Side Salad: So...About Those Aluminum Cans
July 15, 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.
Hey, here’s a little factoid that was buried in this episode of The Daily about rising grocery prices: when the Trump administration imposed a 50% tariff on aluminum, American buyers started looking to the Middle East instead. Mix in a war with Iran, and that’s all over. Hence, why anything packaged in an aluminum can will now go up in price. Life’s great!
Look at what Barb & Star hath wrought--culottes, against all odds, are back.
Ghost Font, courtesy of designer Eric Lu, isn’t a run-of-the-mill typeface you can snag from Monotype. Instead, it’s a “browser-based motion illusion” that utilizes random points to hide a perceivable phrase--it functions very similarly to 3D art, the only difference here is that you can see the actual sailboat, and at least as of this writing, it is completely undetectable by AI, which is the point, because honestly fuck all AI crawlers.
Found some furniture for all those niche hobby readers from industrial designer Fernanda Díaz Tijerina.
I think that this perfectly illustrates precisely how Pantone has lost the plot on collabs.
We have another story about this coming next week, but boy, everyone is trying to make ketchup just a skosh more interesting, right?
Charlotte interviewed Affogato Design’s Chaittali V Patel, and I need to see the wedding invitations she was designing because this sounds bonkers to me.
Tom Cruise in gonzo mode as an oilman who needs to save the world? LFG. I don’t even care that they stole the whole ailing cat bit from Kids in the Hall’s Death Comes To Town.
Anywho, have a day.
-Bill