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.
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A few days ago, I got a message from an old college friend asking about a classmate that I had overlapped with who founded an AI company. He was interviewing for a gig. He’s a writer, too, and he wanted to know what I thought of this guy. And while I didn’t really know him and he seemed like a mostly nice guy in college, there were still plenty of red flags, not least of which was founding a company that could potentially upend an industry and put lots of people out of work.
Of course, my friend understands all of this. It’s not something that really even needs to be said. But he also has a family and debt. Which is to say, I get it. To be honest, I don’t know many people who aren’t struggling right now. There are ethical landmines everywhere, and each of us must decide who is worth working for, despite them perhaps being a very bad actor.
And for some of us, those are some mighty big compromises that we have to make.
This past Wednesday, lettering artist, designer, and author Jessica Hische took to Threads to announce that she had worked alongside Meta’s team to create the icon and logotype for their agentic AI, Muse. Acknowledging that people would be “mad because it’s AI and Meta,” Hische sought to explain at least why she had taken the gig in the first place. Obviously, she took some flak for working with Meta. While plenty of comments voiced support, just as many chastised her for even considering the project, which I can mostly sum up as a general narrative thread of “How could you?”
FWIW, it’s pretty rich to criticize someone for working with Meta while you’re very much using a Meta product to issue said criticism. But I digress.
What’s curious here is that I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen a designer simultaneously announce a project while also seemingly apologizing for taking the gig in the first place (her newsletter about Muse had a subject line of “Don’t Be Mad at Me”). Transparency is good, but perhaps she knew that if she had stayed quiet about working with Meta, it would have gotten out eventually. Who can say?
In her Threads post, she talks about her own complicated feelings on AI, in addition to why she chose to work on the project in the first place. She also mentions having worked with other people at Meta before and having a good experience, but also the need to pay her own employees (and help a pregnant employee with a health plan) and keep her various projects going, not to mention that she hadn’t taken on a big brand as a client in some time.
What’s most striking about the series of posts is how defensive it is from the jump. Certainly, by announcing the work you’re going to garner some attention (whether that’s good attention is debatable), but her need to defend it is unmistakable. We can certainly comb through the many justifications here and critique each decision point (like, I dunno, find a better, bigger client to work with?), but I can also say what I told my friend the other day. I get it.
And while most people were keen to point out that Hische is supporting an AI product, I can point to a few recent headlines that are equally troublesome and genuinely merit turning down the work.
For folks who have followed this newsletter, you likely have a sense of where I land on a lot of these things. We cover design and branding, but in our own way, we also cover the brands themselves, and I have always been of the belief that, on some level, most brands are problematic. That Tolstoy line about how each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? You can say the same for brands—they can be uniquely terrible and evil in their own miserable, shitty ways, too. Ultimately, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s nearly impossible to keep our values intact, and the road to a career in art or writing or design is littered with a fuck-ton of compromises.
But I think about these things a lot, and I would wager Hische does, too.
The thing I always tell people is that I’m very pro-designer and anti-brand. Which, I’m sure, a lot of people will think is complete horseshit. I wouldn’t blame them, but I write about brand design for a living. It’s absolutely complicated and compromising. I’ve also published an immense amount of shit in these pages about Bezos, Musk, and ol’ Zuck because, frankly, they are genuinely awful people, and they certainly don’t care about you.
That said, I reckon most of us have a few clients with checkered pasts on our resume.
I’ve written about this before, but Jeff Bezos has a little bit to do with me being able to afford college, because in addition to some scholarships I got through my mother’s employer, I worked at Amazon’s first non-Seattle warehouse in 1998, where, upon being hired, I received Amazon stock as an employee benefit—stock that I sold so that I could pay tuition. Now, this was 1998. This wasn’t the Lex Luthor Bezos eventually channeled, but it was still the same man putting mom-and-pop bookstores out of business.
It was also incredibly hard, soul-crushing warehouse work that was often physically taxing, and your level of productivity was constantly monitored. Overtime wasn’t mandatory, but, you know, it was strongly encouraged. It wasn’t fun, rest assured. Millions of people have walked through those warehouse doors, and I can guarantee you that most of them considered it a toxic environment.
If you look close enough, there is rot everywhere. And boy howdy do we have a lot of bad systems and reprehensible people that all of us must engage with daily. Ethical landmines and moral quandaries abound. And for every designer who shits on working with someone like Meta or Amazon, I can guarantee that your portfolio contains a few doozies as well.
Oh, and before I forget, let me remind you that I am writing to you from Substack.
Regardless, each of us must tangle with the moral complexities of who we choose to work with. And while the bills need paying, we also have to deal with the consequences of our decisions. But you certainly can’t take umbrage with anyone for finding fault with you for having done the work in the first place. Whether you decide to work with ExxonMobil, big tobacco, Starbucks, or, yes, a Mark Zuckerberg-owned company, it’s on you to decide if it’s worth the potential fallout.
My guess is that most of us would do it.
I don’t have a good note to end on here. There’s no tidy conclusion that I can reach that will explain any of this away or put any of this in a good light. I can only tell you that these are things I wrestle with, too. I don’t have an answer, nor can I toss off an easy joke to make any of this better.
But do I get it? Absolutely.