening at the consumer’s most intimate and interacted-with place— the home.
Final thoughts
The strategy retooling is still in its early stages. Even so, many brands will continue to strip themselves down as they’re influenced by what’s currently in-market instead of playing the long game. This is particularly observable in new brands who tend to jump in and copy what’s currently hot in an effort to capitalize on current trends instead of creating a strong, individual foundation first.
Popular design concepts are ever-evolving and there’s no universally correct approach. Branding’s strategic success is more than landing somewhere on a scale of simple to complex: it’s dictated by where we are at this point in time. What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Brands should be fluid but honest. Forward-thinking conversations about being timely versus timeless are essential.
Updated June 26th, 2023