Side Salad: Know Your Boomer
July 28, 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.
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.