No such thing as normal?
A more interesting way to think about your competitors
Welcome. This week I’ve been rolling around some thoughts about that elusive word ‘normal’. Though we are all taught that there is so such thing as normal, norms and expectations are critical in design. But I believe they are something you should dance with, not be enslaved by. This essay is a journey into that idea and my attempt to articulate a more interesting way to learn from competitors in your space, whatever discipline of design you are working in.
This week, design tool Kittl have shared their annual Trend Report and have given me a promo code to share if you fancy trying one of their subscriptions. Use DESIGNLOBSTER25 for 25% off Kittl Pro or Kittl Expert (monthly or yearly subscription).
One of the interesting things I’ve found about moving back to the UK after two years the US is a subtle shift in what feels normal. Even though I’m “back home” living in a city that I know very well, my time abroad has quietly messed around with my expectations. Compared to New York, London now feels unusually quiet and green and at times nearly impossibly quaint. Many things which I used to take for granted before my move I now notice everyday. Victorian street signs, narrow pavements, that drawn-out sepulchral evening light you only get much further up the Northern hemisphere at this time of year.
These things, which felt normal before, have in the background at some point ceased to be so, and are now visible to my brain in a way that they weren’t before. It’s a mirror of what I experienced first moving to the US when everything there was new, but a stranger one yet, because it’s disconcerting to feel something as both familiar and unusual at the very same time.
After six weeks or so back, the keenness of the feeling is beginning to dim, but I wish I could bottle the sensation and take sips of it from time to time. It’s the sort of clarity you are always looking for as a writer, and also, I believe, as a designer. In fact, the ability to accurately dissect the elements that come together to make something feel “normal” is a power that is exceptionally useful in design, and yet can be elusive because we so easily become blind to what is familiar. It takes effort, often quite violent effort, to shake ourselves out and see clearly what is in front of us.
On of my favorite examples of this effort is an obscure costume party held in Shibuya every year called Mundane Halloween (地味ハロウィン). At this event hundreds of people dress up in a very unusual, but outwardly unremarkable way. Instead of drawing attention to themselves, the outfits they choose are instead often aggressively mundane, highlighting some highly specific situation from everyday life. Some favourite examples of mine include A Person Who Got A Shopping Cart But Picked Up Less Items Than Expected or Person Who Wiped Their Hands On Their Clothes After Washing Their Hands. Many more can be found here. In this version of Halloween, no situation from life is too mundane or normal not to be elevated into a costume.
The outfit choices fall within a category of humour known as aruaru (あるある) which means ‘that’s-so-true’, and as long as your sense of humor is dry enough, they can have you laughing out loud at the trivialness of the chosen situation and the absurd detail with which it has been recreated. Whilst some are so specific they don’t translate out of the Japanese context, the best ones unveil some universal detail of modern life that’s so obvious you’d hardly ever registered it as worth reflecting on before.
The party is of course very silly. But I believe the sensibility that animates it has an important relevance for designers. This awareness of the seemingly trivial details that make up ‘everydayness’ or that make something feel ‘normal’ is critical for us to cultivate too. In fact, it’s my point of view that this should be primary lens we look through whenever we’re tasked with looking at competitors.
At the beginning of my career I was very wary of paying too much attention to what competitors are doing. It seemed lazy, cowardly even. An abrogation of one’s creative powers to obsess not over your customer or their problems, but whatever had been churned out by some other team at a competitor brand. But as I’ve got older my stance has softened a bit. I’ve learned that there are many ways of doing this activity badly, but also ways of doing it well.
The trap of course, is to treat the work of competitors as a copy book, or worse yet as a set of instructions. To jump on a stylistic bandwagon like all the leading fashion brands seemed to in the 2010s. Or to wedge another feature into your product because a competitor just released it for theirs. These examples betray a lack of critical engagement with the design task and it’s underlying assumptions—the decision about what to do or how to do it has simply been palmed off to another company entirely.
Despite these bad examples, there are however important things we can learn from an exercise like this. What our competitors are doing can tell us something quite interesting about the expectations, behaviours and mental models that actually exist in the world right now. In other words, they are a window into what your audience will consider “normal”. And seeing that clearly can open up all sorts of interesting avenues for design.
Here are the main questions I like to ask when looking at competitors:
What’s Essential: What baseline expectations do people have for this category? And what conventions are so ingrained that removing them would break comprehension?
What’s Dead Weight: What’s merely inherited from another context or persists just because no one questioned it?
What’s Broken or Missing: What problems remain stubbornly unsolved and why?
To answer these questions fully you’ll need get up from your desk and talk to real people of course. And to do it well, you need an eye for detail as acute as an attendee of Mundane Halloween. Expectations encompass emotional needs as much as features, and there is a real art to discerning what conventions are essential and which ones you can play with. Sometimes the thing that people tell you is missing seems too tiny to merit design time but you should always record it anyway. Therein sometimes lie billion-dollar businesses.
Your attention should also not just be limited to the obviously ‘design-y’ choices. How for example your competitor makes money will have a critical impact on what the design needs to achieve. As a great woman so often stands behind a great man, so does a great (or at least quite different) business model often stand behind a great design.
The idea I really want to get across though is that understanding these norms and constraints is just your baseline. The critical part is not to stop here. Once you know that normal is for your category you can intentionally flex your design along different dimensions to tell a story. And this is the fun bit where we can put our creative powers to use.
Maybe you will want to keep a design feeling very familiar apart from how it is packaged on order to appeal to a specific audience, like Graza. Maybe there is an opportunity to make a familiar workflow drastically easier like gizmo.ai. The key is to make any and each deviation you make from the norm as thoughtful and as precise as possible.
And call it the 3% rule or MAYA or whatever you like, but restraint is important in this process. Because if you turn up one dial too much your design can quickly become unintelligible or just plain weird. Norms and expectations provide a crucial set of constraints amongst which a successful design must operate. It’s okay to break a few (and probably essential to do so if you are trying to stand out) but make sure you are always doing so intentionally. Breaking an established UX pattern by accident is not acceptable, nor is blithely ignoring the visual codes for your category without some solid justification for why you are doing so.
“It is necessary to violently focus attention on the present as it is, if one wants to transform it.”
—Antonio Gramsci
I didn't expect to end this essay with a Gramsci quote, and I feel like I am preaching the opposite of revolution in this essay, but I do like how forcefully he encourages us to look at what reality is trying to tell us. The words ‘as it is’ are the key part of the quote for me. How hard it can be to see things as they actually are! And yet, if we cannot do so, when we try and design something new, we are effectively shooting in the dark.
It seems to me that mastering the skill of understanding and stretching what is normal has never been more important for designers. AI tools, by virtue of the way their algorithms work, will always generate the most plausible or ‘normal’ version of what we request from them. The tendency of coding tools like Lovable, v0 and the like to spit out a web design with an Inter typeface, 8px border and purple accent colour has been much lamented elsewhere. These are machines for creating impeccably normal versions of whatever you ask and we already starting to drown in their outputs.
I believe the business of how we go beyond that will become central to our craft. How we thoughtfully nudge up and down the what and how of our design based on what we know about our customer and the category we are operating in. Of course, this business has always been central, but with AI vacuuming up an increasing number of the lower-level tasks, this delicate exercise of judgment will be increasingly where I suspect we will spend our time.
And so it seems possible that the best way to thrive in this world will not be piling on new tools and technical skills or but simply to cultivate a more precise vision. To learn how to make—like the cosplayers of Mundane Halloween—the invisible scaffolding of the everyday visible again. To notice the outlines of what the world already finds normal, so that we can choose, deliberately and very carefully, which lines to redraw.
Have a great week,
Ben 🦞
Enjoyed this week’s Design Lobster? Let me know by clicking the heart button ❤️
👇
I think you'll like this (Shlomo is entertaining anyway) but this is presenting Reddit as a kind of 'mundane filter' - someone else has noticed a thing: you can turn it into an ad.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomogenchin_making-ads-from-reddit-posts-2025-version-activity-7380899747664039936-oRmS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAABH_48BW4MUSxwcZPFafT6eiVtIegb0kf8