The Blur Test
Take your glasses off and squint at a brand to judge its cohesion, color story, and overall feeling.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 82%
Detail vision hides the forest for the trees. Hische's blur test — literally defocusing your eyes — strips away the specifics so you perceive only the overall look, the color story, and whether the elements feel like they belong together. It's how a color becomes recognizable before a name is, and how you catch a brand that's really a mishmash.
Origin
Jessica Hische's evaluation heuristic; she frames poor eyesight as a design asset.
Core principles
- 01A brand's color story is recognizable at a blur even when detail isn't
- 02Blurring reveals whether elements feel created together or tacked on
- 03Bad vision is an asset — it forces the broad view
- 04The overall feeling is the thing to judge, not the one-by-one specifics
How to run it
- 1
Defocus
Take your glasses off (or squint) and look at the full brand so you can't see any detail.
Pro tip If you have terrible vision, use it — it's your best asset here.
- 2
Read the color and overall look
Judge the color story and whether the whole thing reads as one cohesive vision or a grab-bag of trends with no voice coming through.
Pro tip Color is the fastest recognition cue — you can identify a mature brand by color alone once it has built equity.
- 3
Get as broad and noodley as you can
Deliberately avoid the specific one-by-one elements; ask only 'what is the overall look of this thing.'
In the wild
Hische says that when she blurred her eyes on Lenny's existing brand, there was already a clear cohesiveness and a distinct color story, so the refresh was about massaging it into a more consistent, professional place rather than inventing a new vision.
→ The blur test confirmed the brand had a real voice worth preserving.
Common mistakes
Judging cohesion at full focus
Looking at details makes disparate elements seem fine individually while missing that they don't feel like they came from the same universe.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and designers sanity-checking whether a brand's elements hang together as a system
Not ideal for
Diagnosing precise legibility or optical-weight defects, which require close inspection
From the transcript
“if you blur your eyes and look at a brand, it you can tell you can recognize it by its color”
“having terrible vision can be like your your best asset when it comes to like logo and brand because it”
“when you blur your eyes on your brand, there was a really clear cohesiveness to it already”
From the episode
How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos
Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author)