Hard to believe that the Domino’s Pizza tracker debuted in 2008. The moment was ripe for them—about a year after the debut of the iPhone. Mobile e-commerce was in its early days.

Alex Mayyasi for The Hustle:

…the tracker’s creation was spurred by the insight that online orders were more profitable – and made customers more satisfied – than phone or in-person orders. The company’s push to increase digital sales from 20% to 50% of its business led to new ways to order (via a tweet, for example) and then a new way for customers to track their order.

Mayyasi weaves together a tale of business transparency, UI, and content design, tracing—or tracking?—the tracker’s impact on business since then. “The pizza tracker is essentially a progress bar.” But progress bars do so much for the user experience, most of which is setting proper expectations.

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.

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.

For the past year, CPG behemoth Unilever has been “working with marketing services group Brandtech to build up its Beauty AI Studio: a bespoke, in-house system inside its beauty and wellbeing business. Now in place across 18 different markets (the U.S. and U.K. among them), the studio is being used to make assets for paid social, programmatic display inventory and e-commerce usage across brands including Dove Intensive Repair, TRESemme Lamellar Shine and Vaseline Gluta Hya.”

Sam Bradley, writing in Digiday:

The system relies on Pencil Pro, a generative AI application developed by Brandtech Group. The tool draws on several large language models (LLMs), as well as API access to Meta and TikTok for effectiveness measurement. It’s already used by hearing-care brand Amplifon to rapidly produce text and image assets for digital ad channels.

In Unilever’s process, marketers use prompts and their own insights about target audiences to generate images and video based on 3D renders of each product, a practice sometimes referred to as “digital twinning.” Each brand in a given market is assigned a “BrandDNAi” — an AI tool that can retrieve information about brand guidelines and relevant regulations and that provides further limitations to the generative process.

So far, they haven’t used this system to generate AI humans. Yet.

Sam Bradley, writing for Digiday:

One year in from the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, adoption of AI-assisted search tools has led to the rise of so-called “zero-click search,” meaning that users terminate their search journeys without clicking a link to a website.

“People don’t search anymore. They’re prompting, they’re gesturing,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory.

It’s a deceptively radical change to an area of the web that evolved from the old business of print directories and classified sections — one that may redefine how both web users and marketing practitioners think about search itself.

And I wrote about answer engines, earlier this year in January:

…the fundamental symbiotic economic relationship between search engines and original content websites is changing. Instead of sending traffic to websites, search engines, and AI answer engines are scraping the content directly and providing them within their platforms.

The British automaker Jaguar unveiled its rebrand last week, its first step at relaunching the brand as an all-EV carmaker. Much ink has been spilled about the effort already, primarily negative, regarding the toy-like logotype in design circles and the bizarre film in the general town square.

Interestingly, Brand New, the preeminent brand design website, hasn’t weighed in yet. It has decided to wait until after December 2, when Jaguar will unveil the first “physical manifestation of its Exuberant Modernism creative philosophy, in a Design Vision Concept” at Miami Art Week. (Update: Brand New has weighed in with a review of the rebrand. My commentary on it is below.)

There have been some contrarian views, too, decrying the outrage by brand experts. In Print Magazine, Saul Colt writes:

Let me tell you a story…

Imagine a smoky wood-paneled conference room. Five men in smart suits sit around a table with a slide projector in the middle. Atop the machine is a finned plastic container that looks like a donut or a bundt cake. A sixth man is standing and begins a pitch.

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on the level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter—Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Designing since 1985

I’ve been a designer for as long as I can remember. I usually like to say that I started in the seventh grade, after being tenacious enough to badger my father into buying my first Macintosh computer and then spending hours noodling in MacPaint and MacDraw. Pixel by pixel, I painstakingly drew Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, for a book report cover. I observed the lines of the parabolic exterior of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known colloquially in San Francisco as “the washing machine,” and replicated them in MacDraw. Of course, that’s not design, but that was the start of my use of the computer to make visuals that communicate. Needless to say, I didn’t know what brand strategy even was, or why it’s important, but we’ll get there.

We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.

Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.

What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.

In this article we’ll take the primary elements of storytelling and apply them to design, namely branding, marketing, and product design:

From an advertising standpoint, I believe Apple has been on fire recently. (Disclaimer: I have been an Apple fanboy since 1985 and used to work there many years ago.) Beginning with the “What will your verse be?” iPad ad that debuted in mid-January, they’ve continued with the “You’re more powerful than you think” iPhone 5S that began airing recently.

When I first saw “Your Verse” on TV it stopped me in my tracks. Using audio of Robin Williams speaking to his class in Dead Poets Society, it features footage of people using the iPad around the world for making music, photography, tracking tornadoes, playing professional hockey, and more. The haunting melody combined with the breathtaking images and Robin Williams’ voice really struck a chord with me. It evoked a deep sense of wonder and faith in humanity. These were real people doing extraordinary things with this product. In the mere three years that iPad has been available* it has created a whole new category of devices and enabled millions of people to do ordinary and extraordinary things.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about how so-called “digital” agencies are or are not ready to be the lead for a campaign. But I think the question is a little off.

Instead the question should be “Why are clients splitting up campaign work based on tactic?”

Despite the maturing of digital agencies such as Razorfish (for whom I work), R/GA and AKQA, today’s clients are still sending digital work to digital agencies and traditional work to traditional agencies. And equally bad is having a third company plan and buy their media (sometimes there’s a traditional media agency and a digital one). Why is this bad?

Yesterday the design and advertising community was abuzz over the leaked presentation deck (PDF) for the new Pepsi logo by the Arnell Group. Yes it is absolutely a work of pure horseshit. But, I was reminded of the decks that my colleagues and I create every day and how somebody’s horseshit may be someone else’s chocolate cake.

We all have to sell our work. Ideally the concepts and ideas come from a well-formed strategy, but that doesn’t always happen. Many times the strategy must back into the creative. In other words sometimes you might have a great idea that you’ll need to justify after the fact.