Hi friends,

Well... I just had one of the most distracting weekends of my life. I sat down at my computer on Saturday morning, opened Twitter, screen-grabbed a picture of some logos, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: "What's causing all these logos to look the same?"​

In the 48 hours since, my Twitter thread has gone viral beyond anything else I've ever published. Thousands of replies. 245,000 likes. 26 million impressions.

Gotta be honest though. Going viral like that isn't an entirely enjoyable phenomenon. All the attention activated the fight-or-flight mode in my teeny tiny brain, which really can't handle this much attention. Thankfully, most of the focus was on the ideas, not on me. Some of the responses were extremely insightful too. They built upon ideas I've been exploring in essays like After Minimalism, The Microwave Economy, and The Great Flattening.

In today's Musings, I'll re-share the thread. In the next Musings, I'll summarize the responses. But first, here's what I want to share this week:

1. ​Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively: That's my motto for improvement at everything. I want to study my craft like a scientist, but execute like an artist. In this essay, I tell the story of Bryson DeChambeau, one of the world's most fascinating athletes. If you prefer a YouTube video, you can watch it here.
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2. Interview about Business Writing: Sam Corcos, the founder of Levels, interviewed me about how to communicate inside a company, both to build relationships and be more efficient. Watch the interview here.​
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3. My Interview with Balaji Srinivasan: This is a conversation with one of the most imaginative people I know. Marc Andreessen once called him "the most generative person I've ever met." Balaji and I talked about his strategies for being more productive, how he identifies top talent, and even how to reverse the aging process. (Listen to the podcast here: Apple | Spotify).

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Why Do Logos Look so Similar?

Note: I edited the original Twitter thread down for readability. You can read the full one here.​

My best guess of why these logos look the same comes down to two factors: software and the Internet.

1) Software: Designers all use the same tools, which exert the same unconscious forces on their creative process.

2) The Internet: Aesthetic diversity is bound to decline in such a hyper-connected world.

Two of the more interesting responses from readers included: "This is what happens when the creative dept is overrun by the marketing dept. Being data-driven is the death of art," and "All businesses are online now and sans serif is among the easiest font set to read online."

Though we've never had so many options, we all trust the same curators with our buying decisions. Sometimes, it’s Wirecutter. Sometimes, it’s mass department stores that homogenize the world while advertising the illusion of choice.

Simon Sarris calls this "The Aesthetic Deep State," and wrote: "As the availability of stores like Home Depot (founded 1978) and Lowes (21 stores in the 1960s) spread — both have over 2000 stores each today — the commodification of house hardware intensified. Today it is easier to find the things you are looking for quickly, for example, if you need a replacement doorknob. This also means that everyone’s doorknobs look the same. As manufacturers and distributors consolidate while carrying only a few brands, the details of houses homogenize. As they converge in style, people stop considering the hardware as a choice at all, and so everything becomes even more of the same."

How much of these homogenization trends come from trying to quantify beauty?

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig argued that quality can't be defined because it transcends language when he wrote: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

As a society, it’s as if we’ve read too many blog posts about the 80/20 rule. When you strip away too much of the non-essential, you lose the craftsmanship that endows objects with soul and makes life meaningful.

Look at how Pepsi's logo has evolved. The brand identity has become flat, bland, sterile, timid, and unimaginative.

Maybe globalization is to blame.

The more you scale, the more you need to appeal to different kinds of people, which sucks the personality out of what you're doing.

Writers aren't immune to these trends. It seems like every non-fiction book follows the same blueprint of simple words, short sentences, and research papers to justify every obvious intuition. And yeah, it's efficient, but where are the unhinged Hunter S. Thompsons of the world?

Architecture follows a similar pattern. I keep seeing the same kinds of modern houses that look like they’ve been copied & pasted by a slapdash architect. Some might call these homes “minimalist,” but I think they're just soulless copycats of each other.

So, I’d love to hear from you… what is going on here?

Photo of the Week

A few months ago, I visited the Le Corbusier Hotel in France's second-biggest city: Marseille.
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I've long been interested in Le Corbusier's philosophy of architecture because so much of the push towards bland buildings (and maybe even bland logos) began with the Modernist movement, where Le Corbusier played a prominent role.

Modernism was an Industrial Revolution aesthetic. As Alana Newhouse wrote in Tablet Magazine: "Modernism and the Machine Age brought with them their own features: Anti-classicalism; anti-Victorianism; the power of science; the absence of filigree; an emphasis on the future over the past, and the valorization of machine production and engineering as the highest forms of human creativity."

If I could summarize all that, I'd say efficiency and a rejection of the past.

Products like Ford's Model T promised the benefits of scale. For the first time, everyone could own a car. But mass volume demanded sameness. As the saying goes: "People could have whatever color car they wanted, so long as it was black." Because of that standardization, Ford cars were extremely affordable. The Modernists asked: What if we brought that philosophy to the rest of society?

Historically, people have looked to their ancestors for wisdom. This, you could say, is the basis of school. At the end of the day, almost every subject is essentially a history class. You learn the best of what the people discovered before you, so you can eventually build upon it. With modernism, people increasingly saw the past as wicked and immoral, and the future as a utopian improvement. The quest for utopia inspired movements like the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier to write manifestos about their vision for society.

Much of their rejection of the past was stylistic. To contrast ornate designs like the ones found in the Baroque style, they saw moral value in the simplicity of clean lines, flat surfaces, and sharp right angles.

Perhaps, the rise of Modernism paved the way for the logo homogenization we see today.