The Trend Gap: Why the Best Design Isn’t Always the Best Branding

Some rebrands are celebrated by designers the moment they’re released. They win awards, dominate design publications, and become reference points for the creative community. Yet some of those same rebrands leave customers confused, weaken brand recognition, or fail to support the business they were meant to strengthen.

This tension has always existed in branding. Designers are naturally drawn to new visual ideas, while brands succeed by being recognizable, relevant, and trusted by the people they serve. Those goals often overlap, but not always. A visual direction that feels fresh and exciting within the design community may not resonate with the audience a brand is trying to reach.

Neubrutalism is a useful example. Characterized by bold typography, raw forms, visible structure, and a rejection of polished minimalism, the aesthetic has attracted growing attention in digital design and has begun to influence branding projects as well. For some brands, it creates distinctive and memorable identities. For others, it introduces a visual language that feels disconnected from their history, category, or customers.

The lesson extends beyond any single trend. Whether it’s startup minimalism, neubrutalism, or whatever comes next, the question remains the same: is this visual direction helping the brand communicate more effectively with its audience, or is it simply reflecting what’s popular within the design industry? The strongest brands don’t adopt trends for their own sake. They use them selectively, ensuring that every design decision supports the brand’s identity, audience, and long-term strategy.

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Designing for Designers vs. Designing for Customers

If you are reading this, you already know how trends propagate through the design community. Trade shows, awards, press coverage, peer admiration, influencers, and tastemakers all play a pivotal role in the adoption of a trend. 

This is valuable cultural capital, and it does real work in pushing the wider culture toward innovation. But cultural capital does not always translate into audience fit. 

Two related questions should be answered before a design strategy goes to market: will the intended audience understand and trust this, and, the internal question, will other designers admire it? The two can meet, but the latter does not necessarily ensure the former. Creative directors and designers often struggle, unwittingly, to distinguish peer admiration from audience resonance. In that confusion, design trends can feel confident and fresh from within the creative process, while for the consumer the same choices read as cold, confusing, or incongruent with the product or service. 

The echo chamber can be genuinely revolutionary, producing aesthetic movements that inspire and inform fellow designers. But brands that borrow the same vocabulary can appear lost or out of touch, and there are concrete, well-known examples of the tension.

When the Trend Doesn’t Work

Minimal modernism was the neubrutalism of the mid-2010s. Abundant white space, sans serifs, and simple representative graphics.  What was often termed “startup minimalism,” carried a freshness partly indicative of the technological limitations of the early 2000s.

Enter the orange juice juggernaut Tropicana, which, in 2009, replaced its iconic orange-and-straw carton with a generic glass of juice and a bit too much white space. The Tropicana disaster has been written about extensively in the branding world, and with good reason. Taken at face value, the redesign was an example of minimalist branding at work. But the backlash eclipsed its creative ingenuity, as sales fell by roughly 20 percent, amounting to an estimated $30 million in lost sales and catalyzing a swift reversal. The moral is clear: a creative movement that does not resonate with consumers ultimately serves only the vanity of the designer or creative team.

More recently, Jaguar’s 2024 minimalist, fashion-editorial shift followed the same audience-resonance misstep in a different aesthetic register. Jaguar is a luxury brand informed as much by its engineering excellence as by its provenance and its sense of timelessness. The minimalist rebrand, combined with the brand’s transition to electric, its pricing adjustments, and supply chain disruptions, created the perfect storm for a 97.5 percent collapse in European sales by April 2025. It would be naïve to blame that collapse on aesthetics alone; as CNN Business reported, the drop coincided with a near-total halt in production during the brand’s electric transition, which accounts for much of the decline. But when a brand like Jaguar sheds the historicism and near-heraldic visuals that carried its equity, and does so alongside major changes in production and price, it becomes a masterclass in when to temper change, when to risk visual innovation, and when to anchor in something the audience can still recognize.

More recently still, the United States restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, long known for its warm goldenrod-and-brown graphic of a man leaning against a barrel, made a similarly difficult shift that proved too much for its loyal customer base. When the beloved chain traded its grandfatherly figure for a simplified goldenrod hexagon and a slab-serif wordmark, and also redesigned its restaurants, the revolt was so immediate that the brand restored its traditional logo and design within days, a reversal this publication examined when it happened.

The Case for Boldness

The lesson in these failures is not a blanket instruction to avoid trends, because there are legitimate occasions when trend-led branding is exactly right. High-fashion houses, in particular, leave ample room for play and risk, and Burberry illustrates both the opportunity and the hazard. 

In 2018, under creative director Riccardo Tisci, the designer Peter Saville created a flat, all-caps sans-serif wordmark for Burberry after years of the brand signaling a distinctly British classicism. The difficulty was that the same minimalist pivot was happening at Saint Laurent, Balmain, and other houses at the same time, a wave of luxury logo homogenization that critics came to call “blanding.” Burberry, along with the others, in a rush to capitalize on the moment, converged on a nearly identical minimalist logo and dissolved its own distinctiveness, another cautionary instance of peer-driven trend chasing. 

Then, in 2023, under new chief creative officer Daniel Lee, Burberry reinstated the heraldic Equestrian Knight crest and paired it with a serif wordmark. The synthesis of provenance and progress worked beautifully, both as a creative decision and as a matter of consumer recognition. The return of the crest allowed what is distinctly Burberry to stand in harmony with the serif’s signal of refinement. Bold modernization in service of a historic brand’s established identity is one way to push the boundaries of design while preserving authenticity and consumer trust.

The Four Trend Tests

The question of how and when to adopt a trend can be approached in many ways, but what follows are four tests that help distinguish a trend’s fitness for a brand from the designer’s preference to be in conversation with it.

The first test is one of audience-designer alignment. Is the brand’s audience design-literate, the kind of viewer likely to read a bold trend as authenticity and innovation? Or is it a general audience more likely to read the same choices as alienating or incoherent? When the audience shares the designer’s visual fluency, the trend can be adopted with confidence. When it does not, a sharp aesthetic turn risks reading as a brand losing its way.

The second test is to assess whether the brand carries invested visual equity. Brands like Jaguar, Burberry, and Harrods hold decades, or more, of aesthetic capital that is just as valuable as the products they make. If the trend in question would sever ties with nearly all of that accumulated equity, the impulse may be the designer’s desire to revolutionize rather than the brand’s need to maintain consumer trust. Long-standing brands need evolution rather than the erasure of what came before, except perhaps in cases where a rebrand is a deliberate strategy to shed negative associations.

The third test is category fit. The trend should match the brand’s market baseline. This does not mean cookie-cutter adherence to category conventions, but some measure of psychological signaling spares the customer from having to work too hard to understand what the brand represents. A rebrand that throws out every rule of its category may be executed so well that, if the stars align, consumers reward the innovation. But even the most exacting execution cannot overcome a true categorical mismatch, because a brand only means something in relation to the space it occupies.

The fourth test is about peer validation and requires a measure of introspection and humility from the creative forces involved. If a trend is adopted chiefly so that other designers, the design press, or fellow creatives will appreciate the boldness of its execution, the brand has most probably lost contact with the customer base that fuels its existence. Peer validation is a meaningful marker of legitimacy, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it, but it is a personal goal that, in the case of trends, may not align with the brand’s commercial one.

If a trend clears at least three of these four tests, it is probably safe to push the vision in that direction. If it clears two or fewer, the misalignment is real, and a return to the brand’s core values, mission, market, and visual baseline is warranted in order to find a more resonant expression.

A Trend Is Not a Strategy

Visual identity is a strategic decision, not merely a stylistic one, and the best designers know how to parse the static of trendcasting from what a client actually needs to represent itself coherently. The industry’s appetite for novelty is not a flaw to be corrected; it is part of the field’s vitality, and it will continue to pull even the most seasoned practitioners toward the touchpoints the trade press is currently celebrating. 

The discipline lies not in resisting that pull but in interrogating it, in asking whether a given trend serves the brand’s audience or merely the designer’s standing among peers, because a celebrated rebrand and a successful one are not the same achievement, and the distance between them is measured entirely by the audience a brand was built to serve. 

The trend, in the end, is never the strategy. It is only ever a vocabulary, and the question that separates durable work from the merely admired is the quiet one a studio asks before it reaches for the aesthetic everyone is applauding: who, precisely, is this for, and will they recognize themselves in it?