Side Salad: On the Redesign Discourse
July 23, 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.
I’m not one to go gaga over a new phone; that said, Light’s new offering feels exactly like the dumbphone I want, which also just so happens to look great.
You can’t put Spider-Man on a beer. An NA beer, however? Yes.
Saw this mentioned in After School, but I think it’s adorable that we’re still celebrating John Cena’s retirement from professional wrestling. Anywho, I hate that jorts have made a comeback. The only proper jean shorts are thigh-bearing cut-offs, preferably paired with a non-reprint Molly Hatchet shirt.
I tried to be open-minded. Really, I did! But I had to turn off Gossip Goblin’s short film, Pomegranate, that was made almost entirely with AI (save for real voice actors, it seems). The short is a preview of a feature-length, but I couldn’t make it through 5 minutes because the actors never seemed to look at each other, not to mention the overall slop factor. Incidentally, this guy has racked up over a billion views, and likely speaks more to Hollywood cozying up to YouTube creators (see A24 and Kane Parsons with Backrooms).
The best roll just got a nifty little redesign. Put some respect on your cheesesteak’s name and use Amoroso’s!
The Coca-Cola redesign isn’t that confusing, and you don’t need to use all caps to tell us, nor does it help putting the before-and-after side-by-side with Coke Zero when I can clearly read ZERO SUGAR and see the black ribbon. Child, please.
If you want to trace the overall decline of civility, look back to the birth of the comments section. This remains a power no one knows how to wield properly. Which brings me to the current state of the discourse around brand redesigns. I would say that we’ve covered a lot of redesigns over the past decade that many of us on the flat-out didn’t like, or wouldn’t cover because they weren’t all that great. And when we do cover something questionable, we at least try to critique respectfully—and I will be the absolute first person to admit that I haven’t always been kind or snark-free. But I would say there was a notable shift last summer, with the absolute dogpile on Cracker Barrel. When you have a sitting US President commenting on it (when he should be doing, I dunno, his fucking job) and crying “woke,” you recognize that we’re in uncharted waters. Or, you know, the wrong timeline. Regardless, do check out Charlotte’s piece on maybe turning the try-hard LinkedIn hate and toxicity down a skosh. I would only remind everyone that they absolutely loathed the KIA redesign from a few years ago (myself included) and that worked out like gangbusters. The William Goldman adage very much applies here: Nobody knows anything.
Incidentally, the Cracker Barrel packaging that came out of the redesign was great. All y’all haters can kick rocks.
-Bill