Walk down a grocery aisle and you can often tell what kind of product you’re looking at before reading a single word.
Natural and health-focused foods tend to lean toward neutral or earthy colors, simple typography, ingredient photography, and plenty of white space. Children’s cereals, candy, and snacks are more likely to use bright colors, bold type, illustrations, and characters. We have an idea of what different types of products are supposed to look like.
I’ve seen the same thing throughout my career working with clinical skincare. White packaging, restrained typography, clean layouts, and touches of blue or green immediately communicate something different. They feel clinical, scientific, and credible.
These visual cues become a form of shorthand. Before we know much about the product, the design has already helped us categorize it. We recognize the visual language and make assumptions about what we’re looking at, who it’s for, and even what we can expect from it.
From a branding perspective, that makes sense. If I’m looking for a clinical skincare product, there is value in immediately recognizing that a product belongs in that world. If I’m shopping for a children’s cereal, I shouldn’t have to study every package to figure out which products are meant for kids.
But there’s a flip side.
If every clinical skincare brand is white and blue, every natural food brand is beige and green, and every children’s snack is covered in bright colors and bubbly typography, how does any individual brand stand out?
There’s a difference between communicating the category and communicating the brand.
A white bottle with clean typography may successfully tell me I’m looking at clinical skincare, but that doesn’t necessarily give me any reason to remember which clinical skincare brand it is. When every company uses the same visual shorthand, the conventions that make a product easy to understand can also make it easy to confuse with its competitors.
On the other hand, abandoning those conventions completely comes with its own risks. Could a children’s cereal use stark black packaging and still communicate that it’s fun and meant for kids? Could a clinical skincare line move completely away from the clean, restrained aesthetic without losing some of the credibility that visual language communicates?
Maybe. And sometimes breaking a category convention is exactly what allows a brand to stand out.
The challenge is deciding which conventions are helping communicate something useful and which ones are simply being followed because that’s what everyone else does.
I don’t think brands need to reject the visual language of their category. Those cues exist for a reason, and they help people quickly understand what they’re looking at. But they should be a starting point, not a template.
The strongest identities find a balance between the two. They give us enough visual information to understand where the product belongs while creating something distinctive enough that we remember whose product it was.
We may typecast design, but belonging in a category shouldn’t mean disappearing into it.