Silicon Valley has a font problem, and it’s worse than you think.
I’ve been staring at startup pitch decks for the better part of a decade now, and here’s what I’ve noticed: roughly 87% of them—give or take a few percentage points, I haven’t actually counted—use some variation of sans-serif minimalism that screams “we’re disruptive” while looking exactly like everyone else. It started with Helvetica Neue, then shifted to Proxima Nova around 2014 or so, and now we’re in this bizarre era where every Series A company uses either Inter or some custom geometric sans that costs more than their office furniture. The uniformity is exhausting, honestly. You’d think an industry obsessed with differentiation would, you know, actually differentiate itself visually, but turns out the opposite happens: the more a startup wants to appear innovative, the more it gravitates toward the exact same visual language as its competitors.
There’s this designer I know—used to work at a pretty well-known accelerator—who told me that founders literally bring reference images of Stripe’s website to their branding meetings. Not inspiration, mind you. They want the exact same gradient-to-solid color transition, the same ultra-light weight typography, the same amount of whitespace. “Make it look like we raised $50 million even if we only raised $500k,” one founder apparently said.
The Tyranny of Flat Design and Why Everyone Secretly Hates It But Can’t Stop
Wait—maybe I’m being too harsh. Flat design did solve real problems when it emerged around 2013. Skeuomorphism was getting ridiculous, with its fake leather textures and stitching that served zero functional purpose on a glass rectangle you’re holding in your hand. Microsoft actually got there first with Metro design language, which is wild considering how much credit Apple gets for “inventing” minimalism in tech. But here’s the thing: flat design was supposed to be a tool, not a mandate.
Somewhere between the release of iOS 7 and the current moment, flat design became the only acceptable visual approach for startups that wanted to be taken seriously by VCs. I’ve talked to founders who chose flat design not because they liked it—not because it served their users better—but because a potential investor casually mentioned that gradients and shadows felt “dated.” One founder told me, with this defeated tone that still sticks with me, that they spent $40,000 redesigning a perfectly functional interface just to remove depth and texture because their Series B lead “didn’t vibe with the current aesthetic.”
The psychology here is fascinating in a depressing sort of way.
Tech startups aren’t just building products; they’re performing a specific kind of legitimacy that requires visual conformity. Y Combinator companies start to look alike not by accident but by design—there’s an implicit understanding that certain visual choices signal “serious technology company” while others signal “bootstrap operation that doesn’t understand Silicon Valley culture.” Color palettes trend heavily toward blues and purples (trustworthy, technical) with occasional pops of coral or teal (friendly, accessible). Illustrations, when they appear, follow the same corporate Memphis style that Slack popularized around 2016: geometric humans with impossible proportions doing vaguely business-related activities. I guess it makes sense from a risk-mitigation standpoint—why take chances with your visual identity when you’re already taking huge risks with your actual business model?
Logomarks, Geometric Abstraction, and the Declining Importance of Actual Meaning in Visual Symbols
Let’s talk about logos for a second, because this is where things get truly weird. In the past five years or so, there’s been this massive shift away from representational logomarks toward pure geometric abstraction. I’m talking about logos that look like Venn diagram accidents or minimalist crop circles—shapes that could mean literally anything or nothing at all. Asana’s three dots. Airtable’s colorful blocks. The entire genre of “overlapping circles in a square” that at least a dozen B2B SaaS companies use.
A brand consultant I interviewed—she’s worked with probably 30+ startups in the past three years—explained it this way: “Founders want logos that feel inevitable, like pure mathematical truth rather than designed objects.” Which is fascinating because it reveals how tech culture views itself: not as creative or subjective, but as logical actors discovering pre-existing patterns in reality. Your logo isn’t a symbol someone made up; it’s a geometric relationship that always existed, waiting to be found. Honestly, this explains so much about Silicon Valley’s self-conception.
But here’s what actually happens: these abstract logomarks become functionally interchangeable. I tested this once with a friend—took 15 startup logos, removed the company names, scrambled them, and asked him to match logos to companies. He got maybe three right, and one of those was definately a lucky guess. The logos conveyed “tech startup” successfully, but they conveyed nothing about what the companies actually did or why they existed.
The typography, meanwhile, tells its own story. Custom typefaces used to be prohibitively expensive, something only established companies like IBM or Coca-Cola could justify. Now you’ve got seed-stage startups commissioning bespoke fonts that cost anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000+, all in service of differentiation that’s often imperceptible to anyone except other designers. I’ve seen pitch decks where founders spend three slides explaining their custom typeface but only one slide on their actual revenue model. Priorities, I guess.
What strikes me most is how little of this visual uniformity stems from user research or usability testing—it’s almost entirely driven by pattern-matching to successful predecessors. Startups look at Stripe, Notion, Figma, and reverse-engineer their visual DNA, assuming that mimicking their aesthetics will somehow transfer their success. It won’t, obviously. But in an industry obsessed with playbooks and repeatable frameworks, even creativity gets reduced to a formula you can copy.
