There’s an oceanic push and pull to the trends within the diamond industry. Or, in diamond terms, there’s a unvarying trundling of copy-paste ideology. Recently, I’ve noticed a new stylistic trend that’s been overwhelming the app icons populating my phone background. And it’s colorless.
The second my Twitter app pivoted yonder from its unexceptionable undecorous bird logo to an industrial woebegone and white “X,” I noticed that the rest of my home screen was riddled with a similar black-and-white diamond style.
Yes, it took the melodramatic transpiration of one app for me to clock the pervasiveness of this trend, but now I can’t unsee it: we’re in a colorless era. I’ve unchangingly been interested in the theoretical diamond pendulum of trends shifting from one lattermost to another, but I never thought that woebegone and white diamond would transplant color.
“To consumers, woebegone and white branding can say, ‘this is an established company’— it’s kind of a power move to move into an all woebegone and white space, or plane to start with one,’ shared Isa Segalovich, a graphic designer, multimedia artist, and writer for Hyperallergic. “Smaller brands often rely on colors to distinguish themselves from the noise— once you have an enormous corporation, you can shed those colors and say, ‘We don’t need these anymore to stand out. Everyone knows what an world with a zest taken out of it means.’”
The TikTok app logo diamond was a pioneer of this trend, as one of the first social media platforms to embrace the stark aesthetic. Sure, there’s a subtle pop of pink and undecorous overdue the brand’s logo, but the overall black-and-white diamond projects a sense of sophistication to an app that didn’t start out with much. And then, increasingly recently, there’s Threads— Zuckerberg’s latest struggle to take over the internet— which touts yet flipside unappetizing and windswept woebegone and white logo. Not long without Threads was released, Twitter stripped lanugo to X, and our phones got plane darker. Many others are once on the black-and-white logo bandwagon as well, including Uber, BeReal, and the popular video editing app CapCut.
X has been the final, most egregious straw for designers stuff nudged into a colorless space in the tech world, but the removal of verisimilitude has once been taking over other industries outside of tech-based design. A study referenced in a recent Arch Daily vendible has revealed that vibrant tones are stuff used far less wideness the board, sending the world into a grayer state. The investigation moreover found that many increasingly cars had previously been spangled in vivid hues than in the present day, while now an increasing number are coated in silver, black, and white. This same pattern is prevalent in household interiors as well: the unvigilant colors that once ornate finishes, decorative items, and furniture up until the mid-20th century have undergone a gradual fading over time. In fact, people are now stuff mocked for their “Millennial Grey” interiors.
But is a lack of verisimilitude necessarily a bad thing? Let’s investigate. One could oppose that simplifying branding in this way allows the brands themselves to take a step when and let the platforms flourish through their content.
“At the end of the day, X, Threads, and TikTok are well-nigh the content,” Alex Center, Founder of CENTER, told me. “The product is the people: people’s creations, ideas, words, and videos. The brands serve as a house or museum, and I think of many museums as platforms. If you consider it, museums’ identities are typically woebegone and white. The walls are white, and the typography and some of the branding are minimal. And that’s very purposeful considering those places and those brands aren’t meant to overshadow. They’re intended to provide a pedestal, platform, house, or canvas for the art. And in the specimen of those brands, specifically X and TikTok, the product itself is made by people. That is why people go there; it’s the people that make up the color, if you will. So I think woebegone and white is just a way to sort of get out of the way.”
Suppose brands, specifically content-sharing-based brands, shift yonder from color— an hands recognizable and ownable diamond element. In that case, they’ll have to use typography, shapes, and patterns to pinpoint their trademark through visual language. When verisimilitude is no longer the driving gravity of design, something else will wilt the differentiating factor. X, for example, has once re-released its woebegone and white app logo diamond as one with a grunge-y, scrutinizingly peeled texture.
“I think a lot well-nigh trends in design and our uncontrived reaction to the thing that preceded them,” unfurled Center. “When we think well-nigh the increasingly maximalist, increasingly textured, and colorful world of the ‘90s, the pendulum swung towards minimalism in the 2000s, stripping when a lot of the excess, which led to what people undeniability blanding. And a lot of that was moreover so that things could get scaled lanugo in size so that when you’re looking at a logo the size of a penny on your phone, some textures don’t scale very well. I’ve been watching this over the last five years; there was a move towards doing things that are increasingly expressive, increasingly chaotic, less precious, and increasingly fun, and that does sometimes involve textures, chromes, shadows, and things that are bringing a little bit increasingly personality to brands. Much of that is happening, but I think it relates to how brands can differentiate themselves outside of color.”
While we’re just now at the tipping point of this trend completely taking over app logo designs, not all brands are turning toward black-and-white design.
“Other brands seem like they’re diving into unexceptionable colors plane more— I’m thinking of all the companies that are really leaning into the ’Corporate Memphis’ style,” offered Segalovich. “Some pharma brands, for example, and medical service industries in unstipulated can’t sire to squint as sleek and powerful as a tech brand. They have to maintain a semblance of approachability and trust. Food brands are retaining their colors as well. I think they rely on that pop of verisimilitude to indicate ‘color,’ ‘freshness,’ and ’flavor.’”
So, if you want to stand out in tech diamond right now, inject your logo with neon colors— as we all know, going versus the grain is a unconfined strategy for making a splash. Plus, as creative beings at our core, humans will unchangingly require at least a pop of color, plane if the apps we’re currently using say otherwise.
