Open any product launch page in 2026. White background. Sans-serif type. Generous whitespace. A single hero image, tastefully cropped. Perhaps a gradient accent if they're feeling adventurous. It could be a fintech app, a skincare brand, a SaaS dashboard, a restaurant menu. You genuinely cannot tell until you read the copy. And even then, it takes a moment.
We've arrived at peak minimalism. Not the meaningful kind - the kind that started as a radical creative position in the mid-twentieth century, when Dieter Rams was stripping consumer electronics down to their essence and the Swiss were reinventing typography. That minimalism had conviction. It was saying something. What we have now is something else entirely. It's minimalism as camouflage. Minimalism as the path of least resistance. Minimalism as the thing you default to when you don't have a strong enough opinion to do anything else.
How we got here
I understand the appeal, genuinely. After years of Web 2.0's glossy buttons and drop shadows, after the visual noise of early social media, clean felt like a relief. Apple proved that restraint could be a brand identity. Monocle proved that news media could look like art. Bloomberg proved that business publishing didn't need to look like a spreadsheet having a panic attack.
But here's the thing those brands understood that their imitators didn't: minimalism was their specific creative choice, born from their specific values, aimed at their specific audience. It wasn't a universal truth. It was a position. And a position only works when not everyone else is standing in the same spot.
The design tool revolution made it worse. When Figma gave everyone access to the same component libraries, the same auto-layout systems, the same design tokens, convergence was inevitable. Templates breed uniformity. And uniformity, dressed up in enough whitespace, gets mistaken for sophistication.
The case for more
Walk into a Japanese convenience store. The visual density is overwhelming - every surface covered in information, every product screaming for attention, every shelf a riot of colour and typography. By Western minimalist standards, it should be a disaster. It's not. It's one of the most considered retail experiences on earth. Every element is there for a reason. The density is the design.
Think about Alessandro Michele's Gucci. When he took over in 2015, the fashion world had been marinating in Phoebe Philo's Céline-influenced restraint for years. Everything was clean lines and muted palettes. Michele threw a grenade at all of it - clashing prints, embroidered snakes, velvet everything, more-is-more maximalism that felt genuinely dangerous. It was the most exciting thing in fashion precisely because it rejected what everyone else was doing.
Or go further back. The Memphis Group in the 1980s. Ettore Sottsass and his collaborators looked at the dominant design orthodoxy of the time - serious, functional, restrained - and decided to make furniture that looked like it was designed by a very talented child who'd been given too many felt tips. It was polarising. It was ugly to some. But it shook the entire design world out of its slumber. It reminded everyone that design could be joyful and provocative, not just efficient.
Minimalism as avoidance
In my years in advertising, I watched this pattern play out constantly. A client would brief something bold. The creative team would develop something with real character - a distinct visual language, a tone of voice with edges, a campaign that took a genuine position. Then the rounds of feedback would start. "Can we simplify this?" "Can we make it cleaner?" "Can we just..." And slowly, piece by piece, the character would be stripped away until what remained was inoffensive, professional, and completely forgettable.
That process was never really about simplification. It was about fear. Fear of standing out. Fear of alienating someone. Fear of being wrong. Minimalism gave that fear a respectable name. "We're going for something clean and modern" sounds so much better than "we're terrified of having a personality."
Intentional editing versus empty rooms
None of this is an argument against simplicity. The best design is often simple. But there's a canyon of difference between simplicity that's the result of ruthless, opinionated editing and simplicity that's the result of having nothing to say.
When Rams designed the Braun T3 pocket radio, every surface, every control, every proportion was the product of hundreds of decisions. The simplicity was earned. It was the end point of a process, not the starting point. That's editing. That's taste. That's the version of minimalism that actually works.
What most brands are doing now is the equivalent of furnishing a flat by leaving the rooms empty and calling it "Scandinavian." The space isn't considered. It's just vacant.
The brave call is character
I think about this constantly when building my own projects. Modern Retro is deliberately dense - the 1970s aesthetic it draws from was visually rich, full of texture and type treatments and colour choices that make modernist designers uncomfortable. The project wouldn't work if I'd sanitised it. The visual maximalism IS the point.
But even the projects that look cleaner have character baked into the decisions. The specific shade of green. The serif headlines in an era where everyone uses geometric sans. The decision to use rounded corners here but sharp ones there. These are positions, not defaults.
The brave creative call in 2026 isn't minimalism. Everyone's already there. The brave call is having enough conviction and enough taste to be specific. To make choices that might alienate some people because they'll deeply resonate with others. To accept that design with a personality is always more memorable than design without one, even when the personality isn't universally loved.
Gucci under Michele divided opinion wildly. Some people hated it. But no one - absolutely no one - confused it with another brand. That's what happens when you commit to a position. You lose the people who don't get it. You become unforgettable to the people who do.
More, but considered
The answer isn't chaos, obviously. It's not about cramming things in for the sake of it, or adding decoration where none is needed, or being loud because quiet is the default. That would be just as lazy as the minimalism it's reacting against.
The answer is intention. The best design - minimal, maximal, or anywhere between - is made of choices that have reasons behind them. Colours that reference something. Typography that sets a tone. Density or sparsity that serves the content and the audience, not the designer's comfort zone.
Minimalism isn't the enemy. Thoughtlessness is. And right now, minimalism is where thoughtlessness is hiding.
