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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…