We All Drew the Same Logo
Some brands borrowed a specific mark. The rest of us just dissolved into the category. Either way: cover the name, and there’s nothing left that’s ours.
Scroll through the apps an ordinary person in Iran opens every day and something starts to itch. Snapp. Tapsi. Filimo. Filmnet. Rubika. All good products. But sit with the logos a second too long and you start seeing other things underneath them. Progress Profiles. Ornikar. Commerzbank. F‑Secure. A stock icon you’re fairly sure you’ve scrolled past in some marketplace. The shapes feel pre-owned. You’ve met them somewhere, wearing a different name.
And it’s not only a local thing. Line up the finance apps — a neobank, a wallet, a BNPL service, Blu Bank somewhere in there — hide the names, and try to match each logo to its owner. You can’t. Lowercase wordmark, a soft geometric sans, one little abstract mark, and blue. It is always blue.
So our logos look the same. Fine. The thing nobody seems to separate out is that this happens for two completely different reasons, and you can’t fix them the same way.
Two problems, not one
The first is the plain look-alike: one mark sitting suspiciously close to one other, specific mark. That’s the list above. Sometimes it’s on purpose, because borrowing the warmth of a brand people already trust is the oldest shortcut in the business. Sometimes it’s an accident — two companies in the same trade reach for the same obvious symbol and collide (Pepsi and Korean Air ended up with nearly the same swoosh and never spoke). And a lot of the time it’s just everyone pulling references off the same three moodboards. I’m not here to litigate who meant what. The user can’t see intent. They just see two logos they can’t keep straight.
The second one is quieter, and more interesting. Nobody is copying anybody. The whole category just drifts. Everyone files down their own edges until the shelf looks like a single brand with a dozen names on it. The branding people call it blanding, and Blu Bank is sitting right inside it, comfortably, next to every neobank on the planet.
One is borrowing a specific face. The other is losing your own. Worth taking separately.
When you borrow someone else’s mark
The pull is obvious. The fastest way to look established is to look like something already established. A mark that rhymes with a trusted one inherits a little of that trust before you’ve earned a cent of it. Free credibility. And like every free thing, you pay for it on the way out.
The bill comes in two parts. There’s the trademark exposure, which is the part everyone worries about and the smaller risk in practice. The bigger one is strategic, and it’s almost invisible while it’s happening: every bit of recognition you build also points at the brand you resemble. You spend your marketing budget and some of it lands on their doorstep. You’ve made yourself easy to confuse with a company you don’t control. That’s not embarrassing so much as expensive, and as we’ll get to, it’s also a security problem.
Blanding: the slow disappearing act
The second kind has a name and a rough birthday. It picked up speed around 2017–2018, first and loudest with the luxury houses, who took a generation of distinctive wordmarks and flattened them all into the same tall, bold, all-caps sans. Fintech went the opposite way typographically lowercase, friendly, soft and arrived at the exact same place: a logo engineered to not be noticed.
You know the recipe by heart even if you’ve never written it down. All lowercase, so it reads “startup” and not “institution.” A geometric sans in one weight, drawn to survive at 16 pixels rather than to look good on a letterhead. One abstract mark that holds up as a favicon and an app icon. And the blue. The point of the whole thing is to be impossible to misread, which it achieves, at the cost of being impossible to remember.
This isn’t laziness, and I think pretending it is misses what’s actually happening. Blanding is the rational answer to a stack of real pressures. Screens are the canvas now: your logo has to work as an app icon and a 24px nav element and an animated splash long before anyone sees it big, and detail dies at that size while simplicity scales down clean. The app store turned every identity into a fight over one rounded square. Blue and lowercase and round corners genuinely do read as “safe, modern, friendly” the problem is that everyone knows they read that way, so everyone reaches for them at once. We’re all in the same software pulling from the same handful of grotesques, and a sans-serif just doesn’t have many knobs to turn, so we keep landing on the same note. And a bland mark sails through stakeholder review and ages slowly and offends nobody, which in a world where every rebrand gets dunked on within the hour starts to feel a lot like being smart.
So I get it. For a young product that needs to look trustworthy today, on a phone, to a skeptical stranger, the safe blue mark is a defensible bet. It’s legible everywhere, it drops cleanly into a design system, it animates without breaking, it’s cheap to ship and maintain. None of that is wrong. It only goes wrong when “trustworthy today” quietly turns into the entire plan.
Recognized isn’t the same as remembered
Here’s the part that comes from data, not taste.
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The Ehrenberg-Bass crowd — the How Brands Grow people — have spent years showing that brands mostly grow by being easy to bring to mind in the moment someone’s choosing. They call it mental availability, and the things that build it are distinctive assets: colours, shapes, sounds, characters. You can score any of them on two axes. Fame, meaning how many people link it to you. And uniqueness, meaning how exclusively it points at you and not at the guy next to you.
Both flavours of sameness destroy the same axis. A borrowed mark fails on uniqueness because it points at two brands at once. A bland mark fails on uniqueness because it points at the whole category. Either way your logo can be recognized perfectly and still summon nobody in particular. People don’t study the subtle differences between options. They grab whatever surfaces in memory first. If your cue surfaces “fintech app” instead of “us,” you did the work for the entire category and got none of the credit.
A logo you can’t tell apart from its neighbours isn’t a brand asset. It’s wallpaper with your name on it.
And yes, it’s a UX problem
The branding teams file all this under marketing. From where we sit it’s also usability, and that version of the argument has more teeth.
Recognition is a task people perform, not an abstract feeling. Finding the right app on a cluttered home screen, the right tab out of twenty, the right option in a list of payment methods that runs almost entirely on the eyes, on shape and colour, before any reading happens. When your icon is interchangeable with a competitor’s, you’ve quietly added friction and error to something users do dozens of times a day. That’s not soft brand equity. That’s a thumb landing on the wrong app.
People love to cite Jakob’s Law here users want your thing to behave like the others they already know and they’re right, about interaction. Conform on the login flow, the tab bar, the checkout. Please. But a logo’s job was never comprehension, it’s identification, and those are different jobs. Matching the category’s patterns lowers the user’s effort. Matching the category’s identity erases the one thing that was supposed to be yours. We blur the two and conform on both.
The sharpest cost is one nobody designs for. When a local app is hard to tell from a foreign brand, and when every bank and wallet melts into the same blue, you’ve taken away the user’s quickest authenticity check. Is this the real Snapp or a clone? Did I just put my bank password into the right blue app or a convincing fake? A look-alike actively invites that doubt. Blanding just removes the cue someone would have used to catch the fake. A truly ownable identity is a low-grade anti-spoofing tool, and sameness files it down to nothing. The people who lose most are the older, less digitally fluent users who get targeted by fraud first and the harm is sitting there inside a decision we made for aesthetic reasons.
So what do you actually do
Not this: more ornament for its own sake, and definitely not borrowing a foreign mark to look legit. The 16px favicon is a real constraint and a good simple mark is hard, honest work. The move isn’t to shout louder with the logo. It’s to stop making the logo carry your whole identity by itself, and to stop renting that identity from someone else.
A few things that work:
Conform where it helps the person and diverge where it builds memory. Match the category on patterns and on the baseline “yes, this is a safe financial product” signals. Then spend your distinctiveness somewhere the logo isn’t.
Spread that distinctiveness across the whole system instead of cramming it into one mark. A colour you actually own not the category blue, your blue, used relentlessly. A way things move. An illustration style. A layout that’s recognizably yours. A sound. And a character or mascot, which is one of the most ownable and hardest-to-clone assets a product can have precisely because it can’t collapse into a geometric default. If your team already has one, that’s not a decoration. It’s the most defensible asset you’ve got. Don’t let anyone flatten it.
Test recognition with the name hidden. Show people your colour, your icon silhouette, your loading animation, and ask whose it is. If they shrug, you don’t have a distinctive asset. You have a category convention with your name taped to it.
And change your story far more often than your codes. Distinctiveness only compounds if you hold still long enough for it to. The itch to redesign because the mark “feels tired” is almost always the team’s fatigue, not the user’s they see it a fraction as often as you do.
For Iranian teams especially, the two temptations turn out to be the same illness. Reaching for a foreign brand’s credibility and reaching for the category’s trust-blue are both ways of trading your own distinctiveness for borrowed safety. Borrowed safety was never yours, and it can be repossessed.
The one question
All of this collapses into a single test you can run on any mark, including your own. Cover the name. Is anything left on the screen still ours?
For a borrowed logo the honest answer is “yes, but it belongs to someone else.” For a bland one it’s “no, it belongs to the category.” Neither of those is yours. Making it yours is the entire job and it almost never lives in the logo.
Notes: the “blanding” framing leans on writing from Siegel+Gale, Flux Branding, DPDK and VelvetShark; the distinctiveness argument comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow and Jenni Romaniuk’s Building Distinctive Brand Assets). The Iranian look-alike examples are cases that have been discussed publicly.
The logo pairs are real, identifiable brand marks, shown here as examples for design criticism and commentary. They remain the trademarks of their respective owners.
