Last month's news that Polish innovator Rondo is set to return under new ownership, but with the same design team, brought a smile to my face. That's not just because I was a fan of Rondos designs, but because the brand's demise in 2024 seemed to signal that being different was too risky in the current bike-business climate.Over the last decade, the prevalence of wind-tunnel testing, CFD software and tube-profile libraries has meant a lot of bike design has become predictable. Or perhaps some of the biggest brands have been playing things too safe.Just look at the latest Trek Domane. It has lost its revolutionary vibration-damping IsoSpeed technology and now its just another lightweight endurance bike. Although Im sure itll be a great bike and Im looking forward to trying it out, I think thats a shame and I miss the bold confidence of the earlier designs. A beautiful example of a curly stayed Harry Hetchins. Rob Spedding Perhaps it has always been this way. Bike design on the whole stays safe.In the golden age of steel-only, lug shapes and paint made road bikes distinctive (bar a few outliers such as Hetchins with its curly stays).However, the bikes that stay in my memory are the ones that break the mould in pursuit of something innovative or new, be it performance or aesthetics. Read more: Rondo is back from bankruptcy and the innovative brand's original design team is coming with itMade to stand out Cannondale's Raven: monocoque, Lefty fork, innovative and bold. I remember the first time I saw the Cannondale Raven in 2000 with a single-sided Lefty fork. It was a unique design that continues to this day and is found on the brilliant Topstone gravel bike. The Raven looked radical enough with its monocoque frame, but combined with the Lefty fork, it stood out like a beacon the first time I saw one on the shop floor at Bristols Mud Dock Cycles.Before that, Giants TCR reshaped the humble road bike into something slicker and more modern. It just looked faster than what had come before.Cinellis Laser looked like a glimpse into the future back in 1981, thanks to its steel frame with aero shapes and smoothed joints. Look at todays 3D-printed titanium framesets and you can see the influence from this handcrafted design. Cinelli's modern reissue of its classic Laser was a limited edition back in 2012. James Huang/BikeRadar.com When Cervlo started bringing true aerodynamics to road bikes and pushed the boundaries of weight on its R series bikes, it changed the industry. It created twin arms races around aerodynamics and weight, which continue to this day.Outside of traditional performance bikes, I think of Moultons 1960s small-wheeled revolution and the compact, folding Brompton. And then Tern made the cargo bike an invaluable (and fashionable) accessory for parents on the school run. The Moulton Esprit retains the Moulton innovation of fast, small-wheeled bikes. Paul Smith While many of the best road bikes and best gravel bikes appear to be cookie cutter designs, there are some signs of innovation in the world of drop-bar bikes. The rise of gravel bikes with 32in wheels is one example. The small-batch custom maker Singular jumped in and proved the divisive wheel size works, and there are plenty more 32in bikes on the way. 32in gravel bikes are an innovation championed by small builders such as Singular. Scott Windsor / ourmedia Then theres new progressive geometry as found on the sublime Merckx 525R, which won our 2026 Race Bike of the Year award. Colnagos impressively successful Y1Rs is welcomingly different although it helps that it's ridden by the best rider of the current generation, Tadej Pogaar.Again, Cervlo deserves credit for bikes such as the S5. Factor does, too, because the One looks like nothing else, and has a progressive approach to geometry to boot.Polish gravel Riding the Rondo Ruut on Polish gravel in 2017. straronphoto This brings me back to Rondo. I got to travel out to the companys HQ in Poland back in 2017 to try out the original Ruut. It was a progressive gravel design before such a thing existed, with adjustable fork trail thanks to its flip-chip dropout a feature now often copied across gravel bikes.The frame design looked like nothing we'd seen before, and I was sold after riding the bike on some wonderful Polish gravel trails and roads.Perhaps Rondos outlier status meant it approached things differently (and from what founder Szymon Koblinski has hinted to me recently, that's something itll continue to do).The HVRT, from 2019, is another example of this. It was three bikes in one: an aggressive aero bike; aero-endurance bike; and a 650b-wheel aero-gravel racer, before anyone else had thought about the concept of aero gravel.Then we had radical-looking bikes such as the gravity-oriented MYLC, the RATT and the last iteration of the RUUT, with its parallelogram-like back end, which combined futuristic looks and engineering to make for a more compliant rear end.I wish Rondo every success in its resurrection, and I hope more brands embrace bold design as it has.