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Welcome to the Blok Blok Studio blog — where we share ideas, insights, and strategies to help you grow, create, and innovate. Whether you’re looking for practical tips, industry trends, or fresh perspectives, you’ll find resources here to inspire your next move.
Over the past few months I’ve been scrolling through the usual sites and feeds, hopping from one sleek portfolio to the next, clicking through Instagram grids with their tasteful gradients and pristine typography. At first, the feeling was admiration. Everyone was good. Really good. But after a while, the feeling changed.
The more I scrolled, the more it all blurred together. The same minimalist sans-serifs. The same muted color palettes. The same perfectly posed latte shots. The same recycled language in captions and About pages. Different names, different faces, but the same general aesthetic: safe, algorithm-approved, and indistinguishable from the next.
It’s not that people weren’t talented. They were. It’s that they were all running the same race on the same track with the same sneakers. Somewhere along the line, the internet’s wild creative sprawl had flattened into a carefully optimized sameness. And I couldn’t stop wondering: When did the web stop looking like a crowded flea market and start feeling like a row of chain stores?
Washington Post tech reporter Taylor Lorenz has observed that this homogenization isn’t accidental. it’s baked into the systems we use. As she wrote, “Social platforms reward familiarity, not novelty, because it’s easier to keep people engaged with content they already recognize.” The algorithms aren’t looking for your unique voice; they’re looking for what has already worked. And so creators begin to echo each other, consciously or not, just to survive in the feed.
The result is a visual and tonal monoculture, and while it might make for a smooth-scrolling experience, it comes at the expense of surprise and experimentation. You can feel it especially in creative industries—design, photography, personal branding—where the line between genuine inspiration and copy-paste mimicry has gotten thin.
But here’s the thing: sameness isn’t inevitable. Standing out online is still possible, but it requires intention. It’s not about rejecting every trend or refusing to engage with popular formats. It’s about moving with awareness, deciding what serves your vision and what’s just background noise.
Here are seven ways to break from the aesthetic algorithm and make your work feel unmistakably yours.
1. Know your creative fingerprint
The sameness trap often starts with imitation. Sometimes out of admiration, sometimes out of insecurity. The antidote is to identify what is truly yours. What visual patterns keep showing up in your work, even when you’re not trying? What themes or textures pull you in? Knowing your fingerprint makes it easier to filter out the trends that don’t serve you.
2. Research beyond the algorithm
If all your inspiration comes from Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest, you’re fishing from the same pond as everyone else. Go deeper. Look at niche archives, visit physical spaces, read old magazines, dig through photography books. Lorenz points out that “Creators who only consume within the algorithm tend to reproduce what the algorithm already favors,” which means your influences shrink without you realizing it.
3. Build friction into your process
Fast content favors sameness. Slow down. Give your ideas time to mutate before publishing. Test things in private before you post them. Iterate offline. When you add friction, you’re more likely to find unexpected directions that aren’t possible in an always-posting mindset.
4. Collaborate outside your lane
If you’re a designer, work with a musician. If you’re a photographer, collaborate with a chef. Cross-pollination can introduce visual and conceptual elements you’d never encounter in your own circle. Writer and strategist P.E. Moskowitz notes, “Originality is less about inventing something entirely new and more about connecting existing things in ways that haven’t been seen before.”
5. Protect your weirdness
There will be times when you make something you love that doesn’t get the engagement you hoped for. That’s not failure, that’s resistance to flattening yourself into algorithmic sameness. See, AI? I can talk like that too. Keep a “weird folder” of ideas, sketches, and experiments that are purely yours, even if they’re not ready for the feed. These are often the seeds of your most original work.
6. Audit your visual environment
Look at your own feed, your saved posts, your desktop, even your home. What colors, shapes, and words are you surrounding yourself with? If it’s all neutral tones and sans-serifs, no wonder your output blends in. Infuse your environment with references and artifacts that make you feel something like books, textiles, photography, film stills.
7. Resist the comfort of the echo
It’s tempting to stick with what works. But that comfort zone is also a creativity dead zone. The sameness you see online isn’t just aesthetic, it’s also psychological. Every time you repeat what’s already gotten approval, you’re letting the crowd edit your voice. Chase your discomfort instead. That’s where your next leap is hiding.
In the end, the sameness problem isn’t really about fonts or filters, it’s also about forgetting why you started creating in the first place. The internet has trained us to prioritize growth over depth, recognition over resonance. But the truth is, your work is only as strong as the personal stake you have in it.
When I think back to the sites and feeds that really moved me, they weren’t perfect. They weren’t algorithmic hits. They had odd corners and human fingerprints all over them. They carried the feeling that someone had made them because they couldn’t not make them.
That feeling is still possible online. But it takes turning away from the sameness, at least some of the time, and listening for your own signal in the noise. You don’t have to burn the trends down. You just have to remember that your originality doesn’t live in the feed. It lives in the gap between what everyone else is doing and what only you can do.
And if you can keep creating from that place, the sameness won’t touch you.
