A brand with twenty years of history hires an agency, pays a serious fee, and comes out the other side with a lowercase wordmark in a geometric sans-serif, a flattened version of its old mark, and a palette that reads as "confident tech company" regardless of whether the business sells software, sneakers, or soup. The old logo had quirks. The new one has none. Somewhere a slide deck called this "simplification for the digital age."

This is "blanding," and it has a name because it happened to enough recognizable brands that designers needed a word for it. Johnson & Johnson, Facebook (as Meta), BMW, Pinterest, Spotify and Google have all flattened toward the same visual language over the past decade, trading distinct wordmarks for interchangeable ones, as documented by Shutterstock's design desk. The trend is real enough that a counter-movement, nicknamed "Heritage Maximalism," has emerged specifically to fight it, as reported by Marketing Brew.

The Bold-or-Boring Test

Distinctiveness (0/2). Cover the wordmark and look at the icon alone. Does it reference anything true about this specific company, its name, its history, its category, or is it a rounded abstract shape that a hundred other startups also use this year? A distinctive mark is unmistakably this brand's. This one could belong to anyone with an app icon.

Memorability (1/2). Would a customer recognize this logo scrolling past it in a crowded app store or a busy street, or has it been sanded down until it slides right past the eye? Flattening a mark for "clarity" often trades away the exact quirks that made it stick in memory. Partial credit here because the palette is at least consistent enough to register as "a tech brand," just not as this tech brand.

Position (0/2). A logo is a flag. It should say something can only be this company. If the new mark could be re-labeled with a competitor's name and nobody in a blind test could tell the difference, the flag has been swapped for a beige placeholder.

Craft (2/2). Geometric sans-serifs aren't inherently weak. Helvetica is geometric-adjacent and has served brands for seventy years. The tell isn't the typeface family, it's whether a single custom decision was made: a cut corner, a ligature, a proportion tweak that required someone to actually design rather than select from a dropdown of "modern wordmark" presets. On pure technical execution, this archetype earns its points.

The logo-off test (0/2). Line up the new logo next to five other recent tech or DTC rebrands at the same size, same color treatment. If you need the name typed next to each one to tell them apart, the rebrand has failed at branding's one job: recognition without a label.

Brave vs. default (1/2). Using AI or generators to explore hundreds of directions fast is smart process. Shipping the fourth generated option because it "looked clean" and the deadline was Friday is the default, not the brave move. Half a point for engaging with the process at all, none for where it landed.

Score: 4/12. Verdict: Boring.

Craft earns a real pass because these rebrands are usually well-executed technically, and memorability and brave-vs-default scrape a point each for at least partial engagement. Everything else fails outright, because technical execution was never the actual problem. The problem is a mark with no fingerprint, and no fingerprint means no one remembers your name in the crowd.

The one fix

Keep one visual element from the old identity that customers already associate with the brand, and build the new system around it rather than discarding everything for a clean slate. A single retained detail, a color, a mascot, a specific proportion, gives the new mark something to hang recognition on instead of asking customers to relearn who you are from zero.

A blanded rebrand doesn't just look forgettable, it costs the recognition equity a company spent years building. Creative Hero builds brands that are impossible to ignore. Our Brand Guidelines process is built specifically to find and keep that fingerprint instead of sanding it off. Book a free brand audit.

Sources