Deva Corriveau, Creative Director at Brandpie, writing for The Subtext, asks what happens when the customer doesn’t choose at all.

Take something mundane, like ordering a takeaway. Consumers don’t feel a deep emotional connection to whether dinner arrives via Just Eat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats. They may have habits or interface preferences, but they don’t meaningfully care about the logo on the rider’s jacket or the tone of voice in their advertising. Yet these businesses still spend tens of millions each year trying to build precisely that sense of distinction.

Now imagine a step beyond this. Instead of opening an app at all, the consumer simply instructs an AI assistant to order a pizza. The system scans available providers, evaluates delivery times, compares pricing, reviews reliability data, and executes the transaction. The entire process takes place behind a seamless, invisible layer of automation. The user does not browse. They do not compare. They are not exposed to campaigns or nudged by distinctive brand assets. The decision is simply optimized.

From a consumer perspective, this is seamless and efficient. From a brand perspective, it’s an unsettling shift in how choice is made and where influence sits.

That distinction matters. In a browser or an app, brand can still interrupt the customer at the point of comparison. Inside an agent, the brand has to show up as criteria the agent can evaluate.

Corriveau on the shift:

For decades, we’ve treated awareness as the foundation of growth. Be famous. Be distinctive. Be top of mind. When the moment of choice arrives, ensure your brand is mentally available. That logic remains sound – but only if a human is making the decision.

An AI agent does not remember your jingle or favour your colour palette. It does not feel reassured by your heritage or inspired by your purpose. It simply calculates against a defined set of criteria.

This does not mean brand disappears, but its role shifts. Marketeers must move upstream from the moment of choice to defining the parameters of the choice itself.

If the agent is comparing delivery time, service ratings, return policies, privacy history, and price, then the promises a brand makes need to map to service behaviors, policies, and performance an agent can actually evaluate. A promise the company can’t prove becomes decoration.

I don’t read this as “branding is dead.” Corriveau is saying something narrower: people still define preferences; automation changes when and how those preferences get expressed.

Discussions about automation often miss a critical point: humans still define the criteria. A user may delegate comparison and selection to an AI, but they still decide what it optimises for. They might instruct it to prioritize companies with high customer service ratings, favour businesses with strong sustainability credentials, or exclude brands that have suffered data breaches. Human values, identity, and worldview remain central – they are simply expressed differently.

Trust, identity signalling, ethical alignment: these human drivers do not disappear just because a machine intermediates the transaction. In fact, they may become more explicit. Rather than being subconsciously influenced by advertising, consumers will consciously encode their preferences into the system.

In that world, the role of brand becomes less about capturing attention in the moment and more about establishing a presence so clear and widely understood that people choose to embed it into their decision rules. The brands that endure will be those that stand for something concrete enough to be deliberately included in the instructions given to machines.

That keeps Corriveau’s argument from becoming a pure optimization story. He isn’t replacing human values with machine logic; he is moving the expression of those values upstream. The shelf moment gets quieter because the proxy has already filtered the options. Brand becomes less about a burst of attention and more about operational consistency the customer can delegate with confidence.

For designers and brand teams, the practical consequence is simple: brand claims need proof a system can read and compare. The work doesn’t stop at making a company memorable; it has to make the company’s promises observable, consistent, and legible before a human sees the options. The artifact isn’t only the campaign anymore; it’s the evidence trail behind the campaign.

The biggest risk sits in the middle. The brands whose differentiation relies primarily on communication rather than capability. Agentic AI will expose decorative branding with uncomfortable clarity. If your distinctiveness lives in marketing but not in service, performance or trust, optimisation will reduce your value to price alone.

For branding professionals, this is not a minor adjustment; it is a structural reframing. The future will rely less on megaphones and more on architecture. We must move away from simply generating awareness toward establishing qualities so credible and so consistent that they influence how customers configure their digital proxies. The question is no longer just how to be noticed, but how to be retrievable, recommendable, and selectable inside AI-driven systems.

This is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) begins to matter. Brands will need to think less in terms of impressions and more in terms of machine-readable signals of trust, performance, and relevance – the inputs that shape whether an AI system even considers them in a ranked set of options. Practically, this means building brand equity in ways that can be consistently interpreted by both humans and machines: structured proof of service quality, transparent value signals, strong third-party validation, and behavioural consistency over time.

I don’t think the Ferrari Luce is ugly. It’s just off-brand. Way off-brand.

I was quoted in Fast Company recently on brand refreshes, and the advice that keeps coming back for me is that brand work has to carry what people already believe about the company. That’s why the Jaguar logo rebrand and the Cracker Barrel blowback had the same shape. The object can be fine in isolation; the reaction is to what it asks people to forget.

Abigail Bassett, writing for The Verge, gets at that with Ferrari’s first EV:

“The reaction illustrates how intrinsically the brand identity, expectations, and design are tied together,” Derek Jenkins, the SVP of Design and Brand at Lucid, told The Verge. “I can see a couple of things in the exterior design that still reference the brand. The taillights for one, the red color option, and finally, the logo. Everything else — proportions, lack of visual agility, even the expression of performance — is missing from the exterior. The face of the car isn’t identifiable… It’s a mismatch with the brand.”

Identity isn’t the badge at the end. It’s the set of expectations the badge has trained you to bring. Ferrari can make an EV. But if the only recognizable Ferrari parts are the color, taillights, and logo, then the product is borrowing equity it isn’t paying back.

Bassett also gets to the LoveFrom question: Ferrari hired LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design firm, and the firm’s product-design strengths don’t automatically transfer to automotive design.

As Raphael Zammit, chair of transportation design at the College for Creative Studies in Michigan, explained, industrial design and automotive design are two very different disciplines, and the skills from one do not consistently translate to the other. Ive’s Apple iPhone design made the physical phone disappear, Zammit said, and was “100 percent appropriate for a digital communication device that you hold in your hand.” But a Ferrari is not an iPhone.

Ferrari’s decision to hire LoveFrom was a choice with a built-in logic, Zammit argued. “Ive is a brand,” he said. “When you hire Brad Pitt, you expect to get Brad Pitt.” The interior of the Luce has been praised for its blend of analog and digital touchpoints. But the interior language would likely be much more at home in a small premium city car, he added, such as a Fiat 500 or a Cinquecento, not a supercar that retails for half a million dollars.

I do love the interior, as it screams consideration on every surface. But Zammit’s distinction is right: the iPhone’s best trick was making the object recede behind the software. Ferrari is nearly the opposite problem. The object is the story.

Zammit again, on the exterior:

Among automotive designers, the criticism is no less blunt. “It is brutally bland, actually. It really does look as if it was designed by AI. It’s like a mathematical averaging of many different themes,” Zammit said, adding that, “it’s almost alarmingly vacant of identity.”

There’s a lot that critics hate about the Luce. The stance and proportions, for example, are all wrong for Ferrari, which is known for its lithe and aggressive lines. The front end of the vehicle is generic, even with the air vent over the front glass (a video of executives showing the car to Pope Leo demonstrates that you can pass your entire arm through it).

“It’s not a sports car, it’s not a city electric, and it’s not really luxury,” Zammit said. “It seems like they might have gotten a little bit snowed or oversold by LoveFrom… The strategy is very muddy, because of what they’re doing versus what they’re saying on different parts of the vehicle.”

“Alarmingly vacant of identity” is brutal because it separates competent surface from brand truth. There are plenty of bland cars in the world. There aren’t supposed to be bland Ferraris.

Bassett closes the loop in the piece’s final section:

Ferrari’s whole cultural function, as a signal, a provocation, an investment, depends on being unmistakably true to itself, its heritage, and, most importantly, its design.

When you remove the engine, the most emotionally resonant element in Ferrari’s history, you have to replace it with something compelling, Zammit points out, and the Luce’s design doesn’t do that.

Despite the design flop, Zammit was careful to separate it from the brand’s long-term health, calling it “a bit of a stumble, both in concept and in execution,” but said Ferrari had too strong a record to be permanently damaged.

One thing is clear in the face of all the negative coverage: In trying to signal a new era for Ferrari, the Luce has made everyone suddenly more interested in the old one.

That’s what makes the Luce a brand-design story, not just a car-design story. The Luce may turn out to be strategically useful for Ferrari. But the design problem is simple: it asks the bolted-on badge to do too much of the work.

I met Jennifer Jerde early in my career. She’s one of the nicest humans I’ve ever encountered in this business, and her firm Elixir Design has been quietly building brands out of San Francisco for 27 years.

Rachel Paese, writing for Design Observer, gets Jerde on the question the rest of the industry is trying to dodge:

We’re in a world right now where everything kind of looks the same. You can go to Canva, you can get Squarespace templates, and you basically just change out the messaging. And it looks pretty handsome. It’s a design of an ad. It’s a design of a website. It’s where the design is a noun. It looks pretty nice, but to make stuff that’s actually true, it looks like listening to a lot of different people.

The thing you ship is the artifact, and the artifact can be produced by anyone with a template and a logo file. What Jerde sells is the listening—27 years of it—and the specific verb that template work can’t perform.

She gives the verb a definition later in the piece:

We do have an observation practice. I would never refer to it that way. We listen like crazy. We’re observing what lives inside clients’ minds and hearts about things. And then we don’t just show them 3 directions, we show them fifteen. Then we observe what happens.

The difference between three directions and fifteen is the difference between a studio and a feed. Three directions is what you present when you already know which one you want the client to pick. Fifteen is what you present when you genuinely don’t know yet, and you’re willing to use the meeting as the instrument that tells you. That’s expensive and it doesn’t scale. It’s the entire reason Elixir has been doing this for 27 years and not 27 months.

Jerde on AI:

I’m both deeply impressed by AI and scared of it. But I feel like companies and brands get exactly what they deserve. They hang out there exactly who they are, in a way. […] And then there are the players who are like, no, no, we really want to reach this audience. We want to show how genuinely great we are in whatever way we are genuinely great. That takes effort.

There’s a caveat in there: the migration to AI is optional. You can opt out. The template will work for the audience that doesn’t require you to have listened. It’s good enough.

But the interesting brands are the ones that don’t accept good enough, that demand that extra effort.

Jessica Deseo, writing for PRINT Magazine, reports on a talk by Ric Edwards, VP of Brand Design at LA28. His challenge: branding an Olympics for a city that resists a single identity. Edwards on LA:

“There’s no one version of it. You would do a disservice if you limited it to one story.”

I spent a few years in Los Angeles and visit regularly. It’s sprawling and each area is distinct. Edwards is right. So instead of a fixed logo, LA28 built a system. The “A” in the emblem is a canvas, reinterpreted by athletes, artists, and communities. The L, 2, and 8 are set in different typefaces. The brand holds many narratives rather than collapsing into one.

“We’re trying to be a stage for all of those stories.”

That word, “stage,” is the whole strategy in one sentence. A stage doesn’t perform. It creates the conditions for others to perform on it. That’s a fundamentally different job than traditional branding, which is usually about control: one mark, one voice, one set of guidelines. LA28 is designing for distributed authorship at global scale, and Edwards is honest about what that costs:

“Operationally, it’s a nightmare.”

Every variation of the emblem has to work across stadiums, broadcast, merchandise, and digital. And then each creative contribution has to pass through legal, production, and brand governance. The ambition is real, and so is the complexity behind it. The Olympics is…well…the Olympics of branding.

Buying something used to be the end of the story. You liked it, you bought it, you used it. Now buying is the beginning. The real work starts when you film the unboxing. At least according to Lucinda Bounsall. Writing for Print Magazine, she argues that platforms have turned everyday life into a continuous production set:

Platforms have normalised a way of living where everyday life is quietly organised around being watchable. Bedrooms become sets, bathrooms become studios, private routines become content addressed to an imagined audience. The effect can feel faintly dystopian; a distributed Truman Show, in which people are advertising products, habits, and lifestyles to unseen cameras, without ever being cast or paid.

Bounsall traces an inversion that anyone who’s worked on a brand should pay attention to. As brands become more abstract and conceptual, the labor of making them mean something falls on the individual:

As brands move up the pyramid, abstracting themselves into values, worlds, and cultural posture, individuals are pushed in the opposite direction, down into labour. The work of meaning-making, distribution, and identity signalling increasingly falls on the person rather than the company. Brands become lighter, more conceptual, more removed; people become the infrastructure through which those brands are activated, circulated, and made legible.

In a way, Bounsall describes what brand has always been at its core—how customers perceive a company or product. It’s always been in the hands of the people.

In her closing, Bounsall sees people starting to pull back into spaces that can’t be monetized:

This doesn’t signal an end to the brandification of the self, but a growing desire to reclaim parts of the self that don’t need to be performed, optimised, or read. Not everything is meant to circulate. And increasingly, that is kind of the point.

That last line pairs with the Dan Abramov piece I linked previously. Abramov argues for an architecture where your data outlives the apps you create it in. Bounsall is making the cultural case for the same impulse: some things should belong to you and not be put into circulation just because a platform makes it easy.

My wife is a huge football fan—Kansas City Chiefs, if you must know—and I’m one too (go Niners!), but too a lesser degree. I just really hope the Seattle Seahawks don’t break out the super-ugly green highlighter-colored Action Green uniforms when they face off against the Patriots in Super Bowl LX.

Anyway, sports teams are some of the best examples of legacy brands, steeped in history, and with legions of literal fans. It interesting how legacy brands evolve—especially ones where the audience feels genuine ownership. And sports teams are the extreme case. Mess with a logo that fans have tattooed on their bodies, and you’ll hear about it.

Natalie Fear talked to several designers about what makes NFL logo updates succeed or fail. Paul Woods, president of AIGA Los Angeles:

The updates that work tend to be quieter. The Chargers’ continued refinement of their iconic bolt or the Vikings’ measured refinements show that evolution can be about better execution, not louder ideas. Improved proportions, stronger typography, and systems that scale across digital, broadcast, and physical environments matter more than novelty.

Better execution, not louder ideas. That’s the whole thing, really. The temptation with any redesign is to justify the effort by making the change visible. But visible change and meaningful improvement aren’t the same thing.

Woods again:

Appeasing fans does not mean standing still. It means understanding what they actually care about.

This applies well beyond sports branding. Any time you’re working on a product or brand that people have history with, the job isn’t to make your mark—it’s to make the thing better without breaking what already works.

Michael Vamosy, founder of DEFIANT LA, puts a finer point on the challenge:

Fans are much more forgiving of poor design choices from the past than they are of design improvements built for the future.

That asymmetry is worth sitting with. Nostalgia protects old mistakes. New work gets no such grace period.

For those of you who might not know, Rei Inamoto is a designer who has helped shape some of the most memorable marketing sites and brand campaigns of the last 20+ years. He put digital agency AKQA on the map and has been named as one of “the Top 25 Most Creative People in Advertising” in Forbes Magazine.

Inamoto has made some predictions for 2026:

1. TV advertising strikes back: Nike releases an epic film ad around the World Cup. Along with its strong product line-up, the stock bounces back, but not all the way.
2. Relevance > Reach: ON Running tops $5B in market cap; Lexus crosses 1M global sales.
3. The new era of e-commerce: Direct user traffic to e‑commerce sites declines 5–10%, while traffic driven by AI agents increases 50%+.
4. New form factor of AI: OpenAI announces its first AI device—a voice-powered ring, bracelet, or microphone.

Bracelet?! I hadn’t thought of that! Back in May, when OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s io, I predicted it will be an earbud. A ring or bracelet is interesting. Others have speculated it might be a pendant.

In a smart piece for Creative Bloq, Niklas Mortensen dissects the public backlashes against logo redesigns. As designers, we know it’s more than the logo. I mean, sometimes it is the logo and how terribly crafted it is, but most other times, it’s what the redoing of the brand identity represents.

People don’t love brands because they look good. They love them because they’re familiar, consistent, and emotionally resonant. The same way we return to a childhood game or a worn-in pair of trainers – if we see a brand we recognise, we will feel comfortable, content, even safe.

So when a brand ditches its serif, swaps its colours, or goes full minimalist (not design’s finest moment), it can feel like an act of erasure. And while sometimes that change is necessary, the emotional cost should never be underestimated, especially when the brand in question belongs to an organisation that’s been a part of people’s lives for generations.

Done carelessly, a rebrand can fracture the trust and equity a brand has spent decades building.

In a very gutsy move, Grammarly is rebranding to Superhuman. I was definitely scratching my head when the company acquired the eponymous email app back in June. Why is this spellcheck-on-steroids company buying an email product?

Turns out the company has been quietly acquiring other products too, like Coda, a collaborative document platform similar to Notion, building the company into an AI-powered productivity suite.

So the name Superhuman makes sense.

Grace Snelling, writing in Fast Company about the rebrand:

[Grammarly CEO Shishir] Mehrotra explains it like this: Grammarly has always run on the “AI superhighway,” meaning that, instead of living on its own platform, Grammarly travels with you to places like Google Docs, email, or your Notes app to help improve your writing. Superhuman will use that superhighway to bring a huge new range of productivity tools to wherever you’re working.

In shedding the Grammarly name, Mehrota says:

“The trouble with the name ‘Grammarly’ is, like many names, its strength is its biggest weakness: it’s so precise,” Mehrotra says. “People’s expectations of what Grammarly can do for them are the reason it’s so popular. You need very little pitch for what it does, because the name explains the whole thing … As we went and looked at all the other things we wanted to be able to do for you, people scratch their heads a bit [saying], ‘Wait, I don’t really perceive Grammarly that way.’”

The company tapped branding agency Smith & Diction, the firm behind Perplexity’s brand identity.

Grammarly began briefing the Smith & Diction team on the rebrand in early 2025, but the company didn’t officially select its new name until late June, when the Superhuman acquisition was completed. For Chara and Mike Smith, the couple behind Smith & Diction, that meant there were only about three months to fully realize Superhuman’s branding.

Ouch, just three months for a complete rebrand. Ambitious indeed, but they hit a homerun with the icon, an arrow cursor which also morphs into a human with a cape, lovingly called “Hero.”

In their case study writeup, one of the Smiths says:

I was working on logo concepts and I was just drawing the basic shapes, you know the ones: triangles, circles, squares, octagons, etc., to see if I could get a story to fall out of any of them. Then I drew this arrow and was like hmm, that kinda looks like a cursor, oh wow it also kinda looks like a cape. I wonder if I put a dot on top of tha…OH MY GOD IT’S A SUPERHERO.

Check out the full case study for example visuals from the rebrand and some behind-the-scenes sketches.

Mnemonics—short audio branding—is one of those trends that come and go. The one for Intel was pretty well-known for a long time and spurred the creation of similar sonic identities (e.g., T-Mobile, Netflix). Apple announced in mid-October that they were dropping the “Plus” from their streaming service to be known simply as “Apple TV.” The news spurred a bunch of punditry around probable confusion with the Apple TV app and Apple TV hardware device.

Yesterday, Apple shared the new identity work that drops the “+” from the streaming service name and logo. It’s in the form of the opening logo and mnemonic that will appear in front of shows.

Here is a longer version that’ll appear before films.

In an interview, Finneas O’Connell (who goes by his stage name Finneas), brother of pop star Billie Eilish and her main collaborator, spilled the beans on how he came up with it. Chris Willman, writing for Variety:

Speaking via Zoom from his home studio, Finneas points to the piano behind him as a starting point for a fleeting piece of music whose instrumentation isn’t easy to pin down before it’s gone in one ear and out the other at the start of a viewing experience. “I have my upright piano back here, so I sat and started there. I’m always more able to make something quickly on a real instrument than I am with software. I played a chord that felt kind of hopeful and kind of optimistic, but had gravity to it and hopefully had a little bit of an enigmatic, mysterious quality. And so I had this chord thing happening and then I started building the sounds around it. I had these pieces of zinc and I was hitting them and then reversing the audio, and I was playing real piano and then reversing that, and playing these bass synthesizers and then pitching those up and gliding them down.”

Beyond the cool sound, I love how the logo sting seems to be inspired by early TV logo idents like this one for NBC from 1967.

Update November 6, 2025 3:00 PM PT:

Ad Age reports that the logo sting was filmed in-camera! Writing in the industry mag, Tim Nudd says the branding was done by Apple’s longtime agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab and production company Optical Arts, and that its “lush visuals are meant to capture the platform’s cinematic ambitions and remind viewers that Apple TV is where prestige storytelling lives.”

The report includes a link to a 33-second behind-the-scenes video:

This post from Carly Ayres breaks down a beef between Michael Roberson (developer of an AI-enabled moodboard tool) and Elizabeth Goodspeed (writer and designer, oft-linked on this blog) and explores ragebait, putting in the reps as a junior, and designers as influencers.

Tweet from Michael Roberson

The tweet earned 30,000 views, but only about 20 likes. “That ratio was pretty jarring,” [Roberson] said. Still, the strategy felt legible. “When I post things like, ‘if you don’t do X, you’re not going to make it,’ obviously, I don’t think that. These tools aren’t really capable of replacing designers just yet. It’s really easy to get views baiting and fear-mongering.”

Much like the provocative Artisan campaign, I think this is a net negative for the brand. Pretty sure I won’t be trying out Moodboard AI anytime soon, ngl.

But stepping back from the internet beef, Ayres argues that it’s a philosophical difference about the role friction in the creative process.

Michael’s experience mirrors that of many young designers: brand audits felt like busywork during his Landor internship. “That process was super boring,” he told me. “I wasn’t learning much by copy-pasting things into a deck.” His tool promises to cut through that inefficiency, letting teams reach visual consensus faster and spend more time on execution.

Young Michael, the process is the point! Without doing this boring stuff, by automating it with AI, how are you going to learn? This is but one facet of the whole discussion around expertise, wisdom, and the design talent crisis.

Goodspeed agrees with me:

Elizabeth sees it differently. “What’s interesting to me,” Elizabeth noted, “is how many people are now entering this space without a personal understanding of how the process of designing something actually works.” For her, that grunt work was formative. “The friction is the process,” she explained. “That’s how you form your point of view. You can’t just slap seven images on a board. You’re forced to think: What’s relevant? How do I organize this and communicate it clearly?”

Ultimately, the saddest point that Ayres makes—and noted by my friend Eric Heiman—is this:

When you’re young, online, and trying to get a project off the ground, caring about distribution is the difference between a hobby and a company. But there’s a cost. The more you perform expertise, the less you develop it. The more you optimize for engagement, the more you risk flattening what gave the work meaning in the first place. In a world where being known matters more than knowing, the incentives point toward performance over practice. And we all become performers in someone else’s growth strategy.

…Because when distribution matters more than craft, you don’t become a designer by designing. You become a designer by being known as one. That’s the game now.

I grew up on MTV and I’m surprised that my Gen Z kids don’t watch music videos. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Rob Schwartz, writing in PRINT Magazine:

…the network launched the iconic “I Want My MTV” ad campaign. Created by ad legend George Lois, the campaign featured the world’s biggest rock stars literally demanding MTV. At the time, this was unheard of. Unlike today, rock stars would never sell out to do ads. But here you had the biggest stars: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Pete Townshend, the Police…and rising star Madonna, all shouting the same line in different executions: ‘I want my MTV!” The campaign was a stroke of genius. It mobilized viewers to call up their cable providers and shout over the phone: “I want my MTV!” In due time, MTV was on damn-near every cable box and damn-near every young person’s TV.

As a child of immigrant parents, I grew up learning English from watching PBS, Sesame Street, specifically. But there were other favorites like 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, and of course, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. The logo, with its head looking like a P was seared into my developing brain.

So I’m incredibly saddened to hear that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded entity behind PBS and NPR, will cease operations on September 30, 2025, because of a recent bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Trump.

While PBS and NPR won’t disappear, it will be harder for those networks to stay afloat, now solely dependent on donations.

Lilly Smith, writing for Fast Company:

More than 70% of CPB’s annual federal appropriation goes directly to more than 1,500 local public media stations, according to a web page of its financials. This loss in funding could force local stations, especially in rural areas, to shut down, according to the CPB. Local member stations are independent and locally owned and operated, according to NPR. As a public-private partnership, local PBS stations get about 15% of their revenue from federal funding.

She reached out to Tom Geismar, who redesigned the PBS logo in 1984—the original was by Herb Lubalin and Ernie Smith in 1971. He had this perspective:

There is an ironic tie-in between the government decision to cut off all funding to public television and public radio, and what prompted the redesign of the PBS logo back in the early 1980s.

That was also a difficult time, financially, for the Public Broadcasting Service, and especially the stations in more remote regions of the country. Much of the public equated PBS with the major television networks CBS, NBC and ABC, and presumed that, like those major institutions, PBS was the parent of and significant funder for all the local public television stations throughout the country. But, in fact, the reality is somewhat the opposite. Although PBS local affiliates received a portion of funding from the federal government, it is the individual stations that have the responsibility to do public fund raising, and PBS, in a sense, works for them.

Because of this confusion, the PBS leadership felt that their existing logo (a famous design by by Herb Lubalin) needed to be more than just the classic 3-initials mark, something more evocative of a public-benefit system serving all people. Thus the “everyone” mark was born.

Geismar ends with, “And now, once again, with federal government funding stopped, it is the stations in the less populous regions who will suffer the most.”

This is gorgeous work from Collins in their rebrand for Muse Group, developers of music apps like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass. Paul Moore, writing in It’s Nice That:

One of the issues, [chief creative officer] Nick [Ace] argues, in the design industry is a fixation on branding tech as “software from the future”, relying on literal representations from the 1980s that have created dull and homogeneous visuals that shy away from the timelessness of creativity. “Instead of showcasing technical specs or outlandish interfaces, we centered the brand around the raw experience of musical creation, itself,” says Nick. “Rather than depicting the tools, we visualized the outcomes—the resonance, the harmony, the creative breakthrough that happens when technical barriers disappear.”

Paul Worthington writing about the recent Cannes Festival of Creativity:

…nostalgia is rapidly becoming a major idea d’jour among marketers targeting that oh-so-desirable “Gen Z” demographic.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that if you were to walk around Cannes over the past month or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking brands no longer had any interest in the future: Lisa Frank notebooks. Tamagotchi cameos. Taglines from 1999. Brand after brand strapping itself to the past, seeking refuge in comfort. Instacart. Mattel. Burger King. Skoda. All treating relevance as if it were a rerun.

But along with nostalgia, another theme was present at Cannes—differentiation:

Cannes was also a parade of brands betting on something riskier. Something sharper. Something new. Liquid Death. Stripe. Tesla. Anduril. Companies building out from belief systems focused resolutely on what makes them unique. Making things you couldn’t have predicted because they weren’t remixes of the past—they were statements of the future.

Worthington argues that these two themes are diametrically opposed. Nostalgia brands are “fundamentally risk-averse” and feel safe. While differentiated brands are “risk-embracing,” betting that consumers are desperate for “something weird, sharp, and built from scratch.”

Jeff Beer, writing for Fast Company about a documentary on Ilon Specht, the copywriter who wrote the iconic line for L’Oreal, “Because I’m Worth It.”

In the film, she describes male colleagues who were always arguing with her and taking credit when something worked. She recalled how during pitch and idea meetings for L’Oreal Preference hair color, male colleagues had suggested an idea that cast the woman as an object, rather than the subject. “I was feeling angry. I’m not interested in writing anything about looking good for men. Fuck ‘em,” says an elderly, and terminally ill, Specht in the film, before looking straight down the camera to the male camera operator. “And fuck you, too.”

The film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions a couple weeks ago as it was commissioned by L’Oreal.

The original ad for L’Oreal Preference hair color that first used the line, “Because I’m Worth It” is a single shot of a woman walking towards the camera, explaining why she likes it, and how it makes her feel.

In the doc, we find out that spot almost never happened. In fact, Specht went behind her bosses’ back to create the ad after her agency produced and the brand approved a spot with almost the exact same script, except it was a man speaking the words on behalf of his wife, walking silently beside him. It’s clear that 50 years later it still made Specht angry. Angry enough to not want to talk about advertising or that campaign ever again.