Why We Crave Software With Style Over "Branding"

Style matters to our economy, our society, and to each of us personally — it allows us to communicate who we are and who we want to be. While it is widely understood that style is the driving force behind consumer purchasing decisions in things like clothing, I’d argue that the same has become true in technology and software as well.

As technology advances, software will increasingly be chosen not just for how well it addresses its use case, but how it conveys its personality, similar to how we choose our clothes. We’re already beginning to see this shift. In highly individualized spheres like note-taking tools and consumer crypto, software is often chosen based on identity. Wh... See more

Fast forward to today and tools are incentivized to expand their market by attempting to solve everything at once. But this means that the market for any given piece of software is often anyone and everyone.

Software started out being specific — designed just for one person even — then expanded to a broader audience by trying to appeal to everyone and losing its identity in the process. In the wake of the uniform brand identity crisis in the tech industry, I believe we need to return to specificity in order to appeal to users more broadly.

Modern software’s humdrum lack of identity has resulted in users craving more interesting, opinionated tools, tools that feel like us — or a better, more interesting, wackier version of us.

From Airbnb to Google to Spotify, this era has come to be defined by the commodification of accessible consumer (and now, even enterprise) brands.

For this reason, websites like Craigslist and Are.na strike a chord: Their analog internet style and chunky buttons feel daring and intriguing in this modern context. Compared to the blasé, blue-branded modern tools we all spend so much of our time using today — and that contribute to that uniform sameness described earlier — these tools feel decid... See more

While crypto historically prioritized function over form, the space has more recently emerged as a leader in experimenting with using style as a competitive advantage.

Style is not just about intentionality and appeal, however; it can also be what differentiates software companies like Notion, for instance, at the outset. The app’s serene environment, charismatic illustrations, and playful references to technology history stand out in a crowded marketplace of note-taking apps.

Within the past few years, tech companies’ digital design all started to look the same: marginally, monotonously quirky; safe. From the sans-serif fonts to the muted pastel color palette, the stark white backgrounds to the curvy shape and hue of the buttons, most modern software blurs together into a familiar, squint-and-you’ll-confuse-it aesthetic... See more