Side Salad: Purple Stuff
August 6, 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.
Truff just launched a Smokey Pineapple flavor, and I SPY that the new branding system didn’t exactly carry over. Did they pull the redesign back?
There’s no changing the Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker’s of the world, but hoo boy, this brand from Studio MPLS takes the cake. Also, that name!
I cleaned up all of my youngest’s Perler beads and attached them to these wine bottles (jk jk I will never be rid of these things).
Levain and Crate & Barrel just collaborated on a home goods line, and yes, there’s a cookie jar.
Imagine selling a $1,350 geometry set in THIS economy and then just going about your business (yes, I see the brand name; no IDGAF).
On the one hand, I kinda have to give it up to LinkedIn for pushing an AI slop button. Lord knows I don’t need to see the most robotic, trifling CEO speak, or forced tears and “spontaneous” family photos for that matter. On the other hand, AI checkers aren’t as reliable as we’d probably like, so this could backfire for the platform. Maybe the ol’ US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart adage around porn is similar to AI; “I know it when I see it.”
Boy howdy—Dogfish Head now has two beer collabs I can fully get behind; one for the still-awesome music rag Creamand the Middle Aged Dad Beer made especially for the 25th anniversary of the best summer camp movie that isn’t Sleepaway Camp.
The last time I worked in an office, I was in my mid-30s and once made a comment to a co-worker in his early 20s about “MacGyvering“ something together, and he looked at me like I didn’t know who Tate McRae is (a name I had to Google so I could spell it correctly because I genuinely don’t know who she is). I will not explain MacGuyver at all here, but the point stands; I am getting old, and no one understands my cultural references anymore. I am perfectly fine with this, and there is a certain comfort in no longer being part of the core YOUNG FOLK demographic we must always be marketing to at all times. But that’s exactly why I don’t really understand Sunny D’s Purple vodka seltzer. Aside from the whole “kids’ juice brand with booze in it” thing, which I’ve never been a fan of (that’s what high school ragers were for), I get you want the Millennial-to-Xennial-to-Gen X marketing spectrum. But that kind of nostalgic bait has never quite sat right with me, and when I look at the images of young folks in their early 20s holding cans of this, I 100% know they have no idea what “Purple Stuff” is or who MacGuyver was (the can is FINE btw. So is crossing out “stuff.”) I know who this is for, but that kind of targetted sentinmenatlity doesn’t make for a good brand and a product should have more reason to exist than “I wonder what purple stuff tastes like.”
Of course, the above shows how out of the loop I am, as this was announced last April. Thought I suppose it could also say how inconsequential this idea was to begin with.
Be good.
-Bill
