Why brand identities in Dubai are starting to look alike

There's no shortage of beautiful branding in Dubai.

Elegant typography, muted colours, carefully art-directed photography, beautifully presented spaces. In real estate, hospitality and parts of the wellness industry, certain visual conventions appear again and again.

Individually, many of these identities work perfectly well.

Put them next to each other and things get more interesting.

You start to wonder how many could exchange names without anyone noticing.

When premium becomes the default

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with wanting a brand to feel premium.

The problem is how quickly that ambition gets translated into a familiar collection of visual decisions.

A sophisticated serif typeface. Plenty of white space. A restrained palette. Photography of impressive interiors, preferably without anyone actually using them.

None of these elements is bad design.

But when everyone reaches for the same ingredients, premium stops communicating much about the individual business.

It becomes a category aesthetic.

A property developer might have a completely different philosophy from the company next door. Different architecture, different customers, different ideas about how people should live.

Yet the two can end up looking surprisingly similar because both believe their identity needs to communicate luxury.

Something gets lost in that translation.

We're sometimes responsible for the problem

Designers spend a lot of time researching other designers.

We look at competitors, study award-winning projects, collect references and try to understand the visual language of a category.

All useful things to do.

But there's a point where understanding the category turns into reproducing it.

We become more comfortable making something that looks appropriate than questioning whether appropriate is enough.

And when clients arrive with references from brands they admire, those expectations can become even harder to challenge.

Maybe the question shouldn't be how to make a business look as good as the brands around it.

Maybe we should spend more time understanding what makes the business interesting in the first place.

Its product. Its people. Its decisions. The experiences it creates. The things its competitors aren't doing particularly well.

There's usually more to work with than another collection of visual references.

Dubai isn't one audience

It's also worth questioning who all this familiar sophistication is supposed to appeal to.

A family choosing a new home, an investor comparing developments and someone looking for their first apartment may all interact with the same real estate category.

But they aren't necessarily looking for the same things.

One may care about reliability and long-term value. Another about design, location or the practical details of living somewhere.

Treating them all as people aspiring to the same version of luxury overlooks those differences.

The same applies to hospitality, healthcare, financial services and other categories where businesses often fall back on familiar signals of quality.

An identity should communicate something relevant to the audience the business wants to reach.

If the strongest reason to choose a brand is that it makes a complicated service feel simple, perhaps looking exclusive isn't such a clever idea.

Accessibility can be a position. So can warmth, clarity, technical expertise or a particular way of doing things.

Not everything valuable needs to look expensive.

Recognition takes more than a nice logo

There's another problem with identities built primarily around familiar aesthetics.

They often depend too heavily on the logo to do the work of recognition.

Remove it from a website, advertisement or brochure and the remaining elements could belong to several different companies.

A distinctive identity needs more than an attractive mark.

Typography, imagery, colour, composition, language and other recurring elements should contribute to a recognisable system.

And in Dubai, that system may need to work across Arabic and English, large-scale outdoor applications, digital advertising, physical environments and everyday customer communications.

It's not enough for everything to look good in a presentation.

The identity needs to remain recognisable when it's being used by different people, in different contexts, with content the designer didn't personally arrange.

That's a much more interesting challenge.

Try looking at your competitors differently

There's a simple exercise worth doing before commissioning a new identity.

Take five competitors and collect a few examples of how each communicates. A website, an advertisement, a social post and perhaps something physical.

Remove the logos.

Look at what's left.

Which visual conventions appear repeatedly? Which brands can you still recognise? What does each business seem to stand for beyond the usual promises of quality and excellence?

Then ask what your own business could communicate that the others aren't.

Not simply a different colour or a more unusual typeface. Something meaningful about the business that deserves a distinctive expression.

The objective isn't to look strange for the sake of getting attention.

Certain conventions help people understand a category, and ignoring all of them can make a brand less effective.

But following every convention can make it disappear.

Give people something worth recognising

Dubai has plenty of businesses with the ambition to stand out. The visual identities don't always reflect that ambition.

Perhaps we spend too much time asking whether a brand looks good, and not enough time asking whether it looks like itself.

A beautiful identity is a good start.

But if it could just as easily belong to your competitor, what's making it yours?

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Related reading

Brand Identity: How to Build a Distinctive Brand Beyond the Logo

What happens when you take the logo away?