If one more person tells me Gen Z is obsessed with nostalgia, I’m hurling my laptop out the window.

Not because they’re wrong, but because it’s become the only marketing trick most brands seem interested in deploying. In reality, it feels a lot like a creative Band-Aid. Risk tolerance has taken over, and nostalgia is what brands reach for when they can’t afford to fail, but it’s nothing strategic or clever.

But I do get it.

The last few years have handed people an unrelenting stream of things to be anxious about. Inflation is making what used to be an average grocery run a checking-account thief of joy; the housing market has affected future generations’ ability to purchase homes; and a constant, always-on news cycle makes people’s jaws tense, and their shoulders stay up high. When the present feels unstable, and the future feels scary, the past sure does become safe.

Not to mention, the data backs brands up. A peer-reviewed, six-experiment study found that inducing nostalgia made consumers willing to pay more for products because those warm, sentimental feelings satisfy a need for social connection. Nostalgia sells, and it makes sense that people would want to buy their way back into a moment that felt simpler, even if it’s half-remembered. So no, I don’t blame consumers for wanting comfort. What I blame brands for is recognizing that hunger and deciding that the easiest way to feed it is to keep serving the same ideas on repeat, instead of asking what comfort could look like, if that’s the problem trying to be solved.

“To us, the popularity of nostalgia came from the reaction to everything looking way too clean, 2D, boring, the same. Minimalism got boring. Techy, cold design all looks the same eventually. Also, the fact that people want to escape the world we live in these days factors into it, too. Nostalgia is an incredibly efficient visual shorthand. You can borrow a typeface, a color palette, a tone for language, a packaging convention from another era and immediately create familiarity and feeling,” Ashley Jones, Creative Director at Creech, shares with me.

“There are categories where familiarity is just really useful. We recently branded Smash Kitchen, and when you’re designing ketchup and mustard, you’re competing with products and brands people have known their entire lives. There are certain things that feel familiar or appropriate to the category because they’ve been proven to work. We don’t think the goal should always be to throw those things out just for the sake of being new. The opportunity is to understand what deserves to stay, and then figure out where you can push,” continues Jones. “For us that’s the distinction. Looking backward can be incredibly generative when you’re extracting an idea, an attitude, or a truth, or even recognizing a convention that has earned its place. It gets less interesting when you’re just extracting an aesthetic”

Something that converts or wins with consumers this consistently stops being a creative decision and quickly becomes impulsive and without thought. It becomes the packaging equivalent of a social media trend. How many times have you seen the butter yellow text over an Instagram reel lately? How many people can share what they think is chic? Algorithmically, it works, sure, and the “creative” might convert. Still, when an entire industry of talented people stops pushing the limits because it’s an easy way to hit numeric goals, we find ourselves in an interesting conundrum.

It is also intriguing that brands have started calling out the nostalgia of it all in press releases. KFC’s U.S. CMO announced the return of popcorn chicken this summer and put it on the record that the comeback was about “nodding to nostalgia” while modernizing the brand, as if those two things obviously go hand in hand. Last summer, the return of Diet Cherry Coke was a nostalgic fever dream come true. Even smaller brands like Batta are betting on the nostalgic take. Christina Fischer at Studio MPLS recently shared with me that she hoped “to balance both a modern aesthetic and a sense of nostalgia” for consumers. But increasingly, “nostalgia” is just a word being slapped onto a press release with no meaning behind it at all.

They’re all the same idea, repeated and repeated once again for good measure.

“Brands follow culture, and culture is on a nostalgia loop: we’re mining the (increasingly recent) past and repackaging it for the present. In 2014, the late theorist Mark Fisher used the term ‘the slow cancellation of the future‘ to describe a sense that no genuinely new styles or movements are emerging, only recycled ones,” Senior Strategist, Claren Walker. at Porto Rocha, notes. “We see it everywhere in brand: from newcomers like Vacation borrowing ‘80s decadence to sell sunscreen, to Burger King recreating ads straight out of the ‘90s, to heritage fashion houses reissuing more bags than they design.”

She goes on, “Some of this is a reaction to a decade of blanding and the sans-serif identities that made everything look the same. But it’s also become a convenient shortcut and turned into its own kind of boring. Nostalgia lends a brand emotion, familiarity, and recognition it would otherwise have to earn, which helps if you don’t have a history of your own to draw on. It’s nearly impossible to design something with no reference to the past, but the brands that do it well start from something they own and then build on it to get somewhere new.”

But it’s not about creatives just being lazy. Last year, when Cracker Barrel dropped its identity to aim at a younger customer—a standard modernization routine straight out of the usual playbook—the backlash cost it nearly $100 million in market value in a week, and the company reversed course before the news cycle even finished processing it, publicly recommitting to the folksy original.

Pirate’s Booty took a similar beating online. In June, the Hershey-owned brand rolled out its most significant rebrand since 1987, working with agency Pearlfisher on a new wordmark, color palette, and a redesigned mascot with a modern, clipart-style overhaul that stripped away the parrot-shouldered pirate’s original personality. The backlash was immediate, with design fans calling it the latest casualty of a broader “blandification” trend. Some critics even speculated that the new logo had been generated by AI (it’s not). If anything, it’s matching current illustration styles that children, the brand’s target demographic, gravitate towards… like Paw Patrol.

The launch suggested that Pirate’s Booty redesigned its mascot for a Gen Alpha customer it didn’t yet have, and, in doing so, alienated the adult fans it already had. Consumers were almost as upset as they’d been with Cracker Barrel, but if you’re an adult who’s going to stop eating Pirate Booty because you don’t like the look of the new pirate, I’d suggest maybe taking a step back and taking a breath.

I’ll admit these two examples complicate my own argument more than they support it. If stepping away from nostalgia keeps failing this publicly and this fast, the market is actively punishing the alternative. When a brand’s entire equity is stability, ditching nostalgia isn’t a smart move. But these two examples shouldn’t be enough to convince an entire industry that forward motion is impossible.

Kapono Chung, partner at Combo, states, “Forward-thinking design must be grounded in consumer and cultural insight; it can’t exist in a vacuum. Humans and taste are constantly evolving, and design needs to evolve right alongside them. Nostalgic design feels so easy and safe because it lets us stay comfortable in what we already know. Real forward-thinking design means resisting that comfort and paying attention to where culture is actually headed, not ignoring it.”

The interesting brands over the next few years will be the ones willing to figure out what “forward thinking” actually looks like, and it will absolutely have nothing to do with a brand’s archive.

“We feel the work that ends up feeling most forward-thinking often comes from paying closer attention to the company than to the category,” notes Griffin Creech, Founder and Creative Director at Creech. “Culture is obviously in the room. We all absorb it constantly. But we don’t think our job is to predict the next aesthetic. It’s to make something specific enough that it doesn’t need to follow one.”

The choco taco might be nostalgic now, but at one point, it was the pinnacle of innovation.

Until next week,

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.

• Hear me out: this is the collab of the year, and it makes all the sense in the world. It’s just so goddamn trashy and wonderful. Incidentally, my 10-year-old is obsessed with thrift-shop safaris and looking for Juicy stuff, which I genuinely can’t believe (the Juicy stuff, not the thrift-store bit).

• This must be a really difficult time for Elon Musk because he seems like the kind of guy who badgers everyone at a gathering to play Cards Against Humanity, which is a few rungs below “Avid Catan Guy.”

• It’s me. I’m the Catan guy.

• Food Network’s Esther Choid just launched her Korean pantry brand, Sessy. The packaging does its own take on picnic blankets and looks nifty without trying too hard. The soy sauce glow-up is upon us.

• They’re enshittfying coffee creamer. International Delight is disgusting, though—just use 2% or half-and-half.

• Here’s a little Todd Radom knowledge on the unis the Phillies wore at last night’s Field of Dreams game. My wife got me the hat as an early birthday present, and now I’m of the belief that this should be the official home uniform (or it should replace the City Connect, which I don’t loathe as much as the rest of Philly).

• Instagram refreshed its wordmark for the first time in a decade, which somehow doesn’t feel true. Either that or this has been the longest decade ever. Anywho, it’s fine.

• Well, if you’re not getting enough slop served to you online or in advertisements, there’s now a 24/7 Roku channel for it.

• Cereal boxes were the OG blind box for my generation. Part of me is happy to see this make a comeback, but we all know these are cheaply made plastic toys whose novelty wears off almost instantly and are ultimately bound for a landfill.

• Watched Leave Her to Heaven ($5 Criterion DVD on eBay, boi—don’t sleep on owning your movies) the other night, and hoo daddy, it has been a while since I’ve watched a Technicolor movie. It does not disappoint, and even though the courtroom scenes are completely ridiculous, Vincent Price (before he was embodied Vincent Price) is absolutely hamming it up. This is gorgeously shot, dark shit. And if I’m being honest, Danny had it coming.

Make it a TGIF night.

-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.

• Hi. Former Pasadena resident here. There ain’t nothing like a Rose City Craftsman, and this one’s a beaut.

• Charlotte is back with her monthly column, Tour de Type, and I have to agree: Roberta’s Pizza has some swell typography.

• Harpoon’s Flannel Friday is an annual autumn release from the Massachusetts brewery, started in 2016 and named for the informal tradition of employees wearing a flannel shirt as soon as that first crisp fall morning rolls around. This year, however, they’ve switched things up and put a new flannel pattern on the label, as they’ve teamed with another New England legend in LL Bean (yes, it’s the “Bean of Freeport flannel shirt).

• Good news: This startup fashion brand made garments that will confuse AI surveillance cameras. Bad news: uh, the patterns are pretty ugly.

• Sickdogwolfman designed a new drink for Schweppes: the Lemon and Lychee Coastal Fizz. Would 100% try.
  Cue Dolly’s “Why’d You Come In Here?” Jif got a spiffy redesign courtesy of Soulsight.

• The term “hobbyamory“ now lives rent-free in my noggin.

• I kinda hate how kickboxing hobbyist Mark Zuckerberg ruined glasses for men. I refuse to go back to wearing contacts; that part of my life is over. Also, if you’re Ray-Ban, hoo-boy, probably shouldn’t have gotten into bed with Meta.

• I gave Pitchfork’s list the ol’ college try this morning for shits and giggles, but eventually, we all age out of the song of the summer discourse. “Florida Water Blues” and “Wink Wink” are mostly my speed these days, and I can get down with whatever Madonna is still making or a 13-year-old Beyoncé tune. Aside from the Knicks locker room loving it (boo, but happy for you, NYC), I guess I’m inclined to agree that it should probably be “Spend Dat,” but I’m not a fan of songs that reinforce the worldview du jour that’s so readily on daily display and kinda depressing? That said, in this economy, maybe we should all be on the side of scammers everywhere.

• Anywho, my real song of the summer is just the new, yet-to-be-physically-released Bill Orcutt album Four Louies Live, which is essentially a blown-out, wordless, maximalist cover of “Louie Louie,” and I would absolutely use it to score a heist picture.

Get some.

-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.

• Reformulating KNOWN products is almost always a bad idea, but then again, 7UP likely doesn’t have the same cultural cache as it once did when you could find Cool Spot hanging around on MTV commercial breaks. Anywho, now it’s a LIME-lemon soda. That may work out! And the new cans are AOK, too.

• Guys, I know this is an Onion article, but “Same Great Taste” can do a lot of heavy lifting with a bad redesign. Just saying.

• What are we doing here, Liquid Death? Butt wipes? Buttlers?

• Might want to keep that new customizable Heinz ketchup lid away from your kids.

• Yes, sir. It was truly something to witness a doctor pump a soda bottle’s worth of vaccine into my babies.

• Uh, this is actually a pretty good burn. Larping!

• Uncommon Creative Studio made a gigantic 10ft hairball for K18 that is currently rolling around NYC. It is said to be composed of 161 million strands of hair, which apparently is how many hairs all of New York would keep if they used the brand’s longevity serum. It is gross and weird, and I love it, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for picking it up every day.

• If you’re in line to dunk on some AI slop, STAY IN LINE (which is to say, keep calling it out).

• Pour one soft serve out for Phantasm legend Reggie Bannister, aka the greatest ice cream man ever. Hot as love!

Burnout isn’t a people problem. It’s a workflow problem.

If you’re starting the week with a pile of approvals and a stretched-thin creative team, the weekend didn’t fix anything. It just delayed it. Join us August 13 to see how high-performing teams have built workflows that actually scale.

Save Your Spot

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.

• We have energy waters for evangelicals and hydration beverages for golfers and coffee for veterans and liquid fuel for gamers, not to mention subcultures upon subcultures that are all stocked with kids who apparently don’t know how to dress. I MEAN, of course, we’re “atomizing.” While I’ll try not to wade into the splintered political ramifications of this, it does make things complicated when you’re a brand marketer trying to cast as wide a net as possible and missing everyone in the process of doing so.

• Felt artist Lucy Sparrow is making it a Blockbuster Night. I would love a “VHS” copy of Poltergeist FWIW.

• Poppie now has a Sour Apple flavor, and I dig the cans with the starburst ZINGS.

• The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) just kicked off its first season at the beginning of the month, and while there are only 4 teams, they have some pretty sick unis. Let’s go, Boston Hunters!

• You can either go bobbing for beads at this exhibit for Australian artist CJ Hendry while making your own bracelet, or you can go into my youngest’s room and do the same thing, as I have stepped on beads nearly 2,000 times this summer alone.

• Aw, drag. InfoWars sold out of the gay frog plushies. Oh well.

• Who knew you could make brewer’s yeast look cool?

• This is a great Jif ad that not only plays around with their beloved logo but also shows you what else you can do with peanut butter that doesn’t involve jam and bread.

• At this point, every tech CEO is just promising that everyone will get a pony. None of this is real, and it’s just an absolute grift.

• I need a soccer jersey that says BEANS.

TTFN.

-Bill

If you’ve spent more than four consecutive minutes on TikTok, you’ve seen a beautiful girl with perfect lighting remove the lid from a box and gasp.

Inside are products she will probably never use, a card explaining the products she’ll likely never read, and, on occasion, something over-the-top and unnecessary, like an iPad. Perhaps you’ll even find boxes shaped like strawberries and kinetic sand designed to resemble ice cream. Regardless, it’s the sort of overconsumption and hyper-overpackaging that makes the comment section do some collective performative moaning before everyone goes back to scrolling for more.

Historically, the PR mailer was a closed system. It went to the creator with the largest following and the most comments per video. It was aspirational mostly because the average consumer couldn’t just buy their way in. Exclusivity became the point.

But the system might be breaking down, and brands are now designing kits anyone can purchase. The timing aligns with a generation raised to want the job on the other side of that unboxing. A brand that builds a consumer kit to mimic an influencer mailer is handing an ordinary shopper the exact role they already want.

A Harris Poll/LEGO survey found that 29 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds want to be YouTubers, three times as many as those who want to be astronauts. Higher education has, unsurprisingly, caught up too. This fall, Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication began offering a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, a degree the university describes as preparing students “to become an influencer and strategic storyteller who thrives in the rapidly evolving creator economy,” with coursework in “content planning, video and podcast production, global perspectives and personal branding.” Students are required to build a real social-media account and demonstrate actual audience growth as part of their coursework, choosing a platform, developing a growth strategy, and graduating on the strength of real followers rather than a thesis.

Which means brands can now safely assume that a meaningful share of their customers are not just watching the unboxing videos, they are, in some ways, in training for them.

Then there are two recent CPG launches that are smart, strategic moments for the brands. McCormick put a spice collection on TikTok Shop that looks suspiciously like a gifting suite, while Poppi sold a limited-edition mailer on Walmart.com for its new Sour Apple flavor, which sold out in 90 minutes. Both, in their own way, are letting an ordinary shopper purchase their way into becoming an influencer.

@traciolesonRestock your own kitchen or gift 🎁 this fabulous McCormack spice set a anyone who is starting a new home or loves to cook! Perfect presentation! @McCormick Spices #spices #tiktokshopmemorialday #kitchen #cooking #restock

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The McCormick Everyday Flavor Collection is, on paper, unglamorous, with seventeen pieces including herbs and spices and seasoning blends and a vanilla extract, priced somewhere between twenty-five and sixty-five dollars depending on the flash sale of the week. Functionally, it’s a pantry restock, but it’s meant to be filmable and is designed to look like the box a creator gets sent. Nobody at McCormick had to hire a single creator; instead, TikTok Shop’s algorithm and home cooks who wanted to earn commission did it for them.

Poppi’s approach was a bit more deliberate and considerably more literal. I spoke with two members of the brand’s marketing and creative team about the Sour Apple mailer exclusive to Walmart. Katy Jones, VP of Creative at Poppi, was candid that the aspiration is the point of it all. “We fully appreciate the allure of influencer culture,” she shares with me. “The gifting, the unboxing, the thrill of the reveal. We design every detail of our mailers assuming they’ll end up on someone’s feed, whether that’s a creator with a million followers or a die-hard Poppi fan. It’s a moment we don’t want to gatekeep.”

Kristina MacIntosh, SVP of Poppi’s Marketing, walked me through why the drop lived on Walmart.com specifically, ahead of the national shelf date. “Early access was a deliberate part of our launch strategy. Our community loves the thrill of discovering something before it’s widely available, and Walmart.com gave us the perfect platform to create that ‘find it first’ moment at scale before the product reached shelves nationwide.”

So what counts as success for a campaign like this? MacIntosh didn’t dodge the question. “Our objective is to maximize social impressions by creating a sense of scarcity and exclusivity, making consumers feel they need to find, try, and share Poppi’s newest innovation before everyone else. As mentioned, this sold out in 90 minutes, and we’re looking forward to continued engagement with our community as Sour Apple officially launches on August 10th.”

None of this works without drop culture. A drop is only a drop if it’s scarce, and scarcity only matters if you can tell people you got it first. The Sour Apple mailer is a fixed run, sold through exactly one retail door, timed to land before the national release, and built to disappear. McCormick took a different route; nothing about a seventeen-piece spice set is actually scarce, but the oversized packaging is directly inspired by a typical influencer PR kit.

An entire generation is growing up treating being an influencer as a dream job, and now we’re seeing brands design around the mindset. Average consumers are now influencers, too, for better or worse. So expect to see more and more brands designing influencer kits for purchase.

The point is, a brand doesn’t need to pay a creator’s (likely astronomical) rate if it can get a thousand regular shoppers to unbox on its behalf for the price of a spice set or a limited mailer. The influencer economy used to be a media buy, but now it’s a crowdsourced production, and the “gift” is really the barrier to entry. It’s cheap enough to scale, and if there’s enough content, there’s bound to be at least a handful of videos that turn out to be algorithmic winners. At the end of the day, we’re all influencers now, so why shouldn’t brands play into it?

Stay Fresh,

Chloe Cordover

Burnout isn’t a people problem. It’s a workflow problem.

If you're starting the week with a pile of approvals and a stretched-thin creative team, the weekend didn't fix anything. It just delayed it. Join us August 13 to see how high-performing teams have built workflows that actually scale.

Save Your Spot

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.

• Rudy wrote about Forchewn, a plastic-free instant coffee brand. Each box comes with a tarot card inside that’s ALWAYS right side up.

• Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be music journalists. NGL, it is bittersweet to watch this era of NYC go away (although that comments section on Brooklyn Vegan should have been nuked from the Earth back in the day). It was another time! Live Nation continues to be gross.

• Storefront canopies as sculpture!

• Supposedly, the trad wife is “evolving” away from Jet Blue-financed homesteading and into something closer to Lululemon lazy chic.

• Here’s some more Coca-Cola / Marlboro hyperbole. Was anyone really “mad” about this?

• Are these the 25 items that best explain America? I would add a bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch, the Home Depot skeleton, a leaf blower, and a boarded-up Toys “R” Us that’s a Spirit Halloween 2 months out of the year.

• Sometimes it really is as simple as MAKE COOKIE BIG.

• Love this illustration from artist Katie Benn on a manila mailer. Also, hard agree. It is too dang hot.

• If you put a gnome riding a turtle on a beer can, there’s a good chance I’ll end up buying that beer,

• Hot dog—I had a quick jaunt in NYC for an event, and I randomly stumbled on the gates from After Hours! This is also Scorsese’s best film. You know I’m right, too.

• Sweetgreen and Fishwife have teamed up for a nicoise salad that comes with this lil’ tin of pricey tuna.

Toodaloo.

-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.

• Truff just launched a Smokey Pineapple flavor, and I SPY that the new branding system didn’t exactly carry over. Did they pull the redesign back?

• There’s no changing the Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker’s of the world, but hoo boy, this brand from Studio MPLS takes the cake. Also, that name!

• I cleaned up all of my youngest’s Perler beads and attached them to these wine bottles (jk jk I will never be rid of these things).

• Levain and Crate & Barrel just collaborated on a home goods line, and yes, there’s a cookie jar.

• Imagine selling a $1,350 geometry set in THIS economy and then just going about your business (yes, I see the brand name; no IDGAF).

• On the one hand, I kinda have to give it up to LinkedIn for pushing an AI slop button. Lord knows I don’t need to see the most robotic, trifling CEO speak, or forced tears and “spontaneous” family photos for that matter. On the other hand, AI checkers aren’t as reliable as we’d probably like, so this could backfire for the platform. Maybe the ol’ US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart adage around porn is similar to AI; “I know it when I see it.”

• Boy howdy—Dogfish Head now has two beer collabs I can fully get behind; one for the still-awesome music rag Creamand the Middle Aged Dad Beer made especially for the 25th anniversary of the best summer camp movie that isn’t Sleepaway Camp.

• The last time I worked in an office, I was in my mid-30s and once made a comment to a co-worker in his early 20s about “MacGyvering“ something together, and he looked at me like I didn’t know who Tate McRae is (a name I had to Google so I could spell it correctly because I genuinely don’t know who she is). I will not explain MacGuyver at all here, but the point stands; I am getting old, and no one understands my cultural references anymore. I am perfectly fine with this, and there is a certain comfort in no longer being part of the core YOUNG FOLK demographic we must always be marketing to at all times. But that’s exactly why I don’t really understand Sunny D’s Purple vodka seltzer. Aside from the whole “kids’ juice brand with booze in it” thing, which I’ve never been a fan of (that’s what high school ragers were for), I get you want the Millennial-to-Xennial-to-Gen X marketing spectrum. But that kind of nostalgic bait has never quite sat right with me, and when I look at the images of young folks in their early 20s holding cans of this, I 100% know they have no idea what “Purple Stuff” is or who MacGuyver was (the can is FINE btw. So is crossing out “stuff.”) I know who this is for, but that kind of targetted sentinmenatlity doesn’t make for a good brand and a product should have more reason to exist than “I wonder what purple stuff tastes like.”

• Of course, the above shows how out of the loop I am, as this was announced last April. Thought I suppose it could also say how inconsequential this idea was to begin with.

Be 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.

• Admittedly, that’s a hefty amount of hyperbole I cobbled together in today’s title, but that’s pretty much bathcare brand Sapone’s mission. The 2-in-1 shampoo is packaged in a bottle made of soap. Genuinely would love to know how the bottle will hold up inside your shower, and want to get my hands on one.

• Best (and only?) bear warning sign ever?

• If you want a PAX with a super spaced-out look, might I suggest the Aurora Burst? You can win one of these by throwing your hat in the ring over at PAX now. Highly recommend listening to “Silver Machine“ whilst doing so.

• Goodles just introduced a Twirly Mac line for folks who can’t make a basic Mornay sauce.

• Someone who is not named Jeff Bezos should be telling the Washington Post how to make compelling social content. Why am I watching the JV team hold their phone whilst watching the video?

• Move your car for the street sweepers, New York City, or face the wrath of the STICKER OF SHAME.

• Dang. Are you saying I could have hired a teen with a point-and-shoot for my wedding pictures?

• I take umbrage with the claim that this is somehow the first-ever breakfast in a can. Have these people not heard of protein shakes or Soylent? That said, I love the name and look for Noon, which just launched in Target. Definitely not for me, but I can see the allure here for the YOUNG FOLKS who will similarly never know the meaning of work-life balance.

• B TEE DUBS--Cranation Instant Breakfast makes for a great post-run drink.

Chim-chim.

-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.

• Good news, y’all. The Phillies traded for Luis Arraez and Caleb Killian. That defense is gonna be lousy, and I really don’t want to know what happens when you put Bryce Harper back in the outfield, but they got the bat they needed and some help in the pen. Incidentally, I have nothing to say about the Brooks Raley because fuck that guy.

• If you are going to do something like this, i.e., saying a brand didn’t do much of anything at all with their redesign, you should try to be funny. This isn’t funny or worth the headline.

• Do you love Alexander Girard patterns? The new Herman Miller Pendleton blankies are very much inspired by his textiles.

• Heavy Slime does not miss.

• Shar Biggers of Saleah breaks down the Dot Cake (packaging) craze.

• More postage stamp beer, please. Good private label beer brand(s) from Thirst for M&S.

• You can no longer use “slop bowl“ to describe food because it now means something entirely different.

• Present & Correct, I was not familiar with your stationery game!

• Bloomberg says Whole Foods is trying to shed its “whole paycheck” image, and I just don’t believe that’s possible. I get that they expanded the 365 private-label brand and have managed to keep those prices somewhat low compared to competitors, but does that have more to do with Bezos and his supply chain than anything else? This is still, to my mind, a pricey option for cash-strapped folks.

Outta here.

-Bill

Every beauty brand wants to be desirable, but none of them wants to admit how desperately they’re chasing cool.

What I’m most curious about is how brands can pull off desirability without trying too hard, while still making consumers feel cool to use their products. The conundrum has been circling the drain that is my mind for a few weeks now, mostly because I’ve been so consumed by understanding how and why beauty brands optimize for cultural relevancy in a very online world.

Most of these thoughts were sparked by Glossier relaunching its Balm Dotcom in an “I Love New York” wrapper, turning its SoHo flagship into a fake bodega. It is, by the company’s own admission, a look backward before it moves forward, trying to regain the same virality and brand trust it once had.

The brand’s new leadership has explicitly said that the plan is fewer launches with greater impact, built on nostalgia for the brand’s own history rather than a new product story. Which raises the question: If a product or brand is no longer seen as being cool, is the memory of once being cool actually enough?

Glossier launched when I was in high school, right as I was figuring out my own taste; what makeup I wore, how I wore it, and what brands felt like me. Glossier was the brand. It was everything I wanted to be a part of: a new label that seemed to belong only to girls in the know. This was pre-peak-influencer, when word of mouth (or word of blog) still carried the weight. Using Glossier and being part of its world felt like belonging to something bigger than myself or my high school.

In college, I fondly remember my brother gifting me a few Glossier products for my birthday, and even he was excited to go to the SoHo store to see the interior design, even if it meant standing in line for close to an hour. Experiential design at its finest.

I’m not sure when the brand lost its intrigue for me. I don’t remember craving it after college the way I once did. It’s not that I aged out of it, exactly; it just stopped feeling like something I had to chase. Other brands kept popping up, too, from Milk Makeup and Kylie Cosmetics to Drunk Elephant and Sol de Janeiro, and the options started to feel endless. Glossier’s products (Boy Brow, Cloud Paint, and Balm Dotcom) stopped being products I needed to repurchase the second I ran out and started being products I might replace with new brands.

Would I go back to Glossier? Absolutely, but I’d need the brand to launch something that actually solves a problem I have now. Part of the original appeal was how the products worked in multiple ways without a brush. I wore Cloud Paint as both blush and gloss, and I loved that ease. But I’ve also grown more comfortable with technical application, and with understanding the science behind what I’m putting on my skin.

The I Love New York campaign is betting that the old Balm Dotcom, in old packaging, sold in a fake bodega, is enough to make girls like me chase it again. And maybe it is, for a weekend. But while the nostalgia can get me in for a moment, I’m not sure if that alone is enough to keep me coming back. And I highly doubt the brand is betting on it; I’m sure there is plenty more up their sleeve.

“As an OG Glossier girl myself, I think it was a really well-executed campaign. But unfortunately, as with nearly all marketing campaigns, it’s a single fleeting moment. If the goal is to truly engage and win back their original customers with nostalgia, I am more eager to see how they plan to actually bring them back into the fold in the long term – beyond a single buzzy campaign,” notes Krissy Arocho, Fractional Director of Brand for Fur and formerly on brands such as DedCool, Salt & Stone, Boy Smells, Kin Euphorics, and Milk Makeup. “These things take real time, repetition, and intentionality. It’s about building that trust and connection again. The other real question for me is whether Glossier can make that nostalgic feeling be enough to translate into sales. If that emotional feeling underneath is enough for someone to want to buy it to hold onto it again. If the product isn’t ‘cool’ by nature anymore, is wanting to hold onto that nostalgic feeling enough to sell it?”

Coolness seemingly compounds the way trust compounds, through repetition over years, not through a single viral post, and most people wildly underestimate how long it actually takes a brand to become truly ubiquitous. Which means the reverse should also be true. The fade takes years, too, even when it feels instant from the outside.

“Old things can become new again when they’re seen in a different light, but the brands that stay relevant usually remain true to their original essence. If you change too much to pursue a younger audience, you risk alienating the customers who built the brand in the first place. I rarely think reformulation or a packaging refresh alone attracts a new generation. It’s more about helping a new audience see an existing product through a fresh lens,” shares Sydney Dake, who formerly worked at E.L.F. Beauty and is now Founder & CEO of Gntl.

Dake continues, “That can happen through storytelling, community, creative direction, or simply showing a new generation using the product in a way that feels authentic to them. Younger consumers, especially, are highly attuned to being marketed to, and they can spot when a brand is trying too hard to be relevant. The brands that succeed don’t chase trends; they create a bridge between what they’ve always stood for and why that still matters today.”

It’s also worth saying that none of this works if the product isn’t actually good. “Coolness” can get someone to try Glossier’s Balm Dotcom, but the reason people have been buying it and restocking it speaks to the product’s quality.

The clearest proof of this came in 2023, when Glossier reformulated Balm Dotcom to be vegan, swapping out lanolin and petrolatum for plant-based alternatives. The backlash was immediate and specifically about the product’s actual performance. Customers said the new formula didn’t seal in moisture the same way, didn’t feel the same on the lips, and wasn’t doing the job. So in May 2024, Glossier brought back the original formula, and the announcement racked up over 100,000 likes and 3,000 comments in just a few days. People absolutely don’t campaign that hard for a product that was only ever performative.

Sunia Pervez, who was a Senior Merchant at Sephora and now owns a Retail strategy and brand growth company, notes, “Rhode and Glossier have become cultural brands in a way that’s bigger than just the products. They’ve created highly recognizable hero products and merch that people genuinely want to own—from Rhode’s phone cases to Glossier’s You fragrance and signature pink packaging. They’re brands where you see the product online or in someone’s bag and immediately know what it is. There’s a bit of an “I want that because everyone’s talking about it” effect.”

Merit, on the other hand, is a clean, vegan, and cruelty-free minimalist makeup brand founded in 2021 that’s never felt like it’s tried too hard, and has built an older-skewing customer around a smaller, more complete assortment. Its business model depends on people loving the core line rather than waiting for the next drop.

“To me, [Merit] is much more of a quiet luxury, minimalist brand. The customer also tends to skew a bit older and is looking for effortless, elevated essentials rather than the latest viral launch. From a merchandising perspective, that’s where their trajectories start to diverge,” shares Pervez. “Merit feels like a brand where the core assortment is the business; you come back because you love the products and they work together as a complete look. Rhode and Glossier, on the other hand, have a faster pace. You’re constantly thinking about what’s next: the new Rhode makeup kit, a limited-edition Balm Dotcom, or the next product everyone will be talking about. Merchandising those brands is as much about keeping the excitement going as it is about the core assortment.”

Then there’s Patrick Ta and EADEM, which are also working hard to win over a core demographic, more under the radar than Rhode or Glossier, and the common thread isn’t chasing a certain aesthetic. Pervez mentions, “To me, Patrick Ta has done an excellent job of staying culturally relevant while building a business that’s rooted in credibility, thoughtful innovation, and products people actually repurchase, not just hype.”

Patrick Ta launches when a product answers something his makeup artist background tells him customers actually need, not when the algorithm needs feeding. EADEM’s founders are frequently described as having a specific, narrow customer in mind, so every touchpoint reads as inevitable rather than trend-chasing. These brands have declined to make coolness part of their plan.

Arocho shares, “Not to be harsh, but I think [sameness is] a plague in beauty specifically. When everyone is using the same references, then what is even really cool, unique, or intentional at all? I usually focus on pulling my campaign references from sources outside of the industry I’m working in for this exact reason. It’s the only way to create something that actually disrupts a feed instead of blending into it.”

None of this means brands should stop trying to be desirable. Or cool.

Which brings us back to Glossier, because no beauty brand has lived through the entire cycle in public quite like it has. It launched in 2014 as the internet’s first true skin-but-better DTC brand, rode the millennial pink wave to a valuation near $2 billion by 2021, and then spent the years after learning what happens when a brand stops being the thing everyone is discovering and becomes the thing everyone already knows. Layoffs followed. So did product dilution, and a valuation reportedly cut by more than half. Glossier did not lose its customers overnight, but it did lose the sense that it was still the most desirable and newest thing in the room.

That is what makes the I Love New York campaign worth paying attention to. It is a very clear attempt to buy back trust using the one asset Glossier has that nobody can copy: its own origin story.

But nostalgia is also low-hanging fruit, and increasingly the default strategic response. Beauty and CPG at large have gotten very good at looking backward and slapping a “nostalgia” label on things, everything from throwback packaging to archival drops. It performs well because it’s built for algorithms, and it lets a brand borrow trust it already earned instead of having to earn new trust from scratch. None of that is inherently bad, but it’s a move I’m slightly bored with.

What separates Glossier here from a quick nostalgia grab is that this bodega move is only just the start of the brand’s comeback era. And the bodega absolutely gained attention. “Hundreds of young women lined up on Spring Street at 9 a.m. on a recent sticky Tuesday. Unlike on most mornings in Soho, they weren’t waiting to get into a sample sale. That day, it was lip balm,” as reported by The Cut.

But I’m most curious to see what’s next from the brand from a product perspective. Pervez notes. “Are they listening to customers? Can they continue to innovate? Do they have a clear point of view, or are they just chasing trends? The brands with staying power know who they are. They evolve with the customer rather than jumping on every viral moment. That’s what separates a brand with longevity from one that has a great six months and then fades.”

Nostalgia can absolutely reopen the door, but it can’t make customers stay. If Glossier pulls this off, I’ll be intrigued. If it doesn’t, it’s the same story every nostalgia campaign tells… a beautiful moment right before the fade continues anyway.

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.

• Nik Bentel Studio designed a fully functional basketball with a cocktail shaker inside for the Lebron x Hennessy collab. This is also the perfect time for me, a Sixers fan, to remind you that I will be insufferable next season.
  Honestly, this Burger King Baby Whoppers campaign is wildly unhinged and weird. Essentially, they dropped an image of a positive pregnancy test on social with zero explanation, and then followed it up the next day with a box of mini baby burgers. It’s unbelievably stupid and lowkey great?

• Actually, most people don’t want dietary guidance from a dude who collects roadkill for future use.

• They made even more of those fake tech company subway ads. Look out for the pop-up on August 8th, New York.

• This is how you do matcha.

• Saw this described as Air meets Daniel Lanois. That feels about right for the new Prairiewolf album.

• Coraz got some genuinely gorgeous packaging from Andrea Ricciarini.

• Hi, would you like to hear my super B-movie pitch about armed drones in schools? Eric Roberts, my king, is already attached to play the principal.

• True story: I once wrote an After Hours-inspired car chase flick with a limo driver that I very much wrote for Eric Roberts, and through some mutual pals, I randomly met his assistant one night. I gave her my script to pass along to Mr. Roberts, and there were nothing but crickets afterward. I’ll never even know if he read it.

• But seriously, I fucking love Eric Roberts. Have you even seen Star 80?

Don’t forget to say rabbit, rabbit when you wake up tomorrow morning.

-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.

• United Flags of Fashion! The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Vogue, and Rockefeller Center came together to design their own flags for all 50 states and our 6 territories. Who doesn’t love a good alt-flag design?

• You cannot stop the mini craze.

• Tip of the cap. I know we’re only talking stretch films here, but when you reduce your yearly output by 30%, that’s worth crowing about. On the plastics front, I give Coca-Cola plenty of grief, but that’s a fairly meaningful reduction.

• Love everything The Onion is doing with its latest acquisition. Dog Blood!

• Who needs agencies! Every brand seems to be starting its own in-house department! This is a fairly interesting trend to keep tabs on, but to answer the question posed in the title, no, I don’t believe agencies should be worried in the long term. Brands will always look to external sources to “shake things up,” no matter how large their in-house team is. FOR INSTANCE, I know one major beverage brand that, for several years, loved to talk up its design team (and, yes, they are good—this is not intended to be a knock on any in-house design team) in press releases for some fairly major projects, but consistently failed to mention their creative partners who helped bring that work to life. Because, like clockwork, the agency that WASN’T credited in said press release would almost always email me within hours of us publishing a piece, asking to be credited in the copy as well. Which, to me, is a pretty lousy way to do business. Always credit. So let me reiterate: agencies shouldn’t worry about this. Brands will always need outsiders.

• Incidentally, it’s NOT the one that issued a major redesign last week. In my experience, they’re actually pretty good about that sort of thing.

• I guess that’s what you get for rolling around in a giant plastic bottle.

• According to an FMI report, consumers are now shopping for benefit over category, which makes for a pretty hilarious reordering of supermarkets.

• I know nothing about the celebrity art world, so I found it hilarious that Adrian Brody had an exhibition at a Times Square Raising Canes.

• Joyce Carol Oates with a steel chair to the head of Emily Wilson!

• Sick cheese redesign from Young Jerks. Great wordmark!

• Another day, another brand that failed to automate some part of its SOPs by using AI. Add Starbucks to the growing list that includes Target, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut.

We leave at 9:30 on the dot. ON THE DOT.

-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.

• If you hate leaf blowers, have I got a horrendous sound that will make you want to drive chopsticks into your earholes.

• I don’t know what Battle Royale’s Tatsuya Fujiwara and food waste have to do with one another, but now you can find the actor’s face on a head of lettuce in Japan.

• I 100% support influencer-free shopping spaces, in addition to pizza joints kicking Dave Portnoy out for filming trash content.

• A24’s Backrooms got a Joya candle.

• Suri is making refillable toothpaste with its own very special tube. Check out Charlotte’s interview with the founder.

• The Weinermobile turned 90, so Milk Bar baked them a hot dog cake.

• Substack has introduced an AI detector. Some writers are big mad and have dubbed it a “witch hunt.”

• This is for everyone who saw The Odyssey and immediately Googled “cyclops penis“ upon exiting the theater.

• Ahem, I meant to say “search it—cyclops penis—up.” Given Google’s propensity for kinda awful AI search dreck, you could also try searching it up elsewhere!

• Sorry about those plastic prices that aren’t going down.

• Julie Masino, the Cracker Barrel CEO and killer of elderly mascots who oversaw that (perfectly fine) redesign, has stepped down.

• Lego and Olivia Rodrigo hid 333 Lego brick records in record stores around the world.

• San Francisco Bay Coffee got a whole new coat of paint, literally. Looks spiffy!

Toodles.

-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.

• Please don’t turn my cats into trashcans, I beg of you.

• Thank you, Simone Goder. Being bored is the absolute best, and I try to tell my kids this all of the dang time. There’s gold to be found in them-there-boring-hills.

• The title here is a little misleading, but this is a decent piece from Debbie Millman. I would take it a step further, however, and only add that using programs like Claude of ChatGPT should be completely banned for anyone in grade school and college. Literacy rates are in the trash. Reading and writing comprehension is an absolute skill everyone needs, and that a 20-year-old college sophomore cannot distinguish between AI-generated writing and the real deal, or simply fucking knowing better, is a real problem.

• Side note: I’d have flunked those kids. Not sorry.

• My chief complaint about the Burger King “Boomer King” meals is that they’re not actually using Boomers in the ad; this is Gen X. Please apologize to my friends who were born between 1965 and 1980.

• I really do love most baking brands, especially when many of the brands currently taking up space in our pantries haven’t changed all that much. Anywho, this one from Elizabeth Goodspeed is one of my favorite projects of the year, and it looks like it’s always been in my kitchen.

• Trainspotting and its soundtrack are 30 years old. Heroin addicts have great taste in music!

• Welp, everyone’s favorite Greek translator Emily Wilson didn’t like The Odyssey one bit. I thought it was good but not great, a testament to craft and a pretty decent art department. That said, I will never understand the dweebs who have a hard-on for IMAX, and the only reason I schlepped all the way down to Providence was that I didn’t want to miss out on 35% of the movie. And I’m not even a Nolan guy! I think two things can be true at once here—it’s not the re-telling of the story I wanted to see, and she put words to a lot of my own qualms about the flick (where is “No Man?”). But it’s also pretty entertaining. Maybe not $25 an IMAX ticket entertaining, but it’s certainly worthy of an evening spent in the dark.

• Incidentally, I look forward to a “historically accurate“ cyclops.

In shocking news, Starbucks’ Pink Drink turned ten this year. Had you asked me when it launched if the Pepto-Bismol-hued coconut milk and freeze-dried strawberry drink would have stuck around this long, I’d have rolled my eyes and laughed at you.

But I’ll admit when I’m wrong, and in this case, I very much would have been.

That said, it caught my eye recently that Dunkin’ wrangled Kylie Jenner for a “King Kylie” collection built around its very own pink offering. Starbucks responded not with a celebrity but with Bearista, its own bear mascot, launched on July 13th, which stretched across tumblers, hair clips, and hats. And then, not to be outdone by other “coffee” behemoths, there’s Blank Street with its Miami Vice Matcha, a summer seasonal blend of ceremonial matcha, coconut milk, strawberry, and pineapple, as well as the Strawberry Shortcake Matcha.

What started as a secret menu item has become a full-blown arms race of merch, collaborations, and content.

I’m most interested in the timing of it all, as it’s happening in the middle of the most aggressive “health”-focused times we’ve seen in recent years. GLP-1 use is up, sugar is the villain, and brands are increasingly leaning into functional additives like prebiotics, adaptogens, fiber, and protein. And yet the drinks taking over culture right now are sugary, artificially colored, and built for Instagram and TikTok.

Pink is having a moment when, by every wellness metric, it should be having the opposite. To understand why, it helps to separate what these brands are actually building.

According to Nikita Walia, Partner, Strategy at U.N.N.A.M.E.D., a brand and venture studio with clients ranging from Apple and Netflix to Nike and Tiffany, the Pink Drink “has crossed the line from a successful product into a platform. Once something has that much recognition, brands start asking how far they can extend it beyond the original purchase occasion: into collectibles, collaborations, content, and, ultimately, identity.” Starbucks and Dunkin’ are running two different plays on that same idea.

As Walia put it, “Starbucks is building a closed, proprietary ecosystem. They are banking on there being enough existing goodwill towards Starbucks, and that this will become a flywheel for the brand. It wants customers to be part of the Starbucks ecosystem, forming attachments to its owned products, rituals, and characters. Bearista is something Starbucks can keep developing without borrowing relevance from others.”

“Dunkin’s model is a bit more open, importing cultural energy through collaborators, and making a brand a platform for engagement with broader culture outside its walls,” she continues. “Kylie then brings an audience and cultural context for their own pink drink exercise. In simpler terms, Dunkin is trying to insert itself into culture, and Starbucks is attempting to manufacture cultural symbols of its own.”

Neither strategy has much to do with what’s in the cup. The health conversation assumes people are optimizing for input, calories, sugar grams, and protein counts. But the pink drink phenomenon runs on a completely different currency. Gen Z is not pulling back on small indulgences even as they say they want to eat cleaner. A 2026 study found Gen Z is more likely than older generations to spend $10 to $25 on small indulgences. Bank of America has reported that 57% of Gen Z buys a small treat at least once a week, with nearly 60% admitting it leads to overspending. This is a generation drawing a hard line between what counts as health and what counts as reward, and letting both coexist.

That split shows up in the way the industry itself frames indulgence. The old binary of healthy versus fun is gone. A pink drink doesn’t have to pretend to be good for you. A little treat here and there is simply necessary.

But why pink, and why now?

“Beyond the nostalgia drivers, pink communicates fun, femininity, girlhood, or even playful rebellion, depending on the drinker,” Walia told me. “There is this massive ‘little treat’ culture, and it seems like brands are trying to one-up each other on flavor profiles, especially those that lend themselves to vivid colorings.” That “little treat” language isn’t incidental. It’s the exact phrase economists and consumer researchers have been using to describe how younger buyers are coping with financial anxiety, tuition costs, and a housing market that feels permanently out of reach. One report described the phenomenon as consumers “turning to small indulgences, nostalgic experiences, and affordable luxuries to navigate economic pressure and social exhaustion.” A pink drink, at roughly five dollars, is an easy way in.

The drink, a grande size — 16oz for any non-Starbucks drinkers —stands at 140 calories, with 25 grams of sugar and 50mg of caffeine. According to the American Heart Association, women should consume no more than 25 grams per day. Men, on the other hand, should consume no more than 36g per day.

There’s also a generational clock running underneath all of it. “Millennial pink was one of the defining colors of 2016, which is when the original Pink Drink went viral,” the strategist pointed out. “What we’re seeing could just be part two.” Nostalgia cycles tend to run in ten-year loops, and 2016 is exactly what people on TikTok have been nostalgic for. In the past few weeks, according to data from the TikTok Creative Center, the graph shows the rise of #2026vs2016 and how much it’s exploded with over 3.7M total views.

When asked what tips a trend from on-trend into overexposure, Walia didn’t hesitate: “When we see a few major brands arriving to the party, a trend is not a point of distinction; it is probably overexposed. By that point, you’ve lost all first-mover advantage and look like you’re just trying to catch the final dregs of a moment to capitalize on. If there is no prior connection to the product or brand, and there is no real newness being created, it’s a brand just tapping into a trend that is on the way out. That does not mean individual brands connected to the trend have exhausted it, but new entrants will seem late. Starbucks has years of consumer recognition around the Pink Drink.”

But at the end of the day, the pink drink wars aren’t really about pink. Or even about drinks. They’re about what happens when a health-obsessed culture needs more whimsy and joy. This trend proves that not everything needs a purpose beyond being fun.

Is it an antidote to the wellness era? Yes, but mostly indirectly. People aren’t drinking pink drinks in spite of being healthy. It’s when the zeitgeist is consumed with preaching fiber and protein goals, optimization-maxing, and tracking sleep scores that it all gets exhausting. In my head, this is a subconscious rebellion against the insistent need to add function to the things we consume. A sweet little pink drink is fun for the sake of being fun. It brings a bit of joy without breaking the bank or the day’s caloric budget.

This time next year, I’d bet on seeing more of these small, joyful treats popping up everywhere, which raises the question. Why do you think Dot Cakes took off so fast?

Until next week,

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.

• The time for spicy ketchup is now, and this is a swell bottle from the folks at Land.

• Oh, nifty. They finally made the millennial golf cart for The Villages (jk, jk, no one under 50 will ever be able to retire).

• “Hey, Brian, what have you been up to? Oh, you cloned yourself and made a ‘blood baby’ so you could harvest its organs? That’s nice.”

• All wine bottles should be coated in black wax with a rainbow layer beneath. It beats a chateau or, I dunno, feet and kangaroos.

• Now on the endangered species list, salads.

• Yikes: “We grew as AI grew. We grew up together. Adults don’t have the same life experience that we do,” one 17-year-old girl told researchers. “They don’t understand how advanced and how intense AI is.”

• For sale: supervillain desk.

• Canadian ciggy packaging goes unfathomably hard.

• Dearest lovers of airbrush art, you’d love a copy of Michael English’s 3D Eye.

• Late to the party, I suppose, but 80s Paul Simon + Vampire Weekend’s brand of cringe = Mr. Jambo.

It’s Friday. Go forth and summer.

-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’m not one to go gaga over a new phone; that said, Light’s new offering feels exactly like the dumbphone I want, which also just so happens to look great.

• You can’t put Spider-Man on a beer. An NA beer, however? Yes.

• Saw this mentioned in After School, but I think it’s adorable that we’re still celebrating John Cena’s retirement from professional wrestling. Anywho, I hate that jorts have made a comeback. The only proper jean shorts are thigh-bearing cut-offs, preferably paired with a non-reprint Molly Hatchet shirt.

• I tried to be open-minded. Really, I did! But I had to turn off Gossip Goblin’s short film, Pomegranate, that was made almost entirely with AI (save for real voice actors, it seems). The short is a preview of a feature-length, but I couldn’t make it through 5 minutes because the actors never seemed to look at each other, not to mention the overall slop factor. Incidentally, this guy has racked up over a billion views, and likely speaks more to Hollywood cozying up to YouTube creators (see A24 and Kane Parsons with Backrooms).

• The best roll just got a nifty little redesign. Put some respect on your cheesesteak’s name and use Amoroso’s!

• The Coca-Cola redesign isn’t that confusing, and you don’t need to use all caps to tell us, nor does it help putting the before-and-after side-by-side with Coke Zero when I can clearly read ZERO SUGAR and see the black ribbon. Child, please.

• If you want to trace the overall decline of civility, look back to the birth of the comments section. This remains a power no one knows how to wield properly. Which brings me to the current state of the discourse around brand redesigns. I would say that we’ve covered a lot of redesigns over the past decade that many of us on the flat-out didn’t like, or wouldn’t cover because they weren’t all that great. And when we do cover something questionable, we at least try to critique respectfully—and I will be the absolute first person to admit that I haven’t always been kind or snark-free. But I would say there was a notable shift last summer, with the absolute dogpile on Cracker Barrel. When you have a sitting US President commenting on it (when he should be doing, I dunno, his fucking job) and crying “woke,” you recognize that we’re in uncharted waters. Or, you know, the wrong timeline. Regardless, do check out Charlotte’s piece on maybe turning the try-hard LinkedIn hate and toxicity down a skosh. I would only remind everyone that they absolutely loathed the KIA redesign from a few years ago (myself included) and that worked out like gangbusters. The William Goldman adage very much applies here: Nobody knows anything.

• Incidentally, the Cracker Barrel packaging that came out of the redesign was great. All y’all haters can kick rocks.

I’m all out of bubblegum.

-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.

• Olive Garden’s Pasta Pass is out here catching the worst kind of strays. Also, this is the absolute worst kind of false equivalence that some think makes for a good enough soundbite, but it actually makes you sound like an old man yelling at a television and/or cloud.

• “There are few things in America more dangerous than a bored CEO using ChatGPT, and the consequences for the Eagles could be tremendous.” Quit it, Nick!

• Thanks for ruining booze, boomers.

• Speaking of alcohol in cans and bottles, I tend to hate it when actors I enjoy start shilling for any kind of brand. But Parker Posey being the spokesperson for Cutwater makes all kinds of enormous sense, right?

• Hell yeah, this is Grade-A looking junk food. Good on you, Couch Potato.

• I really wanted to say that you’ll never catch me buying a supplement from an AI influencer—and the Times found hundreds of hyper-realistic folks touting what amounts to snake oil—but I also just bought a VelorBoard off Instagram for an ailing knee (even though my PT person said I should absolutely buy this). Point being, if you’re hurting or you have experienced some kind of decline in your quality of life, you will do just about anything to be rid of what ails you, and that AI doc might feel not only somewhat plausible, but even trustworthy when you desperately seek out a fix.

• Incidentally, a real Health & Human Services department would be in the business of regulating supplement brands.

• Have you considered that nostalgia might possibly kill us all? No? Just me?

• How come none of you monsters told me there was a SPAM hotdog???

• Today, like most others, is a good day for Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness.

Hey. You’re gonna’ make it after all.

-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.

• Finally, an answer to the multi-million-dollar question that pops up every decade: should we put the Coca-Cola script vertically or horizontally on the cans? The answer—this time, at least—was vertically, which has always looked best to these here peepers. That said, I’m not sure Coca-Cola ever really “redesigns,” I think they remix. This isn’t a system one blows up or evolves; you just move things around until it gels and feels somewhat different, right? And that’s really what Coca-Cola is saying in this piece. The soft drink brand has god-tier assets, and they only need to “amplify” them.

• FWIW, some folks think that the new Coca-Cola typeface is just a skosh Marlboro-ish.

• Speaking of JKR, they did these nifty Budweiser x World Cup bottles that are part of these Adidas boot bag/capsules. Lovely stuff. Busy week for Jones, Knowles, and Ritchie, I guess!

• Van Leeuwen sued Rebel Ice Cream to the tune of $23.8 million in a trade dress infringement case and won. Now, Rebel must redesign their packaging. Seems egregious, but what do I know!

• Everyone’s favorite record cover artist, Robert Beatty, was interviewed in It’s Nice That, and I wholeheartedly agree that cable TV at the dawn of the internet age was a wild and wonderful place.

• How do you, fellow kids? Boy, have I got a soda pop for you! (This is as painful as hearing Elon Musk say “no cap” on SNL.)

• Oh no, Grandpa wandered off again. Someone get Pudding Pants back to the home.

• They just put a Levi’s tab on Woody’s jeans.

• Per customer request, Waiākea Hawaiian Volcanic Beverages has introduced a heavy-duty reusable glass bottle for hospitality, fine dining, specialty retail, and home consumption. Gonna have to keep tabs on that one, because I’m genuinely curious about why people are requesting this format with a water brand. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see it, but beyond, say, a hotel, I don’t know where or what occasions people will refill one of these.

“Fast cars, fine ass / These things will pass / and it won’t get more profound.”

-Bill