DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 25, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

Less, But Lazier

For fifteen years, "minimal" was the safest word in design. A clean white interface, a featureless slab of glass, a logo stripped to one weight of one typeface - all of it read instantly as "considered," "premium," "modern." Reductive minimalism, born with the smartphone and canonised by it, became the default visual language of the entire made world: phones, apps, thermostats, cars, coffee machines, storefronts, brand marks. It won completely.

And that total victory is exactly the problem. When everything is minimal, minimal stops meaning anything.

A signal only works by contrast. When a stripped-back object sat among busy ones, its restraint genuinely signalled care - someone had made hard choices about what to leave out. But once every object on the shelf is equally clean, "clean" no longer says "someone decided carefully here." It says "someone applied the current style." The reductive look, which used to be evidence of a decision, became a way to avoid one. Years of minimalist dominance produced a landscape of minimal sameness so uniform that stripping things back now differentiates nothing.

The great logo-flattening of the last decade is the purest example. One heritage marque after another redrew its distinctive emblem into the same thin, geometric, all-caps sans-serif wordmark, in the name of looking clean and working on a small screen. Individually each felt modern; collectively they became interchangeable. Reduction, applied as a fashion, erased the exact distinctiveness the marks existed to carry - the brands paid to look like everyone else.

The tell is in how badly the movement's patron saint has been misread. Dieter Rams' famous phrase was "less, but better" - and the industry heard only the first word. Rams never advocated minimalism as a style; he advocated removing everything that does not serve the person using the object, so that what remains can shine. That is not a look; it is a method - and a demanding one, because it requires you to first decide what is essential. Minimalism-as-style skips that step entirely. You can apply "clean" to anything without ever asking what the thing is for; you just delete until it looks current. It is less, but lazier.

You can watch the cost accumulate. When Instagram hid its features behind gestures and ambiguous icons to look cleaner, it did not become more usable - it raised cognitive load while lowering the count of visible elements. That is minimalism following fashion instead of solving a problem, exactly what Rams warned against. The surface got simpler; the experience got harder.

Predictably, the pendulum is now swinging. Across 2026, maximalism is going mainstream - bold prints and exaggerated silhouettes on the runways of Paris and Milan, layered, personality-packed interiors, a widespread fatigue with restraint. The temptation is to read this as the answer: minimalism is over, maximalism is in, swap the style.

But that is the same mistake in louder clothes. Maximalism-as-style is exactly as empty as minimalism-as-style - a different default you can apply without deciding anything, "add character until it looks bold" in place of "delete until it looks clean." A brand that swings from blank to busy without asking what it is trying to say has changed its costume, not its mind. The better version of maximalism that designers describe - "curated confidence," meaningful layering - is really just Rams' method pointed the other way: earn every element you add, the same discipline as earning every element you remove.

Which is the whole point, and it lands squarely in the concept phase. Style is not a substitute for the decision about what a product is and what it should mean. Minimalism let a generation of designers skip that decision while looking sophisticated; maximalism now offers the same escape in reverse. The work Rams actually described - deciding, early and specifically, what is essential and what this object should say to the person holding it - was never done by the style. It was only ever hidden by it. "Clean" stopped meaning "considered" the moment it stopped being a choice. The task now is simply to start choosing again.

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