Not all, but a ton of these have everything to do with the profit motive and how everything is being cost cut to the bone.
- Simplified, bland corporate logos can be endlessly copied, moved and placed on canvasses and into a variety of mixed media. A bland, simplified logo is just at home plastered across packaging as it is painted on a piece of glass as it is cast in plastic and used as a decoration as it is floating atop stock footage as it is embossed in plastic on the side of a product. Design once, use everywhere, refresh occasionally.
- Five-over-ones are a response as outlined in the piece to building codes and space constraints. It's the tallest you can safely build a structure without using any steel, and the principle materials are concrete and wood which are very cheap. It can be configured as a mix of residential and commercial properties which means you have an inherent diversity in your investment as a landlord, or just as easily be 100% of either without many foundational changes.
- Corporate campuses have homogenized because of deregulation in corporate taxes and payment schemes, which incentivizes less investment in "cool shit" for your business. Why spend tons of money on a fancy headquarters with the top end of everything when instead you could just as easily give yourself all that money via stock buybacks, and then spend it on a yacht? And it's not like your competitors or customers give half a shit anymore, they all work in equally boring and dull campuses.
- To most people unfortunate enough to live in areas where cars are a necessity, they are at best, a convenient alternative to walking and at worst, an ongoing tax on their livelihood that must be paid. Your average Joe or Jane cares that a car is reliable and gets good fuel economy. The only people who care about looks are those that are status obsessed, and to them, the logo means far more than anything on the actual bodywork. Most of the status enabled vehicles are also identical to the cheaper ones, differed only by badges. It isn't even just platforms as the article says; tons of vehicles are outright the same damn vehicle being sold under a number of brands and models... because it's cheaper.
And as for less obvious things like AirBnBs and Coffee shops, it's just cheaper to imitate what's already working than doing any work to see what might be more interesting. Yeah those particular looks won out, but odds are that's less because of anything inherent to them, and more because it just... did, a no more consequential decision on the part of the universe than which specific fish happened to get legs right the first time. But for it being a different fish, maybe we'd all have legs that curved backwards instead of forwards at the knee.
And instagram face is what it is, as the article says, because of Kim Kardashian. Because she certainly didn't originate the concept of being famous for being famous, but she did perfect it, utterly buff it to a mirror shine, and what is being an influencer if not that?
- Simplified, bland corporate logos can be endlessly copied, moved and placed on canvasses and into a variety of mixed media. A bland, simplified logo is just at home plastered across packaging as it is painted on a piece of glass as it is cast in plastic and used as a decoration as it is floating atop stock footage as it is embossed in plastic on the side of a product. Design once, use everywhere, refresh occasionally.
- Five-over-ones are a response as outlined in the piece to building codes and space constraints. It's the tallest you can safely build a structure without using any steel, and the principle materials are concrete and wood which are very cheap. It can be configured as a mix of residential and commercial properties which means you have an inherent diversity in your investment as a landlord, or just as easily be 100% of either without many foundational changes.
- Corporate campuses have homogenized because of deregulation in corporate taxes and payment schemes, which incentivizes less investment in "cool shit" for your business. Why spend tons of money on a fancy headquarters with the top end of everything when instead you could just as easily give yourself all that money via stock buybacks, and then spend it on a yacht? And it's not like your competitors or customers give half a shit anymore, they all work in equally boring and dull campuses.
- To most people unfortunate enough to live in areas where cars are a necessity, they are at best, a convenient alternative to walking and at worst, an ongoing tax on their livelihood that must be paid. Your average Joe or Jane cares that a car is reliable and gets good fuel economy. The only people who care about looks are those that are status obsessed, and to them, the logo means far more than anything on the actual bodywork. Most of the status enabled vehicles are also identical to the cheaper ones, differed only by badges. It isn't even just platforms as the article says; tons of vehicles are outright the same damn vehicle being sold under a number of brands and models... because it's cheaper.
And as for less obvious things like AirBnBs and Coffee shops, it's just cheaper to imitate what's already working than doing any work to see what might be more interesting. Yeah those particular looks won out, but odds are that's less because of anything inherent to them, and more because it just... did, a no more consequential decision on the part of the universe than which specific fish happened to get legs right the first time. But for it being a different fish, maybe we'd all have legs that curved backwards instead of forwards at the knee.
And instagram face is what it is, as the article says, because of Kim Kardashian. Because she certainly didn't originate the concept of being famous for being famous, but she did perfect it, utterly buff it to a mirror shine, and what is being an influencer if not that?