Everyone fancies himself a designer lately. Take one photoshop class in middle school and suddenly you feel yourself qualified to offer your services to that other ubiquitous class of self-starter: the internet entrepreneur. You find a guy who can program a site for his brilliant new digital product but has no eye for interface aesthetic. You mock up a few clean lines and safe colors, ship him an icon and a few homepage accoutrements, and call it a job. Congratulations: you've now joined the ranks of the designers of the most successful sites out there.

See, it's not hard to draw up a brand that attracts users. The internet provides a space for almost infinite diversity in design, and yet all of us end up liking pretty much the same thing. Ever since Facebook premiered with its collegiate blue-on-white, social media has been a few shades of friendly blue. That's just how it works now. Look at its fellow social sites. The airier Twitter has got a nice sky blue going on, and even Google Plus, with its multicolor branding, predominantly takes on a similar shade. As for logos, there's only one rule: take the first letter of your company's name and display it in white against a background of your primary brand color. That's it. That's all you need to do.

Take, for example, Facebook and Tumblr. They have nearly identical icons. When I've got both open in a browser it takes me a second to figure out which tab to click. This might seem strange--why would designers echo each other so closely? Isn't the point of internet branding to construct a visually and functionally unique experience for visitors? 

Maybe not. Maybe we're just constructing a new language out of the familiar. We've come to associate that fat white letter on an indigo background with socializing and sharing what we've got to say. Facebook and Tumblr are very different platforms (Tumblr being more of a cross between Wordpress and Twitter) but designers want us to feel good about using both of them. And maybe familiarity is a solid enough weapon to catch our eye and reward us for looking. 

The internet and its marketers have branded other colors, too. We see similar initialed logos in plenty of software, like that designed to protect your PC from viruses and malware. But those aren't friendly programs. They're coded in red or yellow--harder, more aggressive colors meant to make us think of a tough, intimidating ally who'll lurk at the entrance to our laptop keeping undesirables out. Some of them place the typical letter-on-color setup against the obvious symbol of a shield.

In both cases, it seems clear that there is now one way to do an icon. Look around the web and you'll find increasing examples of entirely similar graphics. It's as though we've constructed a visual alphabet for ourselves, a set of Wingdings made up of easily communicable symbols. We're all about communicating as fast as possible and I suppose this just eases the process of approaching immediacy. It is a bit of a shame to see such a uniform aesthetic across the entire internet, but I don't write the norms.