“fun Fatigue – Is Formality Returning In Branding?”

At the turn of the millennium, still basking in the afterglow of the end of history, Silicon Valley incubated not just a technological revolution but a radical reimagining of corporate culture itself, rejecting the formalities of suits, hierarchies, and rigid professional boundaries in favour of a philosophy that prized disruption over tradition.

Steve Jobs’ turtleneck, Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, and Google’s colourful beanbag chairs were more than just aesthetic choices – they represented an ideological opposition to establishment business culture.

This philosophy positioned casualness as both moral virtue and competitive advantage: formal dress codes, communication styles, and organisational structures were cast as archaic frictions in the pursuit of innovation.

As the crash of 2008 sent public trust in traditional institutions plummeting, Silicon Valley idealism seemed to offer an alternative. The low interest rate environment that followed led venture capital to pour in, propelling tech centre stage and allowing their corporate philosophy to go mainstream.

Politicians and business people dressed down to mimic the new tech elite, corporate dress codes relaxed, workplace hierarchies flattened, and institutions from banks, to NGOs, to governments adopted increasingly casual communication styles.

Brands in every sector began to soften their image, adopting sans-serif type, primary colours and lower case wordmarks. Companies wanted you to know they weren’t scary institutions – they were your friends.

Examples of lower case wordmarks across various sectors. Image by Alec Mezzetti.

Approachable language and child-like illustrations adorned the brand identities of job-searches, high-risk investments, car insurance and even funeral care. Designer Mike Andrews describes this how this more infantilised, casual aesthetic took hold.

“It’s the tool that the libertarian tech industry uses to make us feel safe, looked-after, coddled,” he wrote.

“Like story-books, these brands want to make this increasingly privatised, individualised economy feel like a fun adventure, and it seems like the worse the economy gets, the more infantilising these stories become.”

Illustrated branding examples from Glassdoor, 2023, Beyond Life, 2018, Sock, 2023, and Marshmallow, 2023. Image by Alec Mezzetti.

Peak casual

The Covid pandemic accelerated these trends across wider culture, sending public trust in traditional institutions plummeting and blurring the distinctions between work and life almost completely.

A near-total lack of public contact eroded further societal norms and formalities, provoking countless think pieces about how people had forgotten how to act in public.

The pandemic economic frenzy and ensuing slump brought with it an explosion of scams, grifts, and get-rich-quick schemes.

The internet, where most of us were spending an increasing amount of our lives, was awash with NFTs, clickbait and misleading ads, much of it sporting the same infantilising, casual aesthetics now ubiquitous in corporate branding.

The arrival of AI supercharged this trend, lowering the barriers of image creation and, in turn, flooding the visual environment with ‘slop’, further degrading public trust.

These images have begun to pervade every corner of online life, used by institutions and governments, including both the UK’s ruling Labour Party, and the US Government’s DOGE, which used AI generated, childlike animals in their communications.

In this new world saturated with infantilised, low-rent ‘slop’ online, and ever lowering social bonds and expectations offline, it’s easy to see how individualist, undifferentiated informality lost its lustre.

In branding, these previously disruptive aesthetics had become the homogeneous visual language of everything from beer to banking apps.

Where once they had served to overcome distrust in a discredited elite, at a time of rising inequality, fear, and uncertainty, they began to represent the condescending veneer of a world out of control.

The beginnings of a counter-trend

Are we beginning to see a turn against the mass casual look? Mandated returns to the office, dress-code controversies and articles ringing in the post-sneaker era all seem to signal so.

Could formality – tradition, cultural specificity and maturity make a comeback in design?

The early signs of this counter-revolution can be seen across the world of branding and advertising, where friendly colours, hyper-legible text and digital optimisation are starting to make way for richer tones, serifs and a de-prioritisation of digital scalability.

Consider the below examples, representing in a wide range of industries, a heel turn on the trend of casualisation, moving towards hierarchical codes of tradition, craft, and heritage – and in some cases directly undoing previous rebranding work.

Wordmark changes by Burberry 2019 to 2023, Saint Laurent 2012 to 2025, Sigma 2012 to 2025, Iittala 2001 to 2024, Lloyds 2013 to 2024 and Faculty 2021 to 2025. Image by Alec Mezzetti.

Perhaps the most striking example in recent years is Robinhood, whose colourful, illustration-led identity inspired countless imitators. Then in 2024, it was given a mature and subdued rebrand rooted much more deeply in the traditional language of finance.

The extreme end of this trend towards symbols of old luxury, hierarchy and tradition has been labelled by Sean Monahan of 8Ball as “Boom Boom” aesthetics, which overtly embrace past eras of excess such as the roaring 1920s or, the boom years of the 1980s.

“After a decade of executives dressing like interns (normcore), touting anti-growth platitudes (degrowth), while smartphones enabled the total dissolution of work/life boundaries (email jobs), is it any wonder the youth find inspiration in the glamour of the past?” he wrote.

Whether these counter trends will eclipse and replace mass-casual aesthetics waits to be seen, but their arrival is hardly surprising.

In a landscape of homogenous casualised branding, widespread disillusion with the idealism that birthed it, and a growing sense of insecurity, these old codes hold power.

Alec Mezzetti is design director at Mother Design. 

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