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Yazin Akkawi (INC Magazine)

Why everything looks the same in 2025

The Copy-Paste World

Open your favorite app. Then open another one. Chances are, they both look eerily similar.

Scroll through your favorite apps today — Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn. Notice something? They all start to blur together.

Rounded cards. Bottom navigation bars. Neutral pastels or sleek gradients. A safe sans-serif font like Inter or Roboto. Scroll enough, and you’ll start to wonder: did the same team design all of them?

Now step offline. Look at your laptop, your phone, your smartwatch, your wireless earbuds. Can you honestly tell them apart at a glance? Most are sleek rectangles, brushed aluminum or glass, with rounded corners. Even cars once full of bold identities are converging into aerodynamic blobs designed for efficiency.

It’s not your imagination. From websites to apps, even physical products — everything is converging into a kind of “global design template.” Clean, functional, predictable. But also… boring.

We’re living in a time where innovation often feels like iteration, and originality gets sanded down in the name of scalability, safety, and familiarity.

Why did design, once a playground of experimentation and rule-breaking, start to look like a template kit? And…

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Hriday Checker

Written by Hriday Checker

Hey I'm Hriday, a designer who’s still figuring things out, still messing up now and then, but still deeply in love with the process.

Responses (69)

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I’ve been noticing this too, and honestly—it feels like design has entered its “uniform phase.” Everywhere you look, whether it’s apps, gadgets, or even cars, everything is polished, minimal, and optimized for mass appeal. It’s functional, yes, but…

163

I worked as a designer in the early 2000’s and although the designs overall where not as coherent as the are today, even then there where emerging patterns and trends. Also because of the lack of focus on user experience, the designs where more…

130

The scary thing is users are becoming programmed to respond to these same designs. This can make creating a different design or more fun design tough because you can mentally confuse the user.
It's just like the algo you mentioned. People are being…

38