Side Salad: Platform Shoes For Pooping
July 14, 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.
There are good ideas, and then there are squatty potty platform shoes, which are also quite obviously a very bizarre and good idea. Love this stupid campaign for Let Loose, which, incidentally, has a banger of a name for a constipation brand, with some Three’s Company-style branding to boot.
I’ve never been a Nolan guy, and by and large I think his movies are mostly longform explorations in yawning (I’m cautiously optimistic on The Odyssey). Anywho, I agree with everything he’s saying here, even if he made Batman completely joyless.
This is censorship. Full stop.
Greenall’s Wild Berry Gin is about to pop.
Boy howdy, I sure would like to go to the Ana Mendieta exhibit at Tate Modern. Genuinely arresting stuff. You can see more images of her work here.
Our numero uno GOAT beer, Miller High Life, just got a redesign from Soulsight, and they made the Girl on the Moon icon on the cans way bigger. Disagree with Rudy’s contention that it should have been extended to the bottle design (the agency only did the cans and multipacks), as it’s still the best-looking bottle of beer in America (well, that and I don’t know how or why you would want to make that icon huge on a bottle that has very limited real estate).
WTF is an “ancestral protein bar?”
Looks like another Meta product is gonna bite the dust, eh? In other news, gross dudes are still gross. Zuck should just retire already and raise beer and macadamia nut-fed bovines for the other bunker-owning billionaires for when the nuclear apocalypse or an American-style French Revolution happens. All the good one can do in this world, and this is what we get? Glasses for incels, shitty AI tools, a mental health crisis for teen girls, and misinformation galore.
Hell of a hyperbolic title here, but also, yikes. There’s very much an argument to say that we’re “post-literate,” or that reading is now some sort of oddball “niche hobby.” Regardless, there are some stomach-churning stats here, like the fact that fewer than half of adults have cracked open a book in 2022, or that only 16% of Americans read for pleasure on “any given day.” Anyway, people aren’t reading, and we’re very much getting dumber. For instance: “In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.“ Again, this is bad!
Toodles, kids.
-Bill