Written By Jackson Rowell, Owner, Way Out Custom Branding
For most of the 2010s, brands looked like they came from the same kit: a clean sans-serif wordmark, plenty of white space, one flat color, and often a lowercase name. Designers started calling it “blanding,” and it spread from tech companies to fashion houses to the gym down the street. At the time it made sense. Simple logos hold up on a phone screen, and looking like a successful startup felt like a safe way to become one.
Now things have swung the other way. Serif typefaces, hand-drawn details, warmer colors and brands that feel like a real person made them are showing up everywhere. In Creative Bloq’s roundup of 2026 typography trends, designers pointed to a kind of visual fatigue with overly polished, uniform design, and to serifs as a way of bringing back a sense of craft and history.
I like this shift, and I think a lot of it is healthy. But it’s worth asking why trends change in the first place, because the answer matters more than the trend.
Trends change because everyone makes the same move
When a handful of brands went minimal, they stood out because they looked different from the cluttered logos around them. Then everyone copied them, and minimal stopped meaning anything. The same thing is happening now. The first brands to go warm and serif stood out because they broke from the crowd, not because serifs are better than sans-serifs. Once every coffee shop, law firm and skincare line has the same elegant serif and the same earthy palette, that becomes the new blanding.
Bentzion Goldman of Mother Design made a similar point in Creative Boom: the bigger risk for brands today isn’t bad design but competent, forgettable design. The rebrands that actually work are the ones whose unexpected choices come from who the company really is.
So if you’re a small business owner deciding whether to “update your look,” following the trend is the move most likely to leave you looking like everyone else in a few years. Here’s what I’d do instead.
1. Start with your position, not a style
Before anyone talks about fonts, figure out what’s true about your business that isn’t true about the others in your market. When I worked with Conspiracy Board Shop in Wilmington, the shop was opening in a town that already had established skate shops. Trying to out-cool them wasn’t going to work. What set Conspiracy apart was that the owner is part of the local scene rather than an outside investor chasing a trend, so the brand was built around that, and built to hold up on everything from small stickers to sponsorship banners across town.
2. Find your voice and write it down
A voice is how you sound in captions, emails, signs and on the phone, and it’s harder for a competitor to copy than a typeface. The headline on my own About page reads “Designer by day, mostly a designer by night.” It isn’t trendy. It’s just how I talk: a little dry and self-aware, from a one-person studio that doesn’t pretend to be a big agency. Write down a few words that describe how your business sounds and a few it should never sound like, then check everything you publish against them. I wrote a longer guide to defining and owning a brand voice on our blog.
3. Treat trends as tools, not an identity
If a serif fits your story, like a family business that’s been around for forty years, use one. If your story is fast, technical and modern, a serif might work against you, whatever the design blogs say. Pick the colors and type that match your position, then use them the same way everywhere, because consistency is how people remember you exist. This is also where templated branding tends to fall apart. A template was built for everyone, so it can’t say anything specific about you.
4. Own it boldly
Being bold doesn’t mean being loud. It means committing to a position and a voice and sticking with them long enough for people to recognize you, even when the next trend comes along and your competitors all make the same move again. Trends last a few years. A clear position lasts as long as the business.
About the Author: Jackson Rowell is the founder of Way Out Custom Branding (wayout.design), a brand and web design studio in Wilmington, North Carolina, that helps home-service contractors, local shops and churches build brands that look as credible as the work they do.