Why so many new sites look the same

Look at forty new product sites in a row and three formulas account for most of them. This is not a complaint about taste. It is a practical problem: a site that looks like forty others is doing none of the work a brand is supposed to do.

The first is cream and terracotta. Warm off-white background, a serif for headings, a burnt orange accent, generous spacing, usually a hand-drawn squiggle somewhere. It reads as “thoughtful independent studio”, which is why every studio uses it, which is why it no longer reads as anything.

The second is near-black with an acid accent. Very dark background, one saturated lime or cyan, tight monospace labels in small caps. It reads as “technical”, and it has become the default for anything involving developers or crypto to the point where the colour tells you nothing about the company.

Three visual formulas have quietly taken over. Once you can name them you cannot stop seeing them.

The third is the newspaper pastiche. Thin rules between sections, a display serif, small caps section labels, columns. It reads as “editorial”, and it is now used by companies with nothing to publish.

What these have in common is that each was a good decision once. The problem is arriving at it by default rather than by choosing it. If you cannot say why your accent colour is that colour — a reason connected to the business, not to the mood board — you have probably landed in one of the three.

A useful exercise: take your homepage, replace the logo with a competitor's, and see whether anything looks wrong. If the answer is no, the design is not carrying any information about who you are. That is a finding, not an insult, and it is fixable in an afternoon by changing two decisions rather than starting over.