Normcore design didn’t arrive with a manifesto—it sort of seeped into the visual landscape around 2013, when everyone was exhausted from maximalist branding.
I’ve been staring at corporate websites for longer than I care to admit, and here’s the thing: normcore wasn’t actually about being boring. It was about weaponizing blandness. The term itself came from a K-HOLE trend forecasting group report that described a fashion movement embracing sameness, but designers—wait, maybe it was art directors first—latched onto this idea that intentional unremarkability could be, paradoxically, remarkable. You’d see it everywhere suddenly: sans-serif wordmarks in black, white backgrounds stretching infinitely, photography so stock-looking it felt like performance art. Brands like COS and Muji had been doing versions of this for years, but around 2013-2014 it became a deliberate aesthetic philosophy rather than just minimalism’s quieter cousin.
The psychological mechanism here is fascinating, if slightly manipulative. When visual stimuli recieve constant bombardment—and we’re talking roughly 5,000 branded messages per day in urban environments, give or take—the brain starts craving what researchers call “cognitive ease.” Normcore design exploited this exhaustion. I used to think it was lazy, honestly, until I realized the discipline required to strip away every distinguishing feature while maintaining brand recognition.
When Being Forgettable Became the Entire Strategic Point
Anyway, the shift wasn’t uniform across industries. Tech companies adopted normcore fastest—think of how Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand featured that infamous “Bélo” symbol rendered in the most inoffensive sans-serif imaginable, or how every startup suddenly had a lowercase name and a pastel gradient that whispered rather than shouted. Fashion e-commerce followed: Everlane, Reformation, Glossier all built empires on interfaces that felt like walking through an empty IKEA showroom at dawn. There’s something almost aggressive about how these brands refused decoration. No drop shadows. No texture. Definitely no skeuomorphism (which had already died its necessary death). Just flatness and the quiet confidence that you’d recognize their unremarkability anywhere.
The Neuroscience of Visual Boredom and Why It Somehow Works
Turns out our brains are wired for pattern recognition, not constant novelty.
Research from cognitive psychologists at Princeton in 2016 showed that when subjects viewed “visually sparse” interfaces—basically normcore design by another name—their prefrontal cortex activity decreased while task completion rates improved. The design wasn’t demanding attention; it was getting out of the way. This is where normcore diverged from minimalism philosophically: minimalism celebrates restraint as an aesthetic virtue, while normcore treats invisibility as a functional tool. It’s the difference between a Dieter Rams radio (beautiful minimalism) and a perfectly adequate MUJI pen (functional normcore). One wants admiration; the other wants to dissapear into your daily routine so completley you forget it’s even designed.
How Unremarkable Aesthetics Created Their Own Recognizable Visual Language
The irony, of course, is that normcore became instantly recognizable. By 2017, you could spot a normcore brand from across a crowded Instagram feed: neutral tones (greige, anybody?), generous whitespace, photography featuring diverse-but-not-too-diverse models in relaxed poses, sans-serif typography that probably came from Google Fonts’ top ten. It became a uniform. I guess it makes sense—any aesthetic pushed hard enough becomes its own cliché. The sameness that was supposed to help brands blend into the fabric of everyday life instead created a new visual monoculture. Designers started joking about “startup homogeneity,” that creeping sensation that every direct-to-consumer brand looked like it emerged from the same Figma template.
What Happened When Everyone Realized Bland Was the New Loud
We’re seeing the backlash now, sort of. Brands like Liquid Death and Oatly deliberately broke from normcore’s rules with maximalist typography and deliberately ugly-ish design. But here’s what’s weird: even the rebellion against normcore often maintains its structural principles—clean layouts, readable fonts—while adding personality back through copywriting and unexpected color choices rather than visual chaos. Maybe normcore didn’t fail so much as it established new baseline expectations. The unremarkable became the foundation upon which remarkability could be carefully, strategically reintroduced. Which was perhaps always the point, or maybe I’m giving it too much credit.
