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.
So I saw You Can See Everything last night, and I’m still chewing on it. That might be the focus of tomorrow’s newsletter. There will be no spoilers, but it will also not be this, because JFC, what a terrible headline. I get that people want evergreen stories, and we live in an economy where anyone who makes content has to feast on the dregs of the BIGGER STORIES, but this is not it. You Can See Everything is a lot of things, but it is absolutely not a masterclass in branding.
Apple has announced its 2026 Designers of Tomorrow.
Looks like Walmart is going for the Bezos-Amazon jugular by bundling Sam’s Club memberships along with Walmart+ for $120 annually. Customers will now have “access to members-only discounted prices at Sam’s Club, free delivery on goods from both retailers, a Peacock or Paramount+ subscription plan, 10 cents off on gas at 17,000 stations.” Pass.
Who amongst us wouldn’t do a movie for 200 canisters of Zyn?
Don’t cry over spilled milk, just put it in your redesign?
You cannot convince me that brand microdramas, or Banana Republic’s first foray into “Fashiontainment,” are nothing more than commercials with a heaping side of product placement, and I’m not entirely sure anyone wants this. I want to see the numbers. Who’s watching this dreck?
It’s genuinely shocking just how many brands don’t have inclusive packaging for folks with disabilities. Rudy spoke with Kevin Marshall of Microsoft about how they made it a priority: “It’s just the right thing to do. But also, because accessible packaging isn’t just better for people with disabilities, it’s better for everyone,” Kevin says. “Features that reduce physical effort, improve clarity, and create more intuitive experiences benefit a broad range of users, including older adults, temporary injury sufferers, busy parents, and first-time users.”
Here’s a diatribe against the new Carrie adaptation, cozy horror, and the general toothlessness of recent “scare” flicks. This is a good bit from Dorian Dawes. I would only add that it ties in nicely with a lot of my feelings around nostalgic branding and marketing (not that Adult Happy Meals are any way supposed to make you uncomfortable, I mean we’re selling chicken nuggies here, but the incessant churn of feel-good marketing is just one more thing that infantilizes American society as a whole): “It should not be a controversial statement to demand horror be horrifying, but because we live in a capitalist society that prioritizes comfort and sanitization over all else, that refuses to engage with material reality if it isn’t assuaging our delicate egos and imperialist sensibilities, we find discomfort immoral. It made me feel bad and therefore it is bad. The thing that made me feel bad should not do that but I want to be a part of it. I want the prestige, the money, to sit at the cool kid’s table and enjoy the infrastructure they built while I was mocking them.”
Speaking of which: let me save you 800 words, Mr. Nudd. You can just say yes and move along.
There’s never a wrong time to hop in the car and jam out to a little Collective Soul.
-Bill