Who Gets to Belong Inside the Structure... and Who Must Shrink to be Seen?

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” — Pierre Bourdieu, 1984¹ 

This sentence explains more of my design life than any critique I ever received, not the layouts, not the colours, but the frame around them. By frame I do not mean a visual border or a style preference, I mean the invisible structure that decides what is considered good, professional, serious, intelligent, and what is not.

I learned early that my layered, rhythmic, full instincts were often read as “too much”, “too emotional”, “too busy”, too everything, while a design on the other side was treated as purity, intelligence, the universal language of good design, or in other words, “What is often described today as minimalism is historically rooted in early modernist movements such as the Bauhaus, shaped by principles like “form follows function” and later “less is more”, popularised by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe². These ideas continue to inform contemporary definitions of minimalist design.”³ Minimalism, in this context, functions as a standard, and when a standard repeats long enough it slowly stops being taste and begins to operate as power.

I volunteer in a second-hand store with a team composed mostly of older women, retired, incredibly kind, full of energy and willingness to help. Over time I began noticing something small but revealing: whenever a yellow item enters, especially in decoration or furniture, there is almost always a reaction. Yellow is often described as cheap, loud, not elegant, and there is usually the assumption that it will not sell because it is “too much”. And yet those yellow pieces often sell quickly, quietly contradicting the belief that they would be rejected.

Yellow has always followed me, not only because of its warmth, but because of its presence, the way it occupies space without apologising. In objects, in details, small points of yellow around me, because without them something feels incomplete. The colour carries light, climate, memory, and when I remove it I feel the absence. What I experience as warmth and vitality can easily be read by someone else as cheapness. Interpretation is never purely visual; it is cultural.

The Quiet Power of Less

Pantone reinforces this logic in a quieter but equally powerful way. The Pantone Colour of the Year 2026, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer, is described as a structural white, chosen because it supports and harmonises, allowing other colours to shine rather than demanding attention, creating calm and clarity across fashion, interiors, packaging and digital environments.⁴

Different voices repeat a similar idea, and when repetition lasts long enough it becomes a norm. For many, minimalism becomes the correct way to exist visually, “less is more”. Inside this frame other aesthetics shrink: maximalism becomes noise, brutalism aggressive, kitsch “cheap”, anti-design immature. These labels do not simply describe, they discipline.

Tunstall shows how one cultural viewpoint became design’s neutral.⁵ Elizabeth Chin shows how ideas of clean and objective visuals quietly decide who belongs.⁶ Bourdieu reminds us that taste is never innocent.¹

Once you begin to see this, minimalism’s silence no longer feels like clarity, it can also feel like exclusion, a space too small for memory, colour. This is where I bring Kees Dorst⁷, a design theorist known for his work on framing and reframing in design, not as abstract theory, but as movement, a way to shift the frame.

Frame 1. Minimalism as the centre of good taste, a world where premium equals quiet, and quiet equals universal.

Frame 2. Why this frame begins to break, because neutrality has a culture, because simplicity has a history, because silence is a choice rather than a truth.

Frame 3. What changes when new voices enter, my layers, my rhythm, my background, and the voices from a small experiment I conducted, Who Gets to Be Minimal?, designers negotiating themselves to fit the frame, softening colours, lowering volume, becoming legible.

These responses are not decoration, they are evidence, as Dorst⁷ reminds us, once new perspectives enter, the problem changes, it becomes visible, reframable. The question was never whether minimalism is beautiful, because it is, the real question is:

Who gets to belong inside the structure, and who must shrink to be seen?

This is where we begin, moving from the silence we were taught to admire to the abundance we were taught to fear, toward a visual world where more is not a problem.

It never was. It is memory.

THE DOMINANT FRAME

FRAME 1

“But who gets to be represented, and who gets access? Eurocentric principles of modern design were conceived as egalitarian tools of social progress, yet they served to suppress differences among people across the globe.”⁸

I want to start this story before me, before Adobe, before 2026, before “clean” became the answer to almost everything. Because the frame didn’t start with us, clean wasn’t born clean, It was made that way. Modernism, Bauhaus, Swiss Style, all chasing purity, order, control, imagining a world of straight lines and one single truth.

Minimalism did not become “good design” because it was better, purer, clearer, or somehow more intelligent by nature. It became “good design” because it aligned itself with a specific historical project: European modernism and its promise of progress through technology and efficiency.⁸ 
What we often forget is that this was never just an aesthetic project. It was also political and cultural, and design became one of its most obedient tools, serving the cultural and political logic behind it.⁸

Dori Tunstall, a design anthropologist, names this with unsettling clarity: the modernist project systematically excluded anyone who was not white, Christian, European, able-bodied, and economically secure, and then presented that narrow, historically specific worldview as universal and neutral. It valued perfection through technology, order over emotion, and rationality over culture.⁵

The promise of “better living” helped hide a system built on colonised land, exploited labour, erased cultures, and silenced difference. As Tunstall argues in Decolonizing Design, modernist aesthetics functioned as a visual language of power, persuasive precisely because they claimed objectivity.⁵ Minimalism did not spread because it convinced everyone, It spread because it disciplined difference. Barcelona chairs, white rooms, glass boxes, perfect grids: not just objects or styles, but signals. Markers of who belonged inside the dream of progress and who remained outside its walls.⁵

While reading the publication ExtraBold⁸, I was struck by how it clearly shows that this dream of minimalism and order never really ended, it simply migrated into education. For decades, classrooms across the world taught Bauhaus, Constructivism, and Swiss Style not as one tradition among many, but as the centre against which everything else would be measured.

“This narrowed lens ignores design contributions from many parts of the world and perpetuates a narrative that good design must be derived from these origins.”⁸

This is how neutrality became a norm. Clean, flat, restrained and emotionally muted.

Kaleena Sales, a Black design educator and professor of graphic design, documents this with painful precision. Black students shaped by hip-hop, layering, texture, rhythm and colour learn very quickly, often without being explicitly told, to tone it down if they want to be taken seriously. Their visual languages are allowed to exist, but only under conditions, under labels like urban, niche, expressive. Never as default professionalism, never as neutral, never as the standard.⁹

And this is not a US-only story. In my own 2025 European survey¹⁰ with practicing designers, part of a small experiment I ran using social media tools for the sake of this article, the same negotiations appear again:

“I receive more praise when my work aligns with what people call a clean or minimalist aesthetic, even when the original concept was more layered.” — Designer, Netherlands, Survey Response, 2025¹⁰

Different continents, same frame, minimalism continues to operate as a passport, a code designers learn to perform in order to appear intelligent, employable, trustworthy, safe. Not necessarily better, but legible to dominant structures of power.

Elizabeth Chin, an anthropologist working on everyday material culture, helps explain why this aesthetic feels so natural to those who sit comfortably inside it. Western culture treats its own perspective as universal by default. Claims about “the human”, “the user”, or “everyone” only sound neutral when we ignore how race, history, class, and inequality structure lived experience.⁶ Building on this, in design the same logic becomes visible:

neutral user = white, Western, middle-class norm

neutral aesthetic = the visual habits of that norm

Minimalism fits this imagined body almost perfectly. It is smooth, controlled, unmarked, detached, decontextualised. Anything that brings texture, memory, ornament, culture, noise, or excess is quickly labelled emotional, subjective, unprofessional or, as I have heard more than once, too artistic.

In a collaborative work, I once watched two people look at the stitching of the same carefully crafted object, produced through machine-assisted handiwork, and read it through entirely different frames. Slight variations in stitching were, for one eye, evidence of care, human presence, material intimacy, authenticity. For the other, they were flaws, inconsistencies, signals of reduced value. Nothing dramatic happened, no confrontation. Just two aesthetic lineages interpreting the same detail through different histories of taste. A reminder that even “quality” is culturally trained, and that “neutrality” is never neutral.

The problem is minimalism's elevation to the silent standard, and before we can reframe anything, we first have to see the frame that has shaped the design field for over a century. Seeing the frame is only the first step; what happens when we try to design inside it?

Because the dominant frame does not only shape aesthetics, it shapes behaviour, decision-making, legitimacy, and the very tools we use to think.

WHY THIS FRAME BREAKS 

FRAME 2

A white room can feel calm, expansive and reassuring in the way only empty space sometimes does. But it can also register as an unspoken request, a subtle pressure to soften your presence, to lower your voice, before you have even spoken. In design culture we often move through spaces like these as if their meaning were universal, as if calm were neutral, as if emptiness naturally signalled clarity. Yet colour itself is rarely as neutral as we imagine. Every year a single shade is chosen somewhere to represent the spirit of the moment, a colour meant to capture the mood of an entire world, as if such a thing could be singular. Colours, like spaces, do not arrive empty of meaning. They travel through memory, through culture, through bodies that read them differently.

I am reminded of a Brazilian reality television show where being taken to a white room signals punishment, a space meant to isolate, disorient, and discipline, because entering it means that whatever you do next can quickly end badly. The same colour, the same emptiness, can soothe or threaten, depending entirely on who is inside it.

The frame does not break because minimalism is wrong, nor because reduction, space, or silence lack value, it breaks because it was never designed to hold everything at once. Layered memories, textures, emotional residues, and cultural references do not always stay quiet.

For a long time this minimalist frame appeared to work, largely because it aligned with the bodies, cultures, and histories that produced it. Within that alignment silence felt appropriate, empty space felt ethical, and reduction felt honest rather than restrictive. But once other lives enter the room, carrying different rhythms, visual densities, emotional registers, and ways of occupying space, the same frame begins to strain.

What we so often call “neutral” is often a position that becomes invisible to those who already sit comfortably inside it.

As Aurélia Durand, a French illustrator and visual artist, reflected during our conversation, what is often presented as neutral design tends to reflect a very specific cultural perspective, for those who already inhabit it.¹¹

What looks calm, elegant and resolved in one cultural context can feel empty or unfinished in another or even threatening. For me, the idea of clean I carry somewhere in my body does not fully match the one I was taught in design classes. Carl Jung refers to the collective unconscious as inherited layers of memory and symbols that move through cultures over time.¹² So when I come across what design culture calls clean, white space, restrained palettes, minimal ornament, controlled typography, I can understand the logic of it intellectually, but emotionally something else happens. A different memory of order, a different sense of harmony. For me harmony needs colour; empty spaces can feel like something is missing. Mine harmony is not straight lines, neutral tones, or silence. Once I read a post that said “I’m too Latina to be minimalist”¹³. The sentence stayed with me. If that is true, then perhaps “I am too African to be neutral”.

Because what we call simple is often simple only when your story is allowed to be simple. When the histories that shape your visual world are linear, when the references around you are already recognised and represented, simplicity can feel natural. But when your visual memory is layered, when your references come from different places, when colour, rhythm, density are not excess but part of how meaning moves, what appears excessive to one eye may simply be coherent to another.

This is why the language of “clean” can feel unstable. It sounds like it is describing a visual quality, but very often it describes closeness to a particular cultural expectation.

As Grada Kilomba, an interdisciplinary artist and writer, reminds us, knowledge and perception are always situated, shaped by colonial histories that determine whose worldview appears universal and whose becomes deviation.¹⁴ Dori Tunstall makes a similar point in Decolonizing Design: neutrality is not a universal value but a cultural one, repeatedly presented as objective by those who benefit from it.⁵ 

Elizabeth Chin approaches this through everyday life in My Life with Things, showing how objects, taste, and ordinary visual habits carry social meaning, and how ideas of order, cleanliness and value are deeply connected with power, race, class and history.⁶

I remember a Christmas holiday that made this suddenly very clear to me. My nephew was coming to spend the holidays with us in Denmark. For him it was not only Christmas, it was snow, cold air, lights everywhere, and the idea that maybe Santa Claus really did live somewhere close by in that frozen northern landscape.

But before the trip he had one small concern: his hair. He wears it beautifully in a full, textured style, the kind of hair that carries presence and movement. Here in winter, hats are almost a necessity, thick wool hats pulled down over the ears before stepping into the cold. But those hats are not really made for hair like his, so he decided to braid it before travelling.

That small decision stayed with me. Something as ordinary as a winter hat quietly revealed a larger truth: what we often experience as universal is very often designed around a particular body. Neutral begins to feel less stable, simply incomplete. What appears natural is often rehearsed, and what feels self-evident is almost always learned.

When minimalism is framed as the safest, most functional option, it places a quiet demand on those who did not grow up within that visual language.

This is where the frame begins to break, not visibly but emotionally and behaviourally. Designers start editing themselves long before anyone explicitly asks them to do so, removing colour in anticipation, reducing texture defensively, choosing silence because silence feels less risky than misinterpretation.

The frame ultimately breaks because it treats abundance as excess rather than significance, reads emotion as noise, and repeatedly mistakes control for clarity while claiming universality. It works smoothly only as long as difference remains outside it or enters only as decoration.

None of this means rejecting minimalism, space and form still matter, and silence can still be powerful. But when one aesthetic becomes the standard against which all others are measured, it stops functioning as a tool and starts operating as a filter, and filters always decide what gets left behind.

This is the moment Kees Dorst describes in Frame Innovation, when the problem itself shifts and the frame no longer fits the reality it attempts to organise.⁷

Designing less has never been the problem. Being asked, implicitly and repeatedly, to become less has.

WHEN NEW VOICES ENTER

FRAME 3

When a new voice enters the frame, it does not enter a white empty page waiting to be filled, it enters a structure that was built, already named, already organised, already holding ideas about what is good design, what is serious design, what lasts and what disappears, and most of the time you only realise this structure exists after you are already inside it.

I did not arrive at these two conversations randomly. One day, after the algorithm did what algorithms now do best, connecting fragments of affinity across feeds and geographies, I found Aurélia, or perhaps she found me. I remember looking at her work and thinking immediately that I needed to speak with her, not because I needed validation, but because I knew she would stretch my thinking, enrich it. I wrote to her that same day: “it is amazing how you use more in your art”. We met in a café in Copenhagen, hygge¹⁵ light, a matcha latte and a cappuccino, and I knew the conversation was going somewhere important.

With Tobias Røder, a Danish designer and creative director working within contemporary Scandinavian design, it was different but equally intentional.¹⁶ While researching Danish designers, trying to understand Nordic design from the inside and not only through outside critique, his name kept appearing. He was recommended to me as someone who represents Nordic design, and I thought: this is exactly what I need to hear, I want to sit in front of the structure, to receive this perspective fully, to understand the internal logic from the inside. If I want to be honest, the piece must be generous enough to include the frame I am questioning. So I reached out, simply to listen. I also turned to my own network, through my Instagram, within my design community, which is not huge but active and spread across different countries and professional levels. I asked how they experienced design education, feedback, recognition, neutrality and praise. It is not an academic dataset (n=8), but it comes from lived practice, from people working inside the industry every day, some struggling to fit the bubble, others trying to resist it.¹⁰

What becomes visible when we place these three layers together, Tobias, Aurélia and the experiment responses, is not a fight between “less is more” and “more is more”, but something more structural.

Tobias avoids the word minimalism.¹⁶ He says they are not minimalists, they “unwrap the problem”, peel layers, remove excess, and look for the core. For him design is not decoration, it is responsibility; it must improve what already exists. He speaks of longevity, timelessness, avoiding trends that expire quickly, craft that requires discipline, and simplicity that exposes mistakes instantly, and I understand this position. What he later called a “shared compass” may not be imposed but constructed through process, a way of working that reduces personal preference and moves close to a shared dogma.

During our conversation, Tobias mentioned an international poster competition he had judged, where entries from dozens of countries seemed to look surprisingly similar. He explained this similarity as a consequence of designers relying heavily on online references, the same visual feeds and global sources of inspiration. But when he told me about this competition, I asked him something that had been sitting in my head for a long time: maybe they looked the same because they knew they were being judged, and in a judging context, designers often align their work with a format that is known to succeed. In doing so they reduce visible roots, reduce local specificity, reduce cultural layers. In other words, I asked him if sameness could sometimes be strategy.

He said it was probably both, the internet and the influence. But what stayed with me was the fear of originality. He mentioned that clients often get scared when something looks too original because they are used to everything looking the same, and here the survey quietly confirms the tension. In my small Instagram poll, half of the respondents said they received mixed messages about “good design” meaning simplicity and neutrality.¹⁰ Not a clear yes, not a clear no, but something in between, norms do not always arrive as rules; they settle in our subconscious as atmosphere, something that surrounds you and shapes your decisions without being directly stated.

A third of respondents said they were asked to make their work “cleaner”. Cleaner is a technical word, it sounds harmless, professional, constructive, but it often means reduce, remove, align, bring the work closer to what is already recognised as correct.

Two thirds admitted that they receive more praise, at least sometimes, when their work fits Western minimalist standards. Not always, not officially, but sometimes, and sometimes is enough to shape behaviour.

Aurélia’s early work, the muted colours, the blending in, suddenly does not look like insecurity, it looks like calibration.¹¹ “It’s easier to use these colours because you blend in,” she said. Blending in is not an aesthetic decision, it is a survival tactic inside a system that already has a visual temperature. The more she reduced herself, the more she felt she was losing herself. The more she allowed colour back into her work, the more she felt whole again.

Do you feel you can influence aesthetic decisions in your work?

None of the respondents in my network said they had zero influence on aesthetic decisions, some said yes, others said partially.¹⁰ Even when designers have influence, their decisions still operate within shared expectations of what “good design” looks like. The structure is not locked, but flexibility is not explicit enough or even an option to erase norm.

Tobias speaks from within the structure, defending craft, longevity and seriousness.¹⁶ Aurélia speaks from within the experience of entering it, negotiating, adjusting, reclaiming space through colour and layering.¹¹ One peels layers to find essence, the other builds layers to restore memory. One begins with society and user, the other begins with self and survival.

The survey does not contradict either of them; it shows how both realities coexist.¹⁰ The dominant frame values clarity, durability and discipline, yet coherence produces norm, and norm produces alignment and influence. Tobias described the Danish design landscape as “small kingdoms”, studios operating within their own spheres, rarely in dialogue, yet still shaped by shared expectations of what counts as good, serious, lasting design.¹⁶

When new voices enter, they are not blocked at the door, they are welcomed, but the room already has a certain light, a certain arrangement. They test whether timelessness can accommodate plurality, they reveal that what appears universal may be culturally specific, they insist that memory is not noise but another type of structure.

The question then is not whether minimalism is good or maximalism is loud, but whether the system built around reduction can fully recognise languages built around accumulation, whether timelessness can hold memory that is layered and diasporic, whether “clean” can coexist with cultural density without translating it into excess.

I sit between these conversations not pretending neutrality, I crossed geographies to understand how this structure works, I respect its craft, I see its strengths, but I also feel its edges. The tension is not aesthetic, it is structural. It lives in the space between peeling and layering, between improvement and visibility, between serving the user and reclaiming the self, between timelessness and memory.

When new voices enter, the question is not whether they can adapt to the frame, but whether the frame can stretch without breaking. And that negotiation remains ongoing.

LOUD & LAYERED

THE NEW FRAME

If Frame 1 showed how minimalism became the standard not because it was visually superior but because it aligned itself with institutions that held power, and Frame 2 revealed how that standard settled inside our bodies, and Frame 3 showed what happens when new voices enter a system that is already calibrated, then this section cannot be an aesthetic celebration of maximalism, nor a simple inversion of hierarchy, because to invert a hierarchy is still to accept the logic of hierarchy itself. What is needed here is something else: another framing.

The experiment is not dramatic in numbers.¹⁰ It is small, but consistent enough to reveal a pattern: the system does not openly exclude; it rewards alignment. When 5 of 8 participants say they receive more praise when they move closer to Western minimalist standards, we are not talking about personal taste but about a validation mechanism, “it feels more professional this way”. Minimalism no longer needs to be imposed as dogma; it operates as expectation, shaping decisions before they are even conscious.

Loud & Layered does not emerge as a visual trend, it emerges as a response to historical compression, layering is not noise, mixture is not disorganisation but memory. Bodies, cultures and histories do not arrive in design as smooth surfaces, they arrive with layers that carry migration and colonial crossings. When someone’s work is considered “too much”, even when softened into “clean it up”, what is being requested is not only formal reduction but cultural containment.

This new Frame does not intend to replace minimalism. The problem is its universalisation, the moment when a situated aesthetic choice transformed into an implicit moral criterion. Tobias helps make this visible during our conversation, Nordic minimalism is not about neutrality as doctrine, but about a cultural orientation, a way of organising society shaped by democracy, user-focus and problem solving, “We are very focused on the end user”, he says.¹⁶ Hearing this, made it difficult for me to see minimalism as neutral.

The new Frame does not reject simplicity, it rejects its elevation into a hierarchy where one aesthetic becomes the standard. It proposes structural plurality. Aurélia makes this urgency explicit when she says that Europe is no longer only white people making white art.

“European design needs to start considering other bodies, other styles, other beliefs, because Europe is no longer – if it ever was – only white and male.” — Aurélia Durand, 2025¹¹

Her position is not about replacing one dominance with another, but about expanding the visual field so that other bodies, references and memories are not treated as exotic insertions.

A plural Frame is one where less is not automatically more mature than density, where neutrality is not presumed more sophisticated than high saturation, where silence is not automatically equated with elegance, and where excess can be understood as intensity, presence. It is a frame where peeling layers and building layers can coexist without one being interpreted as disciplined and the other as undisciplined, where clarity and cultural depth are not opposites but parallel possibilities.

In the interviews, when someone describes simplifying their work to be better received, removing cultural elements to avoid “distraction”, or adjusting palettes and typefaces to appear more corporate, we see the constant negotiation between identity and professional survival. That negotiation is not individual; it is systemic. The new frame does not eliminate this tension, but it makes it visible, shifting the question from “how do I adapt to fit” to “why does fitting have such a specific shape”. At this point Loud & Layered stops being an aesthetic and becomes an epistemological position, a refusal to accept that clarity must mean reduction or that professionalism must mean erasure. If Frame 1 exposed the historical construction of the dominant frame, this new Frame proposes its expansion. 

If aesthetics are only the visible layer, then the real question is not which style should dominate, but who defines the structure within which styles become legitimate. By structure, I mean the conditions that shape how design is judged: education, industry standards, client expectations, cultural references. Within this structure, the dominant Frame (Frame 1) operates as the lens that defines what is seen as “good”, “neutral” or “professional”. Structure defines what is neutral and what is expressive. Structure decides when less is read as sophistication and when density is read as excess.

And if aesthetics are only a medium through which power organises itself, then the manifesto cannot be about colour, typography or layering. It must be about recalibrating the structure that silently ranks them. The question is:

Who built the frame that makes quiet feel safer than loud, and who benefits from that safety?

If design is truly about responsibility, as Tobias suggests, then perhaps responsibility does not end at serving the user; it must also include examining the structure around the user: the surrounding context, other users, and references that shape who is imagined, who is centred, and what is recognised as “good”.¹⁶

If Europe is no longer only white people making white art, as Aurélia reminds us, then why does the default visual grammar still so often assume that it is?¹¹

If designers quietly admit that praise increases when they align with Western minimalist standards, then we are not looking at coincidence but calibration, subtle reward systems shaping decisions before they are even conscious. 

And if “clean it up” is the softened version of “too much”, then what is being cleaned? What is being reduced? Culture, memory, accent, layer, volume.

Loud & Layered is not a trend, not a colour palette, not an Instagram aesthetic. It is a refusal to accept that legitimacy must pass through reduction, a refusal to accept that professionalism must mean dilution. 

It is not about choosing between minimal or maximal. It is about questioning the structure that ranks them and redesigning the frame that made that choice unequal. 

The task is not to defend minimalism as the neutral ideal, but to recognise, as Tobias suggested, that simplicity can take many forms. That simplicity is not the same as minimalism, and that clarity does not belong to one visual language alone.¹⁶

And that is where this manifesto stands, not on a colour or a style, but on a structural shift. 

Not louder for attention but louder for redistribution.