You've seen it. You're scrolling through a new app or walking past a fresh tech startup’s billboard and you get that weird sense of déjà vu. Every "modern" brand uses the same rounded sans-serif typeface. Every interface has the same generous whitespace and those "friendly" pastel illustrations with disproportionately large limbs. It feels like a glitch in the matrix, but it’s actually a predictable economic phenomenon. We’re living through the peak of winner takes all theory in visual design, where a tiny handful of aesthetic styles capture nearly 100% of the market share, leaving everyone else to look like a relic of 2005.
It's frustrating.
👉 See also: Vandenberg Space Force Base Launch Schedule: Why Your Backyard Is Shaking Today
Design used to be about differentiation. Now, it’s often about "de-risking." When a specific visual language—think of Apple’s glassmorphism or Google’s Material Design—proves it can convert users and rake in billions, the incentive to deviate drops to zero. Why gamble on a radical new art style when the "winner" has already provided a blueprint for success? This isn't just about being lazy. It’s a systemic outcome of how global digital platforms scale.
The Brutal Economics of the "Winning" Look
Winner-takes-all dynamics usually happen in markets where the top performer gets an outsized reward, while the runner-up gets basically nothing. In the world of visual design, this "reward" is user trust and cognitive ease.
Think about the "hamburger" menu icon. It’s not particularly beautiful. Honestly, it’s kinda boring. But because it won the early battle for mobile navigation dominance, every designer uses it. If you try to be a "creative" rebel and use a circle with three dots or a custom star icon, your user engagement will probably tank. Users don't want to learn your unique visual language; they want to get things done.
This creates a feedback loop. Because the winning design works, more people use it. Because more people use it, it becomes the standard. Once it’s the standard, any deviation feels like a mistake.
Economist Sherwin Rosen wrote about this back in 1981 in his paper The Economics of Superstars. He argued that in businesses with low reproduction costs—like software or digital assets—the highest-quality provider can serve the entire market. In design, once a "best" UI pattern is established, it can be copied infinitely for free. The "Superstar" design wins everything.
Complexity vs. The Algorithmic Aesthetic
We have to talk about the "Blanding" of brands. You know the ones—Burberry, Saint Laurent, and Berluti all ditching their unique, heritage-driven logos for nearly identical, bold sans-serifs. This is winner takes all theory in visual design stripped down to its barest bones.
These brands aren't losing their minds. They are optimizing for the smartphone screen.
When your primary touchpoint with a customer is a 6-inch OLED display, high-contrast, simple, and scalable designs win every single time. A complex, serif-heavy logo might look gorgeous on a physical shop in London, but it looks like a blurry mess on a mobile Instagram ad. The "winner" in this environment is the design that survives the compression of a social media feed.
- Network Effects: When everyone uses Figma and follows the same "Best Practices" blogs, the tool itself starts to dictate the output.
- The Pinterest-ification of Taste: Designers are constantly looking at the same mood boards. If a specific 3D render style gets 50,000 likes, 5,000 designers will try to replicate it the next day.
- Safety in Numbers: For a CMO at a Fortune 500 company, "looking like Airbnb" is a safe bet. Looking like something nobody has ever seen before is a career risk.
Real-World Casualties of the Winner-Takes-All Loop
Let's look at the "Corporate Memphis" style. You’ve seen it—the flat, colorful humans with blue skin and tiny heads. It was pioneered by companies like Facebook (Meta) and Slack. It "won" because it was scalable, inclusive, and easy for non-illustrators to mimic using component libraries.
But there’s a cost. When one style wins this big, the "visual ecosystem" loses its biodiversity.
I remember when the web felt weird. In the early 2000s, Flash sites were chaotic and difficult to navigate, sure, but they were distinct. Today, a banking app and a meditation app often use the same iconography and the same geometric font (usually something like Inter or Circular). They are both chasing the same "winning" aesthetic because it signals "modernity" and "reliability."
The problem is that when everyone looks like the winner, no one stands out. We’ve reached a point of "peak sameness" where the winner-takes-all theory has actually started to cannibalize the primary goal of design: brand recognition.
📖 Related: Why Thinking About Me and You Together Changes How We Use AI
How to Survive a Monoculture
If you're a designer or a business owner, this looks like a trap. If you follow the winner, you're invisible. If you ignore the winner, you're "unintuitive."
The trick is finding the "Uncanny Valley" of design. You want to be familiar enough that users know how to use your product, but weird enough that they remember who you are. Look at brands like MSCHF or Liquid Death. They explicitly reject the "winning" visual theories of their categories (tech and bottled water, respectively).
Liquid Death doesn't look like a refreshing mountain spring; it looks like a tallboy of beer or a hardcore punk zine. By aggressively ignoring the "winner takes all" aesthetic of the beverage industry, they became a winner in their own niche.
Actionable Insights for the "Same-y" Era
You don't have to be a clone. To navigate the reality of winner takes all theory in visual design, you need a strategy that balances psychological comfort with visual soul.
- Identify the "Non-Negotiables": Use the "winning" patterns for things that shouldn't require thought. Don't reinvent the checkout cart icon or the "Settings" gear. Let the winner have the utility.
- Inject "Friction" on Purpose: Where the winners are smooth and corporate, try being slightly "textured." Use grain, use asymmetrical layouts, or use a typeface with a weird "g" that people haven't seen a thousand times.
- Audit Your Inspiration: If your entire team is looking at the Dribbble "Popular" page, you are going to produce a "winner-takes-all" clone. Force yourself to look at physical archives, old 1970s print ads, or brutalist architecture.
- Test for "Blanding": Put your design next to your three biggest competitors. If you swap the logos, does the design still feel like you? If the answer is yes, you've been swallowed by the theory.
- Focus on "High-Fidelity" Personality: Use the "winner" layout for your UX, but invest heavily in custom photography or unique motion design. People remember how an app moves more than they remember the specific hex code of the buttons.
The dominance of a single style is rarely permanent. Eventually, the "winning" aesthetic becomes so ubiquitous that it starts to feel "cheap" or "old." We saw it with the drop-shadow heavy "Web 2.0" look, and we're seeing it now with the minimalist flat-design era. The next big winner will likely be the one that successfully rebels against the current one.
Start looking for the cracks in the current "winning" aesthetic. That's where the next decade of design is hiding. Stop trying to win the last war; the market is already saturated with those victors. Instead, build something that makes the current winners look boring.