Side Salad: Iceberg Ahead! Oh, Wait, That’s a Floating Bodega...
June 30, 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.
Co-sign on this Tom May piece. I would like to aggressively block any LinkedIn design “stories” or posts that use this specific language. Just like I would like to have ChatGPT bar marketers from making prompts about Levi’s and the “power of brand, as if anyone beyond your 347 LinkedIn followers cares about any of this.
Captain, there’s a floating bodgea ahead.
Rich people are hilarious. “We’re here in the Haptons so Trask can learn at long last how to properly tie a Grief knot and go on data literacy quests, obviously.”
I know what you’re asking yourself right this very second: how can I use shitty memes to promote my brand without having to lift a finger? Stop contributing to the slop-social discourse.
I get that anything that comes from Conde Nast can never seriously be called a “zine,” but I do like it when publications actually PRINT things. And while I don’t much care for her music, Olivia Rodrigo seems like a pretty good egg.
I get that they’re three separate drinks, but these Sazerac RTDs look like they just slapped some stock images on them and called it a day.
A Fast Company interview with David founder Peter Rahal presented without commentary: And I was curious, the name David—did you worry at all about it appealing less to women? No. Men will not consume feminine things. They just don’t. Women will consume masculine things if they’re aesthetic or beautiful. If anything, it’s cool for women to consume masculine things if they’re aesthetic, but the inverse does not happen. You would never have a pink protein bar. You’d be like, “That’s not for me.” But if you were to have a protein bar that was masculine yet had good design or aesthetic, you would consume that, and your wife would, too.
OK, I lied. Fuck that guy.
Toodles.
-Bill
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