Side Salad: I Know How To Spell Philanthropy...Branding Tho.
May 29, 2026
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.
Getting older is realizing that you don’t need to keep drinking high-ABV craft beers or all of the endless variations of IPAs, and that having a trusty grass-cutting macro-lager in your fridge is perfectly AOK. Personally, my go-to remains Miller High Life, but that’s because I’m a fancy lad.
Good for Illinois and its AI safety bill, but this also needs to happen on a federal level.
Protip: Get Fisk to handle the branding for your dispensary.
Raymond Pettibon designed album covers for the likes of Sonic Youth, Black Flag, and Iggy Pop. His album art archive will now be published in the book Nervous Breakdown. And, hey, if you’re in Germany, you can take in an exhibition of his work at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum.
Hey, kids, want some Kraft Singles?
Admittedly, I’ve been trying to avoid World Cup and America 250-themed packaging like Gilmore Girls spoilers (I know, I know, but I’m only on season 2 with my youngest), but I do enjoy Derek&Eric’s Bitburger cans based on the kits from Germany’s World Cup-winning teams.
Noah Hawley, showrunner for Legion, Alien: Earth, and Fargo, penned this nice little piece in The Atlantic on not only just how uninterested the billionaires are in everyday people, but that the same rules that govern the rest of us plebeians don’t apply to them whatsoever.
Speaking of Alien, here’s an OG cinema advertising block for the 1979 beast.
I disagree that Patagonia is “trying to pull a FishWife.” It doesn’t even remotely resemble Daniel Miller’s work (who Charlotte recently interviewed FWIW), nor is it some fishy idea to use illustrations for tinned fish. That said, Fishwife could do the funniest thing right now and hire drag queen and climate activist Pattie Gonia right this second...
Really hope I can find a theater still playing I Love Boosters this weekend. Great interview with director Boot Riley here, who believes that film executives are lying about the future of filmmaking being in AI’s hands: “There’s a trillion dollars already invested in this technology, and a certain amount of the hype around it is just people scamming the same way we saw with NFTs.”
Anywho, enjoy your Saturday and Sunday.
-Bill