I wish people would distinguish more between the "visual" side of UI and the "UX" side of UI. The question and discussion conflate them. And then they confuse t

I wish people would distinguish more between the "visual" side of UI and the "UX" side of UI. The question and discussion conflate them. And then they confuse the whole thing with branding. Branding is NOT about distinctiveness in visual design. Branding is about owning a particular position in the users' mind. ie. "The cheapest" (Wallmart). Or "the original" (Coca Cola). Or "Search" (Google). Or "Classifieds" (Craigslist). The purpose of visual design, particularly on the web, is to communicate well and make your site easy to use. I don't believe it is to "stand out", although that can be a nice-to-have. If you want to study the relation between visual design and branding, study Craigslist, eBay, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. Dropbox too. On the web, the reason why most sites look the same is that we've found again and again that usability trumps "looks", since the browser is so limited. So sites have converged on a whole bunch of conventions. (I'm talking about the ux side of design). Having said all that, I think it's totally ok to not follow the pack in terms of gradients and dropshadows etc.