Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Auge just unveiled a redesign for the oldest Belgian chocolatier, Meurisse, and every inch of the brand has been obsessed over. Gorgeous, elegant stuff.

• Don’t call it a Radioshack comeback!

• Another celeb beverage bites the dust. So long, Betty Buzz, I liked your stubby bottle!

• Chloe just wrapped up her MAX recap. Check it out.

• Speaking of, Threads has been going off, and Adobe’s stock is down 31% for the year. Out of curiosity, did anyone have a good MAX?

• “Meme magic” isn’t real.

• Hell of a Willie Mays stamp from John Shea, who co-wrote Mays’ autobiography.

• Tibor Kalman’s son just brought back his quirky watches.

• I didn’t know that “Frutiger Aero” was a THING, nor that the Gen Z kids are obsessed with it,

• The Metallica Font Generator made my name look stupid. What’s not stupid is them playing a Delaware bar back in 1989. Newark was fun once, I promise!

• If your man just bought a leather jacket, run.

• I am once again asking who designed Jetty, in-house or otherwise. I dislike running stories without getting agency confirmation just as much as I dislike being ghosted by PR folks. It’s nice to credit people for their hard work!

• Get yourself the new album from Lankum’s Radie Peat.

When the young people dance they do not dance forever.

-Bill

• We love a staircase-inspired identity for a park over here at Side Salad HQ, so good on you, Stout SF.

• I think the ugliest thing I set eyes on every gosh-darn year is the Coachella “poster” announcing this year’s fest. To be fair, I don’t know how you present that much information without looking like a total mess, but for funsies, I would love to see the AI flyer version of this. Also, I aged out of Indio a long time ago, and I’m not sure I ever aged in, frankly, but the Dua Lipa-over-Madonna disrespect is diabolical. The most radical thing Lipa has ever done is start a book podcast.

• Ely puts the Memphis in bodycare.

• Mike Reed of Reed Words breaks down the meaning of “maybe it’s Maybelline,” and how the brand blew up its ambiguously great slogan. Maybelline got way into their own head; it need not be this deep, as the kids say.

• Here’s a book about how “America runs on Adderall,” and they even went with a prescription-bottle-inspired cover.

• Hoo boy alert. This Shanghai restaurant(yes, that one) will let you engineer your own Jensen Huang extramarital affair photo. A+ marketing.

• Typography inspired by a Pasadena deli? Sold. Great interview from Charlotte with “Pasadeli’s” creator, Jasper McMahon.

• The world’s best-selling toy just got a redesign. Don’t worry, y’all, it looks very much the same.

• AOL core: People are big mad about... a studio rebooting a popular 28-year-old rom-com that was also the best AOL advertisement ever; however, the Nora Ephron-helmed You’ve Got Mail is also a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, which, for my money, is the real best Christmas movie starring Jimmy Stewart. And that movie was based on a 1937 Hungarian play. Not to mention there are at least five other pictures that have used this setup. Everything old is old again.

• Spotted this on Aquarium Drunkard, but you should start your day with a 30-minute cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car“ that turns into a gorgeous drone. Stick with it.

Maybe meet me another day in the garden.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Blah blah blah fiber is the new protein blah blah blah. Missed this one last week, but Oatly now has a new fiber line, and that packaging is ROUGH. Incidentally, can’t wait for 2027’s hottest food trend, aka listening to your doctor and dismissing macro callouts on packaging in favor of a healthy, balanced diet. People need to get reacquainted with the Michael Pollan manifesto of “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

• I am a sap, and this Rao’s campaign from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, “Limited Time only,” got my ass.

• At least Skims offered refunds after the Advent Calendar debacle.

• In completely unsurprising news, Skydance said they will bundle Paramount+ and HBO MAX, which is huge news for fans of HBO’s branding saga. The combo streamer is set to launch in early 2027, and given their rising costs, it will probably not be easy on the wallet. Sorry!

• Anywho, the best time to buy a Blu-ray or DVD player is now. This is absolutely my hill to die on, but what I love about the New York Times article I linked here is that it gets at a very awful modern pain point. Passwords, QR codes, and, at least for my family, the cycling through of emails for free trials: “I like that our DVD player is neither smart nor intelligent. You put in the disc, and the movie appears. Instead of searching for Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” — and finding it on Prime, only to learn that I have to pay to rent it, and even that would require reinstating my lapsed Prime account, which would require reckoning with my many feelings about Amazon — I can put on the Criterion Collection DVD of “Rushmore” I acquired two decades ago and spend my mental energy on Bill Murray rather than Jeff Bezos. (Speaking of the Criterion Collection, you know why all the celebrities who visit the Criterion Closet look so happy? It’s because they’re surrounded by DVDs!).”

• Welp, I have now lived long enough to see a Supreme x Elliott Smith capsule collection. There has always been an unsettling ick factor to dead musician merch. On the one hand, I want a 15-year-old kid to love Elliott Smith as much as I did, but on the other hand, slapping the cover of his self-titled album onto a hoodie and charging someone $100+ for the privilege of owning it feels gross to me (says the guy wearing a pair of John Prine socks).

• Yes, I would like a picture book about wealth inequality. Good interview here with Mono Chalabi on her new book, Ten Lives.

• Would love for someone, anyone, to tell me who designed the packaging for Jetty, in-house or otherwise (this is despite us asking the brand multiple times).

• Entenmann’s has some thoughts on the Nvidia spy scandal.

Been out haunting the neighborhood and everybody can see I’m no good.

Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I have around 10 old yogurt containers I use for leftovers, and I’d love for other brands to lean into the reusability of plastic tubs like Lala did with this campaign.

• Dior is in hot water for allegedly using AI in its holiday ad (good on FastCo’s Jesus Diaz for explaining “rushed animation,” btw), which was supposed to be a celebration of the handcrafted. The ad’s director, Sylvain Chomet, insists all the animation was done by hand, but he did tell Variety that some segments used an “automated interpolation system.” Now, internet sleuths on Reddit are levying accusations against Prada, too. If you don’t want the stench of AI to follow you, I dunno, maybe just don’t use it? Otherwise, you should be transparent about these things. I’m sure Dior and Prada wouldn’t want to be accused of fast fashion, but if we’re saying that luxury brands are paying a premium for a “hand-crafted” veneer, then if true, this is pretty tacky (and cheap).

• Related: That so much of this has turned into an exercise in seeing where someone used AI is kind of a drag! But at least we have a new Wallace & Gromit spot for Barbour.

• Bluejacket and Ocelot brewed an English-style IPA for pub rock power rockers The Tubs, a very, very, very good live band you should see if they come to your town.

• Subway bread is fashion.

• The “Fyre Festival of Advent Calendars” is a skosh strong, but yeah, Kim’s Skims Calendar feels like she raided Dollar General at the last minute. Packaging seemed fun, but not $148 fun.

• Charlotte posted this in one of our Slack channels, saying “no one wants this,” but I can assure you that I very much want a Baskin-Robbins turkey cake.

• Leave the leaves, or at least turn them into a plastic alternative.

The 10th of November, the year’s almost over.

-Bill

I find the wellness-industrial complex endlessly fascinating. The same industry evangelizing how to make our lives healthier is also finding a way to monetize every last corner of them. Sleep (both getting us there and tracking it once we’re out), focus, calm, energy, the list goes on.

On one hand, there’s the sweet, almost innocent side of wellness: chamomile before bed, lemon in hot water, a solid eight hours of sleep. On the other hand, though, there’s a potion, pill, or powder for anything that functions in or around the body.

I’ll be honest about where I stand. A while back, I started taking a wellness product (that shall remain unnamed) that promised to help me focus. My husband, who’s a doctor, told me it wouldn’t do anything and that I shouldn’t bother, but nothing about it seemed that intense to me. If it worked, great. If not, there was always the placebo effect. A few weeks into taking it, however, I lost my period, and it absolutely freaked me out. I took those products thinking I’d doom scroll less during the workday, but they were strong enough to change something as significant as my cycle. If something marketed for focus can do that, I wanted to know how these types of products were regulated in the first place, because I couldn’t be the only one.

So I started asking around. I spoke with a source at the FDA, who asked not to be named; Carolina M. Wirth, an FDA Regulatory and Compliance Attorney at Hall, Render, Killian, Heath & Lyman, P.C.; and Jane Kate Wong, founder of the functional wellness brand NOON.

The answer to who’s regulating these types of things turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected.

To understand supplements, it helps to start with drugs. “FDA ensures that new drugs work correctly and that their health benefits outweigh their known risks,” my FDA source explained. That means lab and animal testing, human clinical trials, and a full review of the data and the label by a team of physicians, statisticians, chemists, and pharmacologists. “Generally, the agency expects that the drug maker will submit results from two well-designed clinical trials, to be sure that the findings from the first trial are not the result of chance or bias.” The scrutiny continues after approval, too, with ongoing adverse event reporting, label updates, and facility inspections. For drugs, the process is lengthy and comprehensive.

Supplements, however, play by a completely different set of rules. “The difference comes from a policy choice Congress made in 1994 in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. That law treats supplements as a category of food,” Wirth told me. “A supplement company does not need FDA approval to launch. It is responsible for making sure its product is safe, and its claims are truthful and substantiated, but FDA does not review that evidence in advance.”

In other words, a drug has to prove itself before it reaches the consumer, but a supplement generally gets a closer look only after it’s already in your cabinet and people are reporting issues with it.

That said, it’s insane for supplements to be categorized as food. Food. As in salt-and-vinegar chips, canned tuna, and bananas. When I take a capsule that promises to sharpen my focus or calm my nervous system, I don’t think of it as a snack, or as something a regulatory body should treat as one. These products are formulated to change how our bodies and brains function; they come in dosed servings, and they’re often sold in the same aisles as Advil. Yet legally, they have more in common with my breakfast than my prescriptions.

A drug must prove itself safe before it ever reaches the consumer, and for good reason. But it bothers me that a supplement typically gets a closer look only after people start reporting problems. Consumers might not necessarily know that, and I’m not sure the industry is in any rush to tell us. Consumers are being made to do homework they don’t even know they’ve been assigned, and the packaging makes it look like we shouldn’t have to ask any questions.

My first thought was that Europe must do this better, because they seemingly regulate more (and, between us, do everything clearly smarter), and it kind of does. The surprise is that the EU also legally classifies supplements as food, defining them as “foodstuffs the purpose of which is to supplement the normal diet.”So there’s still no drug-style approval before launch, but the difference is in the guardrails. In many EU countries, brands must notify regulators before a product hits shelves, which means governments know what’s being sold, which is the exact gap Wirth flagged in the US. Brands can only use health claims that have been preapproved and listed in an official EU register, so they can’t invent their own wellness promises, and any ingredient that wasn’t commonly eaten in Europe before 1997 counts as a “novel food” and needs authorization before it can be sold, which catches a lot of the “trendy” compounds driving the optimization boom.

So Europe doesn’t treat supplements like medicine, necessarily, but it doesn’t let brands write their own rules about what they can say and put in the bottle.

Wong learned about the U.S. terms firsthand as a first-time founder. “What’s surprising is that there are VERY loose regulations. Nothing on-shelf needs to be FDA regulated or potency tested,” she said. “It really puts an onus on the consumer to do the research if they want some reassurance that what they are taking is truly good for them.” Wong continued, “Each NOON batch is 3rd party tested, and we also ensure our manufacturer is up to date on their GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices), FDA, and ISO certifications,” Wong said. The problem is that it’s voluntary, and as a shopper, I have almost no way of knowing who’s doing it and who isn’t.

Wong was also candid about the gap between what brands say and what shoppers understand. On the phrase “clinically tested,” she told me, “What this means to us is that we’re working with ingredients with known clinical studies behind them, with proven and tested results for their effects. In a consumer’s mind, this might mean that we as the brand have done a clinical trial on our formulas, and unfortunately they might not know the nuance.”

Wirth was clear that design choices matter more than brands might think. “Dosing cards, blister packs, clinical typography, and pharmacy aesthetics are not violative on their own. Taken together, though, they can reinforce a drug impression that the words alone might not create.”

The line between a supplement and an unapproved drug comes down to intended use, and the FDA looks at everything a brand says and shows. “In my practice, I see the pull toward that line most in weight management, where many products are positioned as natural alternatives to GLP 1 drugs,” Wirth said. Her advice to clients is blunt: “On a supplement package, I advise clients to avoid disease names; words such as ‘cure,’ ‘treat,’ ‘prevent,’ ‘heals,’ and ‘reverses’; comparisons to named drugs; and terms that suggest the strength of a medicine, such as ‘clinical strength’ or ‘prescription grade.’”

If something goes wrong after you take a supplement, the system mostly relies on someone noticing. Manufacturers are required to report serious adverse events, and consumers can report reactions directly. But Wirth was honest about the limits of that process. “Adverse events are widely believed to be underreported. Many consumers do not connect a symptom to a supplement or do not tell their doctor they take one.”

And that was exactly what happened to me with that “focus” supplement. My first instinct wasn’t to blame the supplement. It had to be stress, travel, or something else I had consumed recently, and it took me a while to connect the dots, so I never reported it. I’d bet a lot of people are in the same boat.

“The FDA also does not have a complete list of the supplements on the market, which makes oversight harder,” Wirth added.

Change is coming, slowly. Wirth pointed to Dietary Supplement Listing Act proposals introduced in Congress this year that would require every supplement to be listed with the FDA, which she sees as the more realistic next step. “Premarket approval would be a much larger change. It would require significant new FDA funding and enough political will to overcome strong industry opposition, which has not happened in more than 30 years.”

When asked whether supplements should be more regulated, Wong shares, “While I want to say yes, it would mean that brands like mine might not have existed if there was more red tape and higher costs to launch,” Wong said.

When products are formulated to change how our bodies and brains work, and packaged to look either trendy or like they should be behind a pharmacy counter, the stakes are much higher for consumers.

Until regulations change (if they ever do), the burden falls on us as consumers, and in my opinion it shouldn’t. Nobody should have to lose their period to find out a focus supplement was more powerful than it seemed. For me, the scariest part wasn’t even the side effect; it was realizing I’d trusted a nicely designed package more than my own husband, an actual doctor.

When you break it down, I think the wellness industrial complex has three tiers when it comes to packaging. First, there’s the tier that includes what Alex Jones and Joe Rogan-type people with a podcast mic push between conspiracy rants. These types of products often have loud labels and huge, big promises. Most people I know would eye those with at least some sort of healthy suspicion. Then there’s also the clinical tier, with stark white bottles and sans serif type that look like they came out of a pharmacy. And there’s also the tier that focuses on trendier, design-led packaging.

In my opinion, those last two are where things get a little more complicated. The ingredients inside might not be all that different from what’s in the maximalist bottle, but good branding lends them a shred of credibility they haven’t necessarily earned. A smart shopper would probably pass on something hawked by Joe Rogan, but that exact same shopper might not think twice about a beautifully designed supplement from a brand even (and especially) if the products on the inside are exactly the same. It’s the power of packaging, and in this category, it can do real damage when the credibility it creates isn’t backed by anything of substance.

If a product is powerful enough to change something as fundamental as my cycle, it’s powerful enough to warrant a check before it ever reaches a shelf. Until things change, the next time something promises to fix my focus, I think I’ll just put my phone face down while I work.

Stay Fresh,

Chloe Cordover

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Are you telling me that I can make a Grillo’s snow globe kit? It’s a Christmas Miracle! Sold.

• Have you ever wondered what the sprawling, infinite realm of Backrooms smelled like? The Backrooms x Joya Scent Kit just crossed my desk, and I am 1000% stoked to try this. The set, developed by fragrance designer Joya, includes five scents to spray at designated timestamps throughout the film. It’s my 14-year-old’s favorite movie, which we just bought (or you can watch on MAX), and I can’t wait to get a whiff of “yellow.” Love these weird little experiential things. A24’s merch still goes hard.

• Loved this interview with Stout Collective’s Matt Tanaka. I especially dug the part where he outlined what he sees as the three chapters of craft brewing. Good one for the beer nerds!

• OK, but if the alligator swallowed the X-Box, does that make the alligator packaging?

• Bob Dylan’s outfit to meet the pope was cool, but it would have been a whole lot cooler if he’d worn the same get-up when he was nearly arrested for trespassing outside the house where Bruce Springsteen recorded Born to Run and was described as a “disheveled man.” Where’s that fit, Uncle Robert?

• When I zoom in on some of the images for Ono’s protein soda, I can kinda-sorta see “protein soda” running down the can vertically, but when viewed straight on, I would have no idea what this is. I would just assume it’s a can that’s full of 12g of some indescribable mystery protein. Not a good look on a store shelf.

• If I tell you that an 8-ounce cup of milk has 8 grams of protein, does that make me a milk influencer?

• I’m sure this isn’t even remotely a coincidence and has nothing to do with the midterm results or how people hate data centers more than walking barefoot through a room covered in LEGOs.

• Ace redesign for J&J.

• Rudy covered the Canva layoffs that were quietly announced the day after the election (good one!), but the Australian has an exclusive with a former employee who says AI has “wrecked” everything when it comes to working in tech.

• This man is no hero. I get that you don’t enjoy pineapple on your pizza, which is absolutely your right, but at a certain point, you start to sound like a child who refuses to eat his dinner.

For these last few days, leave me alone.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

Sorry, everyone. Not the usual Side Salad today, but we’ll be back in Link City on Friday.

***

The 2026 midterm elections offered not only a referendum on Trumpism, but a stunning rebuke of the administration’s careless approach to the economy and tariffs, not to mention the President’s picking a fight with Iran that sent energy costs soaring. There is no gray area here, no indecipherable mystery over what voters really wanted from their elected officials. It was a complete and total rejection of the path the country was headed down.

But it was also a condemnation of data centers and, by proxy, Silicon Valley and the AI industry. With 41 data center-related ballot measures in the 2026 midterms across 10 states, nearly every initiative resulted in a ban or moratorium, except for an initiative in Harwood, North Dakota, where voters rejected an independent review “before city approval of industrial developments.”

Folks will be sifting through the meaning of the 2026 midterms for weeks to come, but if one thing was resoundingly clear, it’s that Americans are fed up with the overwhelming insistence that AI, as well as AI compute and data centers, are the future and that you can do nothing to stop it. And while it would be foolish to bet against AI and whatever impact it will have on tomorrow and how it impacts our lives and how we work, it was abundantly clear that the backlash to the industry, but also the tech oligarchy that pushed it in the first place, in its current form, is very much real.

You don’t have to accept some bad things happening for the benefit of AI, and, truthfully, what a remarkably dunderheaded, oblivious, and out-of-touch notion to say out loud.

In other words, voters don’t want this. The story of AI is by no means over, but it became clear on November 4th that we need to start having better conversations about the technology and not one that centers on a message of “adapt or die.” Ultimately, this isn’t a red-or-blue state issue. It’s just the way things are. In an NBC exit poll, 76% of voters said they would oppose building a data center in their community, while 56% said it was a crucial or major factor in the congressperson they voted for. Despite the intense, bipartisan opposition to data centers, President Trump put his full support behind them, saying that communities who opposed them would “end up being backwards and poor” and that we would lose ground to China in the AI race.

Of course, data centers were unpopular with the electorate before November 2nd, and it showed in poll after poll and even in a casual scroll through TikTok and Reels. But I do think this is notable now because some of the folks pushing it, politicians and fans of half zips alike, now must face the consequences for having done so in the first place, and all while acting as if the 2024 presidential election gave them some kind of mandate to do whatever they pleased, so long as they courted favor with the president.

Tech executives poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the midterms, and in the end, it only confirmed that people don’t want to live with the loud, incessant hum of a 100-megawatt data center.

Business, as it turns out, has no place in government. It’s one thing to help pave the way for innovation and investing in the country’s future with tax incentives predicated on creating good-paying US jobs; it’s an entirely different thing to hand the keys over to business leaders and give them carte blanche without a skosh of regulatory oversight (and for a problematic industry). Because the people knew they were getting fucked.

Every tech CEO got what they had coming, and we shouldn’t let them forget it either.

Readers of this newsletter are, by now, aware that AI is something I talk about quite a bit, perhaps even to the point where I myself have wanted to let up on the gas at times. However, I would argue that it is necessary to talk about these issues when so much of the federal government has given the AI industry a free pass. Many people have genuine concerns about these tools and technologies, and it’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see that this is a bipartisan issue, with most folks being told to hold their noses and accept their fate.

AI certainly isn’t going anywhere, but what needs to change is not just how these tools are marketed and sold to us for widespread adoption, but the entire industry’s approach to standards and ethics, something that speaks to our concerns around safety, protecting workers, and the wholesale “fair use” theft of IP. The environmental and water-consumption issues alone warrant much-needed regulatory oversight, and most tech companies have failed to be transparent about the water and power required to run these tools.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame you if you’re sick of hearing about AI—I’m just as exhausted as my beloved em dashes that were cruelly taken away from me, and I would love nothing more than to stop writing about it. But when you have a disruptive technology that can potentially upend the entire US economy, and no one in control is raising alarm bells, then we have a very serious problem being handled by deeply unserious people. Frankly, I would much rather spend my time talking about new materials and plastic-free initiatives, or whatever silly watercooler CPG convo is happening around whatever awful flavor Kraft released this week. It’s also my general sense that most rank-and-file designers didn’t go to college to push pixels around on a client’s AI-generated concept for not a whole lot of money, and that the only people who are really talking about how you need to incorporate these tools (at least in this corner of the design world) into your processes are often design leaders, agency heads, and C-suite brand types.

I don’t think most people are against using AI to name files or play a supporting, agentic role, but I’m also sure most of them are sick of having it stare them down on the reg and are rightfully concerned about the direction of their own careers.

The message to every politician, regardless of party, cannot be clearer. Regulation needs to happen now, and the entirety of the AI industry needs to meet real people where they are. We won’t all become millionaires just because we have freed ourselves from the shackles of tedious labor. There will be no 3-day work weeks (though that does have a nice ring to it). Data centers will not be bastions of green energy that don’t wreak havoc on the environment or their community.

And when the 2027 congressional term kicks off in January, hopefully, the watchdogs will finally show up and get to work on what voters actually want.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I filed most of the newsletter before the midterm results rolled in, but voters overwhelmingly rejected AI infrastructure and the development of more data centers. And, at least as of this morning, 33 ballot measures passed. That’s hardly the story of the night, but it’s certainly part of it.

• And on that note, keep on pushin’.

• The great COVID-era QSR redesign has finally ended? It’s fair to say that the scourge of online ordering and get-in-and-get-out-ASAP-and-don’t-make-eye-contact-with-a-human-soul resulted in a less-than-human experience. Some folks want to loiter and hang out, and with this overall lack of third spaces, who can necessarily blame them? Ruthless efficiency is out; lingering is in?

• Speaking of fast-ish food, love the identity SAMPLE pulled off for Port Neches burger joint Luckies.

• MLB and Mother Design assembled a dream team of type designers to bring the league’s font book to life. Real dang shame we probably won’t have baseball next year. My fantasy league weeps.

• Cinnamon Roll Mac n’ Cheese? Kraft is just fucking with us now, right?

• That Adobe class action suit is back on. No one likes a hidden subscription cancellation fee!

• Oh yeah, “AI Compute Campuses“ sounds a lot less evil. That’ll do the trick!

• Just learned of the existence of Spelunkr, and boy howdy, I can’t wait to play around with it. Assembled from VHS recordings available on the Internet Archive, Spelunkr is a free “TV guide” with 33 channels showing everything from classic monster flicks and professional wrestling to Saturday morning cartoons and noir flicks. There are even classic commercials. No skipping ahead; you tune in and watch. It is EXACTLY like the 80s and 90s, and the channel gives you what is on at that exact moment. It’s glorious.

• Talked with Kingdom & Sparrow about our October Pack of the Month and how they went full pastoral on Wild Lady Eggs.

• Hey, super friend! Are you working an extra 90 minutes a day? Welp, there’s a reason for that!

• If your school rejects the use of AI, Google is totally cool with it, OK? Really. They’re totally fine. But you can no longer use their search engine.

• Think we need to sit down with AMC and have the talk (about these Dune 3 popcorn buckets).

And this old world is a new world.

Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I am deeply resentful that every November 1st now signals the arrival of Mariah season. Please, I am begging you. Let Thanksgiving come; let me enjoy the last few vestiges of autumn and listen to a few Sandy Denny records without being bombarded by the holiday season.

• Are you telling me I can get a religious exemption from using AI? Looks like I just jumped on board with the Humanists.

• Publishers Weekly took a close look at Sarah J. Maas Inc. and the author behind the massively popular romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses. Specifically, they turned their attention to the licensing and merch deals the author has received after joining up with the WME group...which seems to be turning off fans. That last sentence here is a doozy, too: In an October 23 video, one bookfluencer summed up this ambivalence: “I don’t know how I feel about my favorite series becoming a capitalist nightmare.” There is a point where you eventually go a little too hard on the cash grab and merch a little too close to the sun (looking at that monster, JK Rowling). You have to do this sort of thing in a way that genuinely makes sense and feels non-icky.

• There’s no such thing as a “Disney Cool Girl.” You cannot simply rebrand the Disney Adult.

• Using South Park is certainly one way to market your video game.

• Mentioned this one a few months ago, but this is an immensely pleasing box from Tavern and the beverage they developed for their Cannes trip last summer.

• Guess there really is no stopping December’s hemp ban, huh? Better get your fav drinks and gummies while you can!

• Man, just bring back the glass bottle already, will ya’, Snapple?

• Please vote today. Please.

I’ll call you back.

-Bill

I recently saw a video saying that if a teenager from the 1930s saw us eating Samyang Spicy Chicken Carbonara Ramen or neon-blue Takis, their heads would explode. I mean, let’s be honest, these foods make my head explode. Red dye 40 might be slowly phasing out, but that doesn’t negate the fact that we’re eating five thousand other processed foods in its place.

In the last year or so, I’ve become the person who annoys everyone else in the grocery store aisle because when I’m shopping, I pick up something on my list, flip it over, and try to understand the ingredient list while someone waits behind me with their cart. Reading the back of the box used to be something my mom did that annoyed me, but I’ve fully converted to the process, and judging by the data, something almost everyone is starting to do more and more.

I wasn’t surprised, however, when Whole Foods Market’s 2027 trend predictions landed earlier this month with one movement it calls Ingredient Minimalism. Whole Foods credits viral “read your labels” content and growing scrutiny of additives and ultra-processed foods for turning a short ingredient list into a marker of quality. Cathy Strange, Whole Foods’ ambassador of food culture, described this year’s list as reflecting “a meaningful return to simpler, whole-food ingredients.”

In FoodMinds’ 2026 Conscious Consumption Index, 54% of grocery shoppers said they bought more of something in the past year because it seemed less processed or had fewer additives, and 46% cut back on something for the opposite reason. Meanwhile, a L.E.K. Consulting survey of 2,000 Americans found that 71% say familiar, easy-to-recognize ingredients matter more now than three years ago, and those shoppers will pay about 7% more for them.

Removing things from a product, which should in theory cost less, is now something people will pay a premium for. We are, quite literally, paying for absence. But when you think about why those extra ingredients were there in the first place, it does start to make a little more sense. Most of them exist to make food cheaper or last longer. Ingredients like gums hold things together, seed oils that cost a fraction of better-for-you oils, and preservatives extend shelf lives. When brands remove these ingredients, they have to make up the difference. That usually means smaller batches, shorter shelf lives, and higher costs, which get passed on to the consumer. So what we’re really paying for isn’t nothing.

But why is this a “trend” right now? The idea of “clean label” has been floating around for a while, but what’s the appeal of visibly stating on the pack how few ingredients a product has?

Several things have happened in the last year that help me understand why the shift is happening. In January, the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines arrived with a three-word thesis: eat real food, and for the first time told Americans to limit highly processed foods and artificial additives.

Campbell’s, PepsiCo, Conagra, Kraft Heinz, and J.M. Smucker now flag ultra-processed food scrutiny as a business riskin their SEC filings, and three disclose litigation. Add the roughly 18% of American adults now taking a GLP-1, and you have a huge group of shoppers eating less and reading more. FoodMinds found that 63% of current GLP-1 users look up ingredients and additives at least weekly, compared with 41%of people in households with no GLP-1 use. Because if you’re only going to eat half a sandwich, you probably do get pickier about what’s in it.

But the part I find most curious is what this does to the package itself. For decades, the front panel did the selling in an appetizing, appealing way, and the back panel handled things more factually, including the ingredients. The ingredient list was never really art-directed, because nobody, except an almond mom here or there or someone with allergies, cared that deeply about them. But that’s why people trust it now. When so much packaging looks like it came out of the same Canva template, the list is the one element a brand can’t style its way around. So brands are moving it to the front, and the list has become the selling point.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because RXBAR started the whole concept in 2013. Founders Peter Rahal (now behind all things David) and Jared Smith started making bars in Rahal’s parents’ kitchen in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. According to former CMO Lindsay Levin, the team kept flipping packs over to show how few ingredients they used, so the rebrand moved that list right to the front, right above a “No B.S.” It worked so well that Kellogg bought the brand in 2017 for $600 million. What’s different now is that RXBAR’s idea has gone from a niche protein bar move to something every category is finding value in.

A perfect example is Vandy’s kettle-style chips, by co-founders Seth Goldstein and Steven Rofrano, made from three ingredients: potatoes, grass-fed beef tallow, and Redmond Real Sea Salt, cooked in small batches. In June, Ancient Crunch brought Vandy and its tortilla chip sibling MASA into 400 Whole Foods stores, and the founders framed the launch around a mission to “bring real food to everyone.” The pitch, though, isn’t about these being “healthy.” It’s chips made with fewer ingredients.

HOL Health Club takes the same idea into the protein bar aisle, a category famous for ingredients, lots of them, and I don’t even know how to pronounce most. Founders Mackenzie Muth and Nolan Spencer left investment banking in New York after struggling to find a high-protein bar made from whole foods. Muth drank bone broth as part of her morning routine, so the pair swapped protein powder for powdered chicken bone broth, and the result is a 20-gram protein bar whose Salted Chocolate flavor lists just nine ingredients, including peanuts, dates, oats, honey, and cacao nibs. Nine ingredients might sound like a lot, but a quick look at some of the best sellers (including Quest, ONE, and Barebells), and I quickly realized that nine was low compared to around 30 on the higher end.

And you know a trend will fully take off when the giant brands start copying the new ones. In March, Jack Link’s announced a full three-ingredient portfolio, starting with air-dried beef slices made from grass-fed beef, vinegar, and salt, with sticks and steaks following later this year. The same company commissioned a Talker Research survey in June that found six in 10 Americans think snacks have too many ingredients.

I do have one hesitation concerning the “trend” of it all. A short ingredient list doesn’t automatically mean healthier food, and the cost factor matters, too. FoodMinds found that 58% of shoppers agree the cheapest foods tend to be the most processed, and 61% say healthy, sustainable food is just too expensive. If simpler products cost 7% more, ingredient minimalism could become a luxury, which is odd when there’s less. A bag of tallow-fried chips and a bag of regular chips now say very different things about who’s buying them, and who’s able to.

For decades, packaging has been a game of addition, with the more claims the better. However, according to the Whole Foods report, the 2027 shelf will be a game of subtraction, and the winning move is having nothing to hide.

But for now, sorry to the person behind me in the snack aisle. I’m going to be a while.

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Even my cold, blackened Philadelphia heart can tip the ol’ cap to the Brewers for the club’s very first World Series win. Who says a small-market team can’t win the whole shebang? Incidentally, Miller Lite is celebrating, too. Meet theClinch Cans.

• Thanks to eagle-eyed Side Salad reader Steve Perry (and very obviously, the former lead singer of Journey) for bringing this OTHER moka pot-inspired bottle to my attention!

  

• Instagram’s Adam Mosseri says that our collective feelings about AI amount to a “fear of being left behind,” which sounds exactly like the narcissistic “they’re just jealous” label someone issues whenever they’re criticized.

• Also, how does everyone feel about longer-form videos popping up on Instagram?

• If the Wendy’s Final Fantasy-esque RPG game, WendyQuest: Legend of the Four Corner Stones, is anything like Shining Force, it could potentially force me to update my unofficial QSR rankings (Wendy’s = barely there). Anywho, you get to do battle with baddies like the “Big Mech” and “Mech Chicken” (get it?) and it appears to stay true to the classic RPG playbook.

• First, the CPG Gods fixed cereal packaging, and within the same week, they did bacon, too?

• Just gonna’ go throw it back to this oldie but goodie where I wrote about some of the best packaging featured in horror movies, which was really just an excuse to talk about The Stuff, a solid 8/10 on the ol’ B-movie excellence scale. That said, I wrote this seven years ago, and it feels a skosh outdated and deserves an update (especially after The Substance).

• Jessica Hische talked to The Wire about that Meta gig.

• Speaking of The Wire, I love this title, and, yes, the current iteration of the internet should die. Every iota of it has been completely enshittified, and I can’t imagine everyone wanting to live in a constant state of agitation, weaponized bots, and AI slop. I don’t know what takes its place, but I’d love to see it! Now I would like to read John West’s The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age: “West confirms what many have suspected for a good while now: The platforms once seen as enduring archives of knowledge and communication are being cannibalized by ideological warfare and basic greed.” Big Yup energy from me.

Does she cook beans? Does she cook rice? Does she do ritual sacrifice?

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Everyone knows that the 2026 midterms are about Cheesecake Factory’s design, and not, you know, war, inflation, and tariffs.

• That said, boy howdy, am I stoked for all the AI videos of right-wing influencers eating at Cheesecake Factory. Where was this during the great Cracker Barrel debacle of 2025!?

• I know that I rail against the kid-dults on the reg (don’t get me started on Disney adults), but even I have to admit I wouldn’t mind having some Daft Punk LEGO figurines. I have brought shame to my family’s name! Shame!

• Hey, watch out for grandma’s fruit cocktail brand of choice. Related: do people still eat fruit cocktail? I haven’t had this since I was 9.

• A coffee liqueur housed in a bottle shaped like an Italian moka pot? Brilliant. Someone make this real.

• A woman turned to ChatGPT to help wean her off life-saving seizure medication, and the “tool” even helped her navigate fooling her doctors. As a reminder, ChatGPT is not a trained medical professional. That woman is now dead. Her parents have since filed a lawsuit. That said, there’s a world where ChatGPT might get a pass on this because the woman was chatting with an older model, and now they have some new and improved version. That this company wasn’t forced to shut down and make drastic changes—with regulatory oversight—is one of the US’s great consumer-protection tragedies, not just in recent years, but in this still-young century.

• Folks are elated that General Mills and Cheerios have partnered with Ziploc to introduce the very first resealable cereal bag. Admittedly, this has never been one of my packaging pet peeves (hello, bacon, my old friend). First-world packaging problems, am I right?

• Epic Games is in a bit of a pickle, as they have forced AI on employees...but won’t stand for folks using AI to vibe-code a browser-based Fortnite port. Some would say there’s some irony in this, but I would say that it’s more of an expected outcome.

I recall a bigger, brighter world, a world of books and silent times in thought.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Free idea: Halloween is the deadliest night of the year for child pedestrians, which is exactly why more neighborhoods should shut down high-traffic candy areas completely to all automobiles. Get some traffic cops and some orange cones and let the kids run wild. And, if a candy brand like Hershey’s somehow got involved in making neighborhoods safer to Trick or Treat in, we might be talking less about rising chocolate costs (thanks, tariffs!), just saying.

• Oooh! Stumbled upon this today in case you would like to draw some little “weirdos.”

• So long, maxxing! You had a good run. I look forward to un-optimizing our lives and maybe never hearing the word “macros” ever again.

• Hard agree with everything Madison Utendahl said here about the Gap comeback.

• Absolute shame, because I would love to see Wildwood. Who doesn’t love stop-motion animation, aside from, you know, Sam Altman?

• Black Poetry’s sparkling coffee is where the classics meet-cute with graffiti. It’s probably not for me, but I’m into the vandalism concept, and this doesn’t really look like any other beverage I can recall. Plus, they have a zine! What’s not to love?

• The internet was once a weirdly wild place, and the folks who became the stuff of meme legends have banded together to promote Firefox with an anti-AI, anti-tracking plea. Sold!

• Can’t believe I’m going to say this…but I think I’m actually team Biberty now? Who knew a protest against a fuzzy brand mascot with no known appendages would rankle me in this way.

Hang on to your dreams til’ someone beats them out of you.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Getty Images went bankrupt! Hell of a time to be in the business of stock photography.

• OK, but what if the “culture” you’re creating isn’t very good? Maybe some of us don’t want Allstate, Ford, and Visa to “break into Hollywood” because that’s not what we define as “culture.” You’re just creating a more expensive version of branded content. We really need to have an intervention with all the marketing people and discuss what constitutes “culture.”

• Le Puzz made a Hanukkah puzzle with a Matzoh ball Jell-O mold, and I’m in love. Get me this puzzle!

• Rudy rounded up some of his favorite Halloween 2026 designs, and I only want to add that candy corn is delicious, and I will not abide the slander over this shellac’d morsel of high fructose corn syrup.

• Starbucks Red Cup Day returns on November 16th, but in the meantime, the coffee chain has unveiled its holiday merchandise plans, which include a “surprise collection” of “mystery glass Bearista” cups. Everyone loves a blind box, even the kid-dults.

• Day Job did the branding for Lance Oppenheim’s production company, To Be Formed. Speaking of which, I wrote about You Can See Everything last week.

• The Puente Hills Mall is not actually Back to the Future’s Twin Pines Mall, and has been largely vacant in recent years. That may no longer be the case, as it might be turned into a data center. Incidentally, this would be a 10-megawatt data center, which still wouldn’t be enough power to make time travel possible, as the flux capacitor requires 1.21 gigawatts to work its magic.

• Clean Cult just released a line of castile soaps. Pretty groovy looking, maaaaaaaan.

• Say less, Marissa!

• Anthropic has a proposed Public Benefit Fund. Elon Musk will supposedly give every child in America a share in SpaceX. The Dells have kicked some cash into the Trump accounts. What does it all mean? Welp, the extremely wealthy are trying to “curry favor” with the public and do a little image rehab, given that the uber-wealthy currently have us in a vice grip. Anywho, I disagree with the close of this FastCo piece covering this. Empty (and PR-forced) generosity is not a “positive force” and is very much worthy of cynicism. But especially after the Doge disaster.

I don’t wanna live outside.

-Bill

Look, I’m no doctor, but I’ve always wondered how and why Listerine had cornered the market on dissolvable strips. It has crossed my mind many times that Tums should try them. Or Advil. Not to get too carried away, but I even think there’s a world in which Kraft could make cheese slices as thin as a dissolvable strip to lay delicately across a bowl of chili, though that’s a thought for another day.

The point is, apparently I’m not the only one with these thoughts, and wellness is starting to melt in your mouth.

We already know what to do with a strip. Thanks to Listerine, the act is decades old, and that familiarity helps explain the format’s appeal. StripIt, an LA startup from brothers Noy and Vem Chatoyan, launched this summer with Sleep and Digest strips. Its pitch focuses less on what’s inside and more on how it goes down. The founders watched family members struggle to swallow pills and decided that discomfort alone was enough to make people quit their supplements. Board-certified dermatologist Dr. Noreen Galaria, who treats skin cancer alongside her plastic surgeon husband, founded INNER GLOW, which built its name on sun-protection and anti-aging supplements before adding VitaMelt vitamin D strips. RIN, on the other hand, brings over a format Korean consumers already know well. Mother-daughter founders Dr. Youngja H. Park, a pharmacologist, and Candace Dannenbaum, a former managing director, launched the brand in the UK in September with passion fruit Glow Strips loaded with liposomal glutathione, vitamin C, and marine collagen.

And Sleep or Die, a Canadian sleep brand whose name says everything about its world, sells strips meant to help you drift off.

These brands are making supplements dissolve, but they’re also giving them a different cultural role. A vitamin bottle belongs in a cabinet, but a slim pack can become part of what you carry when you travel and, maybe most importantly, become part of your everyday ritual, ideal for throwing in a purse or pocket. I’ve written about the rise of the single-serve pack, particularly how it’s impacted the health and wellness space, and these strips are definitely an extension of that conversation, especially when it comes to convenience.

“One of the things I love about supplement strips is the freedom they give you. You don’t have to be at home or plan your day around taking your supplements. You can take them anywhere, anytime. They’re incredibly thin, lightweight, easy to carry, and dissolve right on your tongue without needing water,” notes Noy Chatoyan, co-founder of StripIt. “I think that simplicity is a big part of why strips are gaining so much attention. People want to take control of their health, but they also want it to be easy and enjoyable. And when you remove some of those everyday inconveniences, taking care of yourself becomes that much more accessible.”

That pocketability also brings me back to the cigarette packaging trend I wrote about. Part of that format’s appeal is physical: flipping the lid and sliding a single piece out of the pack. But the bigger draw is what those gestures signal in the context of wellness. They turn consumption into a little occasion, a small pause in the day. Supplement strips work the same way. Peeling one open and letting it melt on your tongue feels less like supplement stacking and more like a tiny ritual. Yes, it’s a nod to the “little treat economy” we’re all, frankly, tired of hearing about, but it also says something about where wellness is headed. People still want to optimize, but they don’t want it to feel clinically soul-sucking. A pill organizer and a 12-step supplement stack can make self-care feel robotic, and strips bring back some necessary whimsy.

StripIt’s founders describe individually wrapped strips inside a flip-top pack with a magnetic closure. INNER GLOW uses a slim tin for its VitaMelt strips. Both formats feel comfortable alongside gum, lip balm, and the other small objects that somehow become permanent residents of a bag. “Our goal was packaging that does two jobs: protect the product and make it easy to keep up,” says Dr. Noreen Galaria, the dermatologist who founded INNER GLOW.

This also has a big packaging impact because of its potential sustainable features. A tin can be refilled, reused, or tossed in the recycling bin, which is more than you can say for most plastic supplement tubs. And because strips are paper-thin, a month’s supply weighs next to nothing compared to a bottle of capsules, which means smaller boxes and lighter shipments. But it’s not all perfect: the individually sealed sachets that keep each strip fresh are usually made of multilayer foil and plastic, which is notoriously hard to recycle, so the format trades one bulky bottle for a handful of tiny wrappers. Whether that’s better or worse is debatable.

Keeping up with wellness now means fitting products into everyday life, and strips offer participation with little prep. “People want wellness to feel less like a chore and more like a natural part of their day,” says Vem Chatoyan, StripIt’s other co-founder.

Eye patches help explain what that can look like, because they used to be something you wore while getting ready in private. Now, though, they’re an accessory people wear out in the world, like on flights, at the coffee shop, on a Zoom call, apparently without a shred of embarrassment. Self-care has become an accessory, and strips fit right into that shift. The product itself disappears, sure, but the pack stays behind to carry the identity.

Supplements have always been a bathroom-counter habit, swallowed quickly, the bottle hidden even faster. A strip pulls that moment out of the medicine cabinet and into a purse haul, beside a latte on a café table, or mid-meeting, or passed to a friend at dinner. What was once a private act now happens out in the open, where other people see the new ritual and, inevitably, ask about it.

RIN makes its relationship to beauty explicit. Co-founded by Candace Dannenbaum and her mother, Dr. Youngja H. Park, the brand brings a Korean inner-beauty perspective to its Glow Strips. “We wanted RIN to look and feel like beauty, because in Korea that’s what inner beauty is,” Dannenbaum explains. That positioning helps the strip make sense alongside skincare.

She goes on, “Strips are resonating because they’re easy and convenient. There’s pill and powder/mixing fatigue. No one wants another tub of capsules or bag of powder on the counter, and a strip needs no water and fits in your pocket. Snacking on skincare is a real concept in Korea.”

For brands, that creates an opportunity beyond making a supplement easier to take. In a category where the contents often look fairly interchangeable, the package gives people a way to express taste. A capsule doesn’t say much from across a table, but a distinctive pack of strips might, and in a culture where people want to show off what they’re into or what they know, a little tin does that efficiently.

And novelty absolutely matters. A strip gives an established category a fresh action: open, place, dissolve. The product includes a built-in demonstration. You can explain the experience by showing someone, which gives brands and customers something more immediate to share than another bottle of capsules.

Novelty alone won’t carry a brand, and Dannenbaum is the first to say so. “The products that last will be the ones with a reason to be in a strip. Not every ingredient should, or even can, be absorbed through your mouth. My advice to anyone looking at strips is to ask why it’s a strip. If the answer is only ‘it’s convenient,’ that’s a nice bonus, not a reason. The products and brands that last will be the ones where the format is doing real work.”

Pill fatigue is one thing, but actually struggling to swallow a pill is more common than you might think. In a 2026 study published in the International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 41.5% of respondents reported difficulty swallowing pills.

“I think the future of supplementation is ultimately about giving people better choices. And for vitamins, probiotics, and other ingredients that can be effectively formulated into strips, I believe this format has enormous potential,” shares StripIt co-founder Chatoyan. “We’re not trying to make every pill obsolete. We’re trying to make wellness more accessible to more people, regardless of their age, background, or lifestyle. Because taking care of your health shouldn’t be limited by how comfortable you are swallowing a pill or how busy your day might be.”

And of course, the strips’ efficacy is another factor. Can they ever be as effective as a pill? Noy Chatoyan helps answer this, saying, “There are limitations, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that no single supplement format is going to work perfectly for every ingredient. One of the biggest challenges is simply space. A strip is incredibly thin, so there are physical limits to how much of an ingredient you can fit into it. Certain supplements that require very large doses, for example, aren’t necessarily practical in this format.”

He continues, “What’s especially exciting for us is that our strips are formulated without added preservatives, yet have a stated shelf life of two years. The individual sealed sachets are an important part of that, helping protect each strip from moisture and air until the moment it’s opened. Unlike a traditional supplement bottle that’s repeatedly opened and closed, each of our strips remains individually protected until you’re ready to take it.”

The early science is encouraging for these strips, at least for some ingredients. A 2022 study published in Clinical Drug Investigation compared a vitamin D3 dissolving film with a standard oral vitamin D solution in 48 healthy adults and found they performed nearly identically, with the film absorbing slightly better. But Chatoyan’s point about space also makes sense: a 2025 review of orally disintegrating films notes that most can carry less than 40 milligrams of an active ingredient before the film starts to break down. In other words, a strip can do a vitamin D dose justice. But something like your daily magnesium, which usually comes in hundreds of milligrams, might not be as effective. It’s equally important to remember that supplements aren’t held to the same testing standards as pharmaceuticals; in fact, they don’t require pre-market approval or safety and efficacy testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which, in my opinion, is quite scary. That, however, is a whole other article.

Despite the lack of pre-market approval in the U.S., strips absolutely bring together several desires at once, like everyday wellness, beauty that travels beyond the bathroom, and brands that become an accessory, so there’s a lot of potential for these brands to succeed. The next chapter of wellness branding will be shaped by how comfortably products move through our social lives, and strips give wellness a pocket-sized ritual.

Now give me Tums and Advil in a strip.

Stay Fresh,

Chloe Cordover

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

Sorry, everyone. Not the usual Side Salad today, but we’ll be back in Link City on Tuesday.

“Move fast and break things” has long been Silicon Valley’s general ethos. The phrase itself was originally coined by Mark Zuckerberg and was the internal motto guiding Facebook’s engineers. It prioritized pushing software development quickly over a slow, cautious approach; keep it moving, and whatever damage ensued could be addressed at some TBD future date (clearly, it’s worked out for them).

That same careless and irresponsible mentality has characterized much of American life over the last decade.

A few nights ago, I managed to get out of the house for a $5 Tuesday night screening of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything; mostly out of fear of having something spoiled about the movie on social media, but also because I’m cheap and the joy of going to the movies alone is sacrosanct.

Also, this is exactly the kind of picture you see with an audience. Rare is the film that gets a Royal Rumble-esque pop several times throughout its duration.

You don’t need me to recap the Elizabeth Holmes saga, but the businesswoman was convicted of fraud after lying to investors because her startup Theranos’ raison d’être, a blood-analyzing machine said to test for multiple ailments and diseases with a single drop, didn’t, you know, work. Before she went to federal prison, she and her husband, Billy Evans, brought in comedian and showrunner Nathan Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim to document her last month as a free person, in an attempt to humanize her and potentially tell her side of the story.

Why they even agreed to star in a documentary from a comedian who once had a Comedy Central show centered on legally dubious marketing scams isn’t exactly clear to me, and there’s absolutely such a thing as bad press, but the result is what will likely be one of the best movies of 2026 and perhaps even the decade. The film is about truth, manipulation, and the very art of documentary filmmaking. I am spoiling nothing by saying any of this, by the way, and that is largely what the film focuses on.

It’s certainly the movie that meets the American moment we’ve been living through for the last ten or so years, and will be something we’ll still be talking about for some time. In this particular attention economy, that’s truly saying something. Because, really, what was the last thing you watched on Netflix that actually stuck with you for the next 24 hours? I’ve got nothing, but maybe that’s just me and my viewing habits.

But I think there’s also a smaller story that exists within the immensely complicated narrative Fielder and Oppenheim delivered with the film (which I would argue is two films, but let’s not go there given the spoiler agreement we’ve made). There is no doubt whatsoever that Holmes committed the crimes she was convicted of, despite those in certain corners of social media who might have you believe that was debatable. But it is fair to say that the loudest voices in the room, or at least the ones heading tech and media, who tend to garner the most coverage, are the kind of grifters and con artists who thrive in a moment defined by corporate fraud and regulatory chaos.

We know Theranos’ Edison was a dud and that the device couldn’t do the thing it purported to do. If you have a machine that clearly doesn’t function as intended, you probably shouldn’t go to market. That would make sense because you want to build trust in the very expensive doohickey that will revolutionize healthcare, right? You go back to the drawing board, and you make something that actually works. Similarly, if you have, say, an AI chatbot that has coached a teen on how to commit suicide, and even written their suicide note for them, you would think that the company responsible for the defective and harmful technology would discontinue the product until they introduce new safeguards. Instead, we reward them with further investment and corporate sponsorship while the US government ignores consumer protections and the environmental costs of the energy required to power the sector. Oh, and we’ll also supply that company with contracts for the Department of War. Hell, we even rebranded Artificial Intelligence.

And why not pile on to this some more? What about technofascism and crypto grifts or daily disinformation and the war on democracy? Figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos have had an enormous impact on our lives, not just with regard to the media and information we consume, but even the products we use.

In the first part of the film, Fielder repeatedly attempts to get Holmes to reckon with what she’s done and the many lies she’s told. Of course, she shows not an iota of contrition or accountability, which isn’t even the point, really. If anything, it only compounds her elusiveness and keeps the audience wondering whether any objective truth can be wrung from the doc (and whether that’s even possible by the very act of making a documentary). Whether that’s master manipulation territory or someone who is completely removed from the consequences of her actions, I can’t (or won’t) say. But it does take a very particular kind of person to do that, and we sure do seem to have a lot of them on hand, from our own president to the leader of most every tech and media company. And it’s not as if we have a particularly good relationship with the truth.

To be successful in building your company or brand or even your silly little gut-healthy soda takes a certain kind of character (and one that Holmes may have even created herself, but I digress).

There genuinely is a universe where Holmes isn’t exposed as a fraud, where she is constantly fundraising and getting more buy-in or whatever to make this contraption that will conceivably change the world for the better.

Holmes and her husband (and boy, I wish I could say more about him in these pages) are still committed to the Theranos bit by desperately attempting to launch “Theranos 2.0” and getting the “truth” out over the first half of the film. That sociopathic start-up energy and the language of “business” and generating hype is immensely toxic to witness in the documentary. Much of that plays out like the kind of catnip for LinkedIn thought leaders and tech bros and marketing marks that I find compellingly empty and devoid of any real substance. Currently, the world’s greatest conman is trying to sell you a flying car while doing his darndest to influence another election and maybe even manipulate an armed conflict. These things are absolutely related, and I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of exhaustion when I come into contact with all of it.

Because things are bad for most everyone, and I’m not sure there’s such a thing as objective truth anymore.

Meanwhile, a majority of Americans think AI is bad for society and fear losing their jobs. They’re also overwhelmingly against the construction of more data centers and would like to see some kind of industry-wide regulation, and I’m not so sure they’re interested in “pacing” the AI arms race, no matter what they say at the UN. Though, to be fair, maybe we should give Sam Altman some credit for his candor when he recently said we should “accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”

Regardless, the tactics of business leaders and brands and the “faking it” to “making it” pipeline don’t exactly make for a sound approach when building a company. And perhaps we should be concerned about the real lack of serious people in the room instead of paying heed to the folks who insist on selling us the fantasy of an AI-assisted utopia…or even transforming the healthcare industry.

Because if we can no longer tell what the truth is, if we can’t even agree on the basic facts of any given situation, then maybe things are irrevocably broken.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Chloe spoke with artist and illustrator Jackson Tupper about his design for Camp Butter. He also dropped a little wisdom that speaks to the “quirky” sheen we’ve been seeing in CPG since, oh, 2020ish: “Probably now more than ever, we’re living through an ‘I choose wine by the label’ mentality, but for all packaged goods. From tinned fish to olive oil, buying cool art to express your taste seems almost more important to the consumer than the actual product behind the packaging. If it looks good in your kitchen, it’s gotta be good. All to say, with such an emphasis on standing out on the shelves, we’re competing against a lot of heavy-hitting packaging design these days. It’s a fun time.”

• Incidentally, that Camp Butter label exists in the same world as beef tallow brand SuetCo. Clarified butter and beef tallow are definitely getting the cutesy illustrated Americana treatment. Interesting to see them side by side on the site within a day of each other.

• Ballooning bubble! You’re on notice!

• Hard agree on this Criterion Collection packaging problem for the new Stanley Kubrick set. If a box set retails for over $500, you probably shouldn’t be using those pesky sleeves.

• Dude. Streaming is out of control:

• I know Jell-O has a Kleenex-level brand name that speaks for the entire category, so it’s always weird for me to say “gelatin brand.” That said, Wobble is so perfectly executed for a GELATIN brand, and you can absolutely feel it jiggle as soon as the name comes out of your mouth.

• Oddly enough, it reminded me of a lyric from one of my favorite Eleanor Friedberger tunes, “Inn of the Seventh Ray,” which was named after a restaurant in Topanga Canyon. I always thought the line was “watch us go wiggling in Wobbleton,” but it’s actually “Wombleton.” Oh well, I have old ears.

• Paul Noth illustrated exactly how I feel about those cute-washed agentic Meta furballs over at The New Yorker. But now I want a Terminator movie starring these guys.

• Outerwear brand Columbia made a fleece jacket using the carpet pattern from the PDX airport.

• Supposedly, PTO requests are up for when Grand Theft Auto VI comes out. Everyone else is gonna have “GTA flu” the week of November 19th. Don’t tell HR.

I swear I’d drive all night again just to buy you some shoes.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• So I saw You Can See Everything last night, and I’m still chewing on it. That might be the focus of tomorrow’s newsletter. There will be no spoilers, but it will also not be this, because JFC, what a terrible headline. I get that people want evergreen stories, and we live in an economy where anyone who makes content has to feast on the dregs of the BIGGER STORIES, but this is not it. You Can See Everything is a lot of things, but it is absolutely not a masterclass in branding.

• Apple has announced its 2026 Designers of Tomorrow.

• Looks like Walmart is going for the Bezos-Amazon jugular by bundling Sam’s Club memberships along with Walmart+ for $120 annually. Customers will now have “access to members-only discounted prices at Sam’s Club, free delivery on goods from both retailers, a Peacock or Paramount+ subscription plan, 10 cents off on gas at 17,000 stations.” Pass.

• Who amongst us wouldn’t do a movie for 200 canisters of Zyn?

• Don’t cry over spilled milk, just put it in your redesign?

• You cannot convince me that brand microdramas, or Banana Republic’s first foray into “Fashiontainment,” are nothing more than commercials with a heaping side of product placement, and I’m not entirely sure anyone wants this. I want to see the numbers. Who’s watching this dreck?

• Grotesquely rich man throws crumbs to the poors.

• It’s genuinely shocking just how many brands don’t have inclusive packaging for folks with disabilities. Rudy spoke with Kevin Marshall of Microsoft about how they made it a priority: “It’s just the right thing to do. But also, because accessible packaging isn’t just better for people with disabilities, it’s better for everyone,” Kevin says. “Features that reduce physical effort, improve clarity, and create more intuitive experiences benefit a broad range of users, including older adults, temporary injury sufferers, busy parents, and first-time users.”

• Here’s a diatribe against the new Carrie adaptation, cozy horror, and the general toothlessness of recent “scare” flicks. This is a good bit from Dorian Dawes. I would only add that it ties in nicely with a lot of my feelings around nostalgic branding and marketing (not that Adult Happy Meals are any way supposed to make you uncomfortable, I mean we’re selling chicken nuggies here, but the incessant churn of feel-good marketing is just one more thing that infantilizes American society as a whole): “It should not be a controversial statement to demand horror be horrifying, but because we live in a capitalist society that prioritizes comfort and sanitization over all else, that refuses to engage with material reality if it isn’t assuaging our delicate egos and imperialist sensibilities, we find discomfort immoral. It made me feel bad and therefore it is bad. The thing that made me feel bad should not do that but I want to be a part of it. I want the prestige, the money, to sit at the cool kid’s table and enjoy the infrastructure they built while I was mocking them.”

• Speaking of which: let me save you 800 words, Mr. Nudd. You can just say yes and move along.

There’s never a wrong time to hop in the car and jam out to a little Collective Soul.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Turner Duckworth refreshed Yorkshire Tea, and they even got a bespoke typeface (Proper Sans) courtesy of Rob Clarke.

• Massachusetts is down bad, as Kayem just recalled 1.5 MILLION pounds of meat products due to temperature abuse during storage.

• Idles knows ball (also look at that pack of screws, my dudes).

• As much as I bitch about streaming, there are legitimately good services like Criterion and Mubi (y’all know they got Camp Miasma right now, yea?) that go far beyond delivering algorithmic content. I think you can count Eternal Family among those highly curated godsends, too. They stream some of the most oddball and visually spectacular films from around the globe, and kudos to It’s Nice That for compiling some of the best posters from movies currently on the site. Also, holy shit, that Drowning by Numbers poster! Wow.

• Timothy Goodman and Jessica Hische spoke to Charlotte about adding Generative AI clauses to their contracts. Don’t let the bastards get you down, or in this case, steal your hard-earned style.

• Kylie Jenner wore a diamond-encrusted $50 million bra at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, and 8% of the country doesn’t have health insurance. That feels like a non-sequitur, and it’s absolutely not.

• I’m not dropping $315 bones on a 7-Eleven mahjong set, but this is purdy.

• I quickly gobbled up Vincenzo Latronico’s novella Perfection over the weekend, and I can’t tell if I hate it, it’s genius, or perhaps some combination of both, as I simultaneously feel seen and disgusted! I’m not sure I can muster up a nuanced take here. When your own life very much revolves around engaging with the aesthetics of packaging and design while you simply must be very online, it’s a very unnerving read, particularly as the perma-lancing couple ( two “creatives” living in Berlin during the 2010s) push 40 and begin to feel the disillusionment over the lives they’ve painstakingly curated. Fun times!

I think of demons for you.

-Bill

There’s no shortage of sayings about how what we wear shapes how we think. But can it shape what we design, too?

I’ve long been intrigued by how packaging trends occasionally mirror fashion, and as gorpcore’s technical details and utilitarian aesthetic have begun appearing in packaging design, I’ve started wondering whether the clothes designers wear to the studio might be seeping into their work.

At its root, gorpcore brings the practical look of outdoor gear into everyday style. Brands like AlpineStart and Fungo Design’s Harvestime illustrate this. Alpine Start’s compact, single-serve coffee sachets bring the pack-light practicality of outdoor gear to an everyday ritual, while Harvestime creates a stronger visual connection, inspired by soil and regional landscapes, with a palette and organic patterning that echo gorpcore’s outdoorsy aesthetic.

But even brands as big as Johnnie Walker have wrapped a bottle in puffer-coat material, partnering with the ski brand Perfect Moment to appeal to a new wave of luxury drinkers.

It’s easy to imagine a designer’s favorite hiking jacket inspiring their next packaging project, but I think the connection is less literal than that, even with the Johnnie Walker example. At their core, outdoor clothing and packaging both need to tell consumers what they can do. The real question, though, is whether designers are borrowing the look of high-performance gear or taking inspiration from how it makes practical details feel appealing.

The brands behind this world of gorpcore are certainly doing well. In August, Amer Sports reported that its Outdoor Performance business, which includes Salomon, grew 37% year on year in the second quarter of 2026. Its Technical Apparel business, led by Arc’teryx, grew 32%. By no means are designers the only ones wearing these brands, but it shows momentum behind these outdoor names among the general population.

For Elizabeth Goodspeed, an independent designer, art director, and writer, understanding the appeal starts with remembering why outdoor gear looks the way it does. It’s all about intention and purpose. Reflective materials help people stay visible. Bright colors make details easier to spot. Looking good is certainly a welcome bonus. And packaging has its own practical demands, from ingredient lists to nutrition panels. Rather than treating these as awkward extras, designers can make them part of the look.

“For food and sunscreen, you are required to put the nutrition label or ingredients panel. As a designer, you can either design the whole pack so it’s stunningly beautiful, and then just deal with there being an ‘ugly zone,’ or you can lean into the aesthetic of those requirements and make them feel more like part of the packaging.”

Love and Money’s packaging for Omega Yeast shows how this can play out in design. Brewers choosing between yeast strains need to understand what each one offers, so the packaging needs to communicate plenty of useful information. “We wanted the packaging to feel as considered and high-performing as the product itself,” says Love and Money creative director Elizaveta Pogozzov.

The team used data to shape, color, and distort each illustration, connecting the expressive artwork to the product inside. But the illustrations couldn’t explain everything. Clear labels, color coding, and carefully organized type helped brewers navigate the range. “It’s quite similar to technical outdoor gear in that way, where the functional details aren’t something you try to hide; they actually become some of the most distinctive parts of the design,” notes Pogozzov.

Just as a well-designed piece of equipment helps someone find the right pocket or adjust the right strap, the packaging helps brewers find the information they need. It can catch the eye while staying easy to use.

“What I find interesting is that ‘outdoorsy’ as an adjective used to mean something more crunchy granola, trees, kraft paper, Patagonia, whereas gorpcore now seems to encompass a much more techy, almost sci-fi visual language too,” notes Goodspeed. “The tech-forward side overlaps with what I’ve called automotive normcore: technical, very detailed and layered, but in a brutalist kind of way. I think right now we’re sort of somewhere in the middle of that matrix between different types of ‘outdoorsy,’ basically.”

But what about the people designing it? Pogozzov says several team members enjoy hiking, climbing, and other outdoor adventures, so they appreciate how technical gear brings function and style together. “We leaned into that contrast where something expressive sits alongside something highly systematized.”

This approach might also resonate with shoppers. People increasingly want food to do something for them, whether that means adding protein or fitting a particular diet. The International Food Information Council’s 2026 Food & Health Survey found that 70% of Americans actively tried to include protein in their diets.

Goodspeed notes, “There’s been a real shift toward marketing products in terms of what they do for the consumer: protein-rich, low sugar, GLP-friendly, etc. More people are also shopping according to dietary restrictions or preferences—gluten-free, vegan, whatever. Those are all very function-oriented markers to communicate, so it makes sense to me that designers are looking to visual worlds that also originate from function.”

So, are designers’ outdoor wardrobes making it onto shelves? Quite possibly, though the route is unlikely to be as simple as jacket to mood board to finished pack.

“Visual cues in society are always cross-genre. See: everyone wearing Everlane and elevated basics in the 2010s coinciding with peak blanding. So, yes, if gorpcore is in style, ergo, it’s in design,” Goodspeed shares. “It offers brands a way to communicate premium-ness through utility rather than luxury. Instead of ‘this is expensive because it is refined and pretty,’ the message becomes ‘this is expensive because it is engineered.’ That idea seems like it could be especially useful for products trying to position themselves as high-performance like David, Magna, Small Act.”

Maybe what we wear does shape what we design. Or maybe the same part of a designer’s brain that loves a perfectly placed pocket also loves a beautifully organized label. Either way, with Salomon seemingly becoming part of the unspoken studio uniform, it’s hard to imagine all those colors, cords, and technical details not finding their way into designers’ heads. And eventually, their work.

When your brain is trained to notice every little detail, the shoes under your desk are bound to give you ideas.

Until next week,

Chloe Cordover