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.
Oh. No. Stop. Please. Help. Someone stole 40,000 lbs of PBR. What will we ever do?
I haven’t witnessed a carton of ciggys being gifted to someone since the early 90s, and despite the price tag here, this smoked ruby glass “carton” gave me a nice giggle.
It’s 2026, and you can’t eat guacamole, lettuce, tofu, eggs, beef, jalapeños, and rice, all because the Trump administration laid off over 4,000 FDA workers. I just went back in time to tell 2016 me what foods will give me diarrhea in the future, and he said IDGAF; please tell me who won the 2017 Super Bowl, World Series, and NBA Finals.
Can-o-flage is just a nice way of saying beer cozy, I suppose.
Rachel Karten has 32 social media hot takes, and, yes, Threads is by FAR the most toxic place to be. That algorithm has been fine-tuned to make me angry as soon as I accidentally stumble on the app via Instagram ragebait.
I would absolutely fuck with Black Cuttlefish Doritos.
Speaking of, here’s a rolled Doritos alternative with some pretty good packaging courtesy of If Only Creative.
Admittedly, I think about a lot of this all too often, particularly as I now have a high school-aged freshman who is going to a vocational school because they want to study graphic communications and art. Given every student’s penchant for using AI (and teachers’, for that matter), I wonder what the value of higher education even is anymore. If you’re paying upwards of $400k and having ChatGPT do your homework for you, are you even really learning anything at all aside from prompting arcana? None of this is to say that our AI-assisted future is sealed, or that we’re going to lose 50% of the workforce because of AI-created job-pocalypse, but I don’t necessarily blame anyone for pursuing a trade when the outlook for the future is as fuzzy as it feels.
Today’s sandwich TO GIVE A GO: Sliced turkey, pimento cheese, and pickle de gallo on Olive Sourdough. Solid 7.
Forget about the Lindsay Clancy trial; Canada has a disappearing island.
Novelist and poet Wendell Berry passed away at the age of 92. Please watch this gorgeous animation from Charlotte Ager with Berry reading “The Peace of Wild Things,” which I’ve also pasted for your reading pleasure. “Hits” as the kids say:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry
Go get ‘em, tiger.
-Bill