Everything is Becoming Beige
Authored By Jake Engel
A few weeks ago, I went to a local cocktail lounge I’d been excited to try. It was beautiful in every way a cocktail bar is supposed to be. The drinks were excellent, the music was just loud enough, and even the glassware felt intentional.
Yet, I left feeling strangely untouched.
Everything had been done well. But somewhere between walking through the front door and paying the bill, I never once felt surprised. By the time I got home, I couldn’t think of a single notable thing I’d tell someone else about it.
It was, in a word, beige. Since then, I’ve started noticing this everywhere.
The average experience today is undeniably better than it was ten or twenty years ago. Restaurants are more thoughtful. Hotels are more beautiful. Branding is more polished. Design has become dramatically more accessible. We’ve surrounded ourselves with better ideas, and the world is objectively nicer because of it.
So why does so much of it disappear from memory so quickly?
Maybe it’s because we’re all drawing from the same well. We admire the same brands, save the same inspiration, study the same trends, and build the same mood boards. None of that is inherently bad. In fact, it’s probably elevated the average quality of what we create. But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing taste with originality.
They are certainly not the same thing.
Taste helps us recognize what’s beautiful. Originality asks us to create something that doesn’t yet have universal approval. One is built on pattern recognition. The other requires the uncomfortable belief that your instincts might be worth trusting before anyone else can validate them.
Yet, the places, messages, and advertisements I still think about years later almost always have one thing in common: somewhere along the way, someone made a decision another person probably argued against. Maybe it wasn’t the most universally appealing choice. Maybe it wasn’t backed by data, trends, or best practices. But it gave the work something increasingly rare – a point of view.
As a culture, we’ve become remarkably good at making things people will like. Along the way, I’m not sure we’ve become as interested in making things they’ll never forget.
Maybe beige isn’t a color after all. Maybe it’s what happens when originality slowly gives way to consensus because consensus is predictable and easy to defend.
That’s probably why it’s so difficult to recognize. Nobody wakes up trying to make something forgettable. Every decision is reasonable. Every stakeholder genuinely believes they’re making the idea stronger. Until one day, the work no longer feels like it belongs to anyone.
I keep thinking about that lounge, and how easy it is to build a room that is perfectly nice and completely unnoticeable. It is making me look at my own work differently.
The next time you create something that everyone in the room immediately agrees on, look closer. Are you proud of it, or did you just build another beautiful, forgettable cocktail bar?
The hardest part about beige is that almost nobody chooses it. They arrive there together.
