The episode always begins the same way.
A body is found, detectives arrive, and the camera cuts to the courtroom. The doors swing open, mahogany gleams, the seal of the state hovers above the bench, and the audience instantly knows what kind of space this is—solemn, orderly, incontestable. Before a single argument is made, design has delivered its verdict: authority resides here.
For decades, television shows like Law & Order have relied on these visual tropes to cue legitimacy. The brass scales, the elevated dais, the serif lettering of In God We Trust etched in stone—these aren’t props, they’re semiotics. They’re shorthand for justice. The audience doesn’t need to be told the judge’s credentials or the veracity of the system. We recognize the cues because they are universal. The design of authority precedes the experience of authority.
In the real world, as in television, institutions stage their credibility long before they earn it. From the architecture of a courthouse to the typography of a dollar bill—or the homepage of a global law firm—visual language governs our expectations of truth and fairness. We are comforted by consistency, persuaded by restraint, and disarmed by the quiet certainty that order already exists.
Yet the design of authority is changing. In a digital age where screens have replaced marble façades, we are living through a visual realignment of power—one that has shifted from monumental to minimal, from hierarchical to “humane.” And that transformation raises a profound question: When trust moves from stone to pixel, what does truth look like?
The Semiotics of Power
Design has always been the handmaiden of authority. Roman emperors inscribed laws on stone tablets; monarchs embossed their decrees with wax seals; early banks borrowed ecclesiastical architecture to sanctify money. Across time and culture, institutions have relied on the same repertoire of signals—scale, symmetry, material permanence—to convey stability.
Typography followed suit. The serif typefaces that dominate court filings, financial statements, and Ivy League seals are descendants of those Roman inscriptions—letters that promised endurance through their very weight. In design, gravitas has a grammar.
These patterns are not aesthetic accidents. They form what sociologist Max Weber called the performance of rational-legal authority: the illusion that a system, not an individual, governs. The institution, not the speaker, holds the power. We trust it because it appears objective.
From Marble to Minimalism
Compare the websites of the U.S. Supreme Court and Apple. The Supreme Court’s homepage feels frozen in time—featuring gray and gold backgrounds, dense text, and an old-fashioned seal that conveys authority by reputation. It’s a digital monument to an analog institution: weighty, inaccessible, and confident in its permanence.
Apple’s site, by contrast, is the height of corporate control disguised as ease. Every interaction is frictionless, every transition intentional. Its authority derives not from hierarchy but from mastery—the illusion that perfection requires no effort. One interface reminds us of history and permanence; the other of innovation and personal empowerment. Yet both command obedience, one through reverence, the other through seduction.
The visual shift from marble to minimalism marks more than a stylistic change—it signals a cultural realignment. Where power once demanded distance, it now depends on intimacy. The language of authority has absorbed the aesthetics of consumer experience: sleek, seamless, optimized. But the friendliness of minimalism often conceals its own form of control. The same design principles that make a device irresistible also make us surrender our agency.
The “Don’t Be Evil” Aesthetic
In 2004, when Google went public, its founders included an unusual promise in their IPO letter: “Don’t be evil.” The phrase became Silicon Valley’s moral motto—and inadvertently, its design philosophy. Google’s homepage was revolutionary in its emptiness: a single search bar floating in white space, free from the portal clutter that defined Yahoo and AOL. This wasn’t just minimalism; it was moral minimalism. The design implied: we have nothing to hide.
That aesthetic—clean, friendly, unthreatening—became the template for institutional rehabilitation everywhere. When Facebook faced Congressional hearings, Zuckerberg didn’t just wear a suit—the platform’s interface got progressively gentler, with rounded corners and pastel accents multiplying after each crisis. Goldman Sachs, once content with its stark wordmark, launched Marcus—a consumer banking app that felt more like a friend than a financial product. Wells Fargo’s post-scandal rebrand dramatically simplified the stagecoach and wordmark to tell a story of transformation.
This visual formula—what we might call the aesthetics of “innocence”—has become so universal that corporations, government agencies, healthcare systems, and financial institutions now all speak the same design language. They’ve discovered that the illusion of accountability is easier than practicing it. But when everyone adopts the same visual vocabulary of trustworthiness, the meaning is lost.
The Crisis of Trust
And yet, trust itself is eroding. Americans report record-low confidence in nearly every major institution—government, media, business, and the justice system. As institutions falter, design becomes a compensatory theater. The first response to scandal is now reflexive: rebrand.
But no amount of kerning can repair what behavior breaks. The public has learned to decode the pattern—when a logo gets rounder and friendlier, it’s rarely about modernization. It’s penance without the repentance.
Control Without Friction
The most consequential shift is invisible. As decision-making migrates from human judgment to algorithmic systems—loan approvals, market predictions, risk assessments—the face of authority is no longer human. It’s computational.
This is where Daniel Kahneman’s research becomes prophetic. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he demonstrated that our brains use cognitive ease as a proxy for truth—we literally believe things more when they’re easier to process. A statement in clear font is judged more truthful than one in hard-to-read type.
The implications are staggering: the smoother the interface, the more legitimate the authority feels, regardless of what’s happening beneath the surface. The interfaces of modern power—financial dashboards, legal platforms, data portals—weaponize this cognitive bias perfectly. They translate vast, opaque systems into experiences so frictionless that questioning them feels like a sign of incompetence.
Design has evolved from a mission of persuasion into one of seduction. We don’t resist because resistance itself has been designed out of the system.
The Aesthetics of Trust
In Law & Order, the gavel’s bang signals resolution. Justice has been performed. But today’s authority arrives in silence—the frictionless app, the pre-checked box, the algorithmic verdict delivered as a suggestion—“You might also like…”
Every institution now knows the choreography: simplify the interface, soften the edges, speak in lowercase. When your bank’s interface becomes indistinguishable from your meditation app, when every authority performs with the same visual humility, we’re witnessing power. Can we recognize that design has become the primary tool of institutional manipulation? Kahneman would appreciate the paradox: the better authority looks, the less we should trust it.
Lynda Decker leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands. This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon.
Header image courtesy of the author.
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