In visual identity, we’ve spent the last several years watching logos lose their details, and the trend is still going strong. First, individual elements disappear. Then come the shapes, shadows, and eventually a couple of letters get merged together. Sometimes it makes perfect sense. Other times, so much gets removed that the personality disappears along with it. That little something that says, “Here’s why I’m different from everyone else.”

The luxury industry is a particularly good example of this trend. Burberry set aside its historic equestrian knight for a while in favor of a much simpler logo, although the brand eventually decided to bring it back. Brands like Saint Laurent and Balenciaga also simplified their visual identities, opting for cleaner typography. The problem is that when everyone starts simplifying according to the same visual rules, some brands end up looking a little too much alike. And there’s something ironic about an industry where standing out is practically everything ending up with designs that make one brand harder to tell apart from another.

That doesn’t mean a simple logo can’t have personality. Mastercard can use its two circles almost entirely on their own because those circles have spent decades building recognition for the brand. And Nike doesn’t need to spell out its name next to the swoosh every time it appears. But before either brand could start removing things, it spent years building that recognition.

Simplification works when there’s already something recognizable behind it. That’s why strategic design has much less to do with deleting elements and much more to do with knowing which ones are actually doing their job. Sometimes that means removing things. Other times, it means bringing back something that once made the brand recognizable but got lost somewhere along the way. And sometimes, the smartest decision is to leave things exactly as they are, which is a pretty underrated move in branding.