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.
Sunday Afternoon did a decent cleanup here with the WNBA Finals logo.
Dude. The Make Up Archive. Charlotte just interviewed the folks behind the MUA, and boy howdy, these images definitely don’t disappoint. You want to see Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick, right? What about a compact housed inside a stuffed red monkey? This archive is incredible. Not to be missed.
Stay away from the clams, y’all. Speaking of, do you remember having a mostly functioning FDA? Me neither. Sorry if that question feels like a diarrhea re-run after the great 26’ iceberg-pocalyspe
I find all of these agentic AI mascots absolutely unnerving. This is spoonful-of-sugar territory, and I don’t care much for it. Infantilized approachability won’t kill us all, but it is deeply insulting and says an awful lot about how these products are marketed to you.
Welp, this is fascinating. According to Grub Street, upscale grocers like Meadow Lane have seen a sizable uptick in hot prepared goods, as shoppers grow tired of pricey delivery fees and bare-minimum-effort meal kits. Takeout sure does look a lot different these days, and there’s a real opportunity here for a new kind of Blue Apron, i.e., the one you don’t have to unbox and assemble. And, to make this about me, I would say this is also happening at your run-of-the-mill local grocer, too. The hot bar line was packed on my recent Sunday stockup, and I joined about 10 other folks waiting to get their hands on an improbably cheap rotisserie chicken after they were being, uh, un-rotisseried from the oven. Apologies for being unaware of the rotisserie lexicon.
Guys. Road Dog, aka Fred Hart, just got back from the Canadian trade show CHFA Now and smuggled back some sweet untariffed contraband in the form of 33 newish brands you should watch out for.
Oh! So the chair of the philosophy department thinks the art of writingain’t all that and prefers engaging in “searching conversation.” That sure does sound like something the head of a philosophy department would say! Jokes aside, he does have a point about the real need to wrestle with ideas and have a dialogue. But you also need to be able to not only clearly communicate your ideas on the page, but do the actual work of thinking something through (without the aid of AI, natch’). Only a philosophy major would agree with this guy. Anyway, nice try. Happy you got that byline for a rage-inducing title!
Toodles.
-Bill