Designer Davide Mascioli created a book and online archive of over 450 space exploration-related logos from around the world.

It’s a wonderful archive—pretty exhaustive—and includes a smattering of logos from science fiction (though less exhaustive there, since there are so many sci-fi properties).

Here are some of my favorites (graphically)…

The designer of the iconic “007” logo from the James Bond movies has died. Joe Caroff was 103. Jeré Longman, writing for The New York Times:

For the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” (1962), Mr. Caroff was hired to create a logo for the letterhead of a publicity release. He began working with the idea that as a secret agent, James Bond had a license to kill (as designated by the numerals “00”), but Mr. Caroff did not find Bond’s compact Walther PPK pistol to be visually appealing.

As he sketched the numerals 007, he drew penciled lines above and below to guide him and noticed that the upper guideline resembled an elongated barrel of a pistol extending from the seven.

He refined his drawing and added a trigger, fashioning a mood of intrigue and espionage and crafting one of the most globally recognized symbols in cinematic history. With some modifications, the logo has been used for 25 official Bond films and endless merchandising.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball also wrote a piece about Caroff:

Caroff had a remarkably accomplished career. He created iconic posters for dozens of terrific films across a slew of genres. The fact that he created the 007 logo but only earned $300 from it is more like a curious footnote than anything.

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.”

Elizabeth Goodspeed contextualizes today’s growing design influencers against designers-cum-artists like April Greiman and Stefan Sagmeister. Along with Tibor Kalman, Jessica Walsh, and Wade and Leta, all of these designers put themselves into their work.

Other designers ran with similar instincts. 40 Days of Dating, a joint project by Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman created in 2013, was presented as a kind of art-directed relationship experiment: two friends, both single, agreed to date each other for 40 days (40 days being the purported time needed to build a habit). The project was presented through highly polished daily updates with lush photography, motion graphics, custom lettering, and a parade of commissioned work from other artists – all accompanied by alarming candid journal entries from both parties about the dates they were going on. It wasn’t exactly a design project in the traditional sense, but it was unmistakably design-led; the relationship itself was the content, but it was design that made it viral.

These self-directed, clientless projects remind me of MFA design theses where design is the medium for self-expression. Bringing it back to 2025, Godspeed writes:

Designers film themselves in their bedrooms and running errands, narrating design decisions and venting about clients along the way. Just as remote work expects us to perform constant busyness, design influencing demands a continuous performance of creative output. …Brands have jumped in on the trend, too. Where once a designer might have been hired to create packaging or campaigns behind the scenes, many are now brought forward as faces of collaborations – they’re photographed in their studios and interviewed about their process as part of launch. The designer’s body, personality, and public profile become a commercial asset.

And of course, like with all content creators, it becomes a job that just might require more work than it seems.

Influencing can seem like a good, low-lift side-hustle at first. Most designers already have tons of unused work and in-progress sketches to share. Why not just post it and see what happens? But anyone who’s ever had to write captions or cut reels knows that making content is, in fact, harder than it looks. The more energy that goes into showcasing work, the less time there is to actually make work, even if you want to. “Influencing” can quickly become a time suck.

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.

Elliot Vredenburg writing for Fast Company:

Which is why creative direction matters more now than ever. If designers are no longer the makers, they must become the orchestrators. This isn’t without precedent. Rick Rubin doesn’t read music or play instruments. Virgil Abloh was more interested in recontextualizing than inventing. Their value lies not in original execution but in framing, curation, and translation. The same is true now for brand designers. Creative direction is about synthesizing abstract ideas into aesthetic systems—shaping meaning through how things feel, not just how they look.