Side Salad: The Ice Cream is Gonna Be Flyin' Fast and Furious
August 12, 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.
Reformulating KNOWN products is almost always a bad idea, but then again, 7UP likely doesn’t have the same cultural cache as it once did when you could find Cool Spot hanging around on MTV commercial breaks. Anywho, now it’s a LIME-lemon soda. That may work out! And the new cans are AOK, too.
Guys, I know this is an Onion article, but “Same Great Taste” can do a lot of heavy lifting with a bad redesign. Just saying.
What are we doing here, Liquid Death? Butt wipes? Buttlers?
Might want to keep that new customizable Heinz ketchup lid away from your kids.
Yes, sir. It was truly something to witness a doctor pump a soda bottle’s worth of vaccine into my babies.
Uh, this is actually a pretty good burn. Larping!
Uncommon Creative Studio made a gigantic 10ft hairball for K18 that is currently rolling around NYC. It is said to be composed of 161 million strands of hair, which apparently is how many hairs all of New York would keep if they used the brand’s longevity serum. It is gross and weird, and I love it, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for picking it up every day.
If you’re in line to dunk on some AI slop, STAY IN LINE (which is to say, keep calling it out).
Pour one soft serve out for Phantasm legend Reggie Bannister, aka the greatest ice cream man ever. Hot as love!
Burnout isn’t a people problem. It’s a workflow problem.
If you’re starting the week with a pile of approvals and a stretched-thin creative team, the weekend didn’t fix anything. It just delayed it. Join us August 13 to see how high-performing teams have built workflows that actually scale.