Storytime:

This week I realized I had a small hole (and another one soon to be) in my pillowcase. I’ve had my grandmother’s sewing machine in my study for years and had been meaning to learn how to use it. So this simple mending task seemed like the perfect situation to do so.

I think a lot of folks would go straight to AI: “Tell me how to set up this machine, and provide steps on how to mend this hole in my pillowcase.” And in seconds it would spit out full, step-by-step instructions for their custom machine, ready to troubleshoot as issues came up, no problem.

But instead I asked my mom.

We set up a time for us to sit down together so she could teach me.

We cleared the kitchen table and brewed some tea.

We pulled out the old instruction manual with my grandmother’s handwritten notes (and even the receipt).

We experimented with different stitch settings.

I asked dumb questions and made beginner’s mistakes.

We celebrated when I got the hang of it.

AI can teach and empower us in so many ways. But it cannot hand us moments of humanity. There’s beauty in slowing down, in building deep relationships with time, in making embarrassing mistakes when learning a new skill while someone watches with care. We must advocate for these moments in our life. It’s important for our individual and community well-being.

Stay inspired,

Creative Director

L I N K   R O U N D   U P

1. The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations
We’ve had the discussions in Slack. We’ve tried banning em dashes from our ChatGPT results with mixed success. But we’ve also typed out em dashes with our grubby human fingers (Option Shift -). Justice for the em dash.

2. U.S. Department of State Brand System
The U.S. State Department just launched a new brand identity and shifted to a monolithic brand architecture. Regardless of politics, it’s fascinating to see brand strategy applied at this scale, showing how structure alone can signal a change in message and mindset.

3. Portland Fire Reveals Team Branding
With branding by Portland-based Adopt, the WNBA team has a fresh new brand. While our team is divided between “cool” and “ehhhh,” we can agree that it's an improvement over the 2002 identity. What do you think?

4. Community and Content
“All of that content generated by LLMs is individualized; what you ask, and what the AI answers, is distinct from what I ask, and what answers I receive. This is great for getting things done, but it’s useless for creating common ground.”

C R E A T I V E   S P O T L I G H T

“Starting tomorrow, do one creative act that you can repeat for 100 days.”

This is the prompt graphic designer Michael Bierut tasked his students with that became “The 100-Day Project.” Beirut drew an image from the New York Times everyday. One student filmed themselves dancing to a different song everyday. Or it could be learning a K-Pop dance, writing a haiku, baking a new recipe, or making a collage out of the day’s junk mail. In a similar vein, Julie Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” prescribes writing three pages about anything as soon as you wake up.

As Michael Bierut writes in his essay, “With something like the 100-day project, there’s no right way to do it, and there’s no wrong way to do it. The reason this project works is the reason anything like this works: you can do it on your own terms, in your own way.”

If you choose to undertake your own 100-day project, we’d love to hear about it.

N O W   H I R I N G

Product Designer at Salesloft

Remote, US

Director, Corporate Marketing at Doppel

Remote

Technical Content Developer at Udacity

Remote, US

Senior Manager, Product Design at LaunchDarkly

Remote, US

Senior Product Designer at Dig Insights

Toronto, CN

Director, Customer Advocacy at Drata

Remote, US

Senior Product Designer at Ethyca

New York, NY

I N   C A S E   Y O U   M I S S E D   I T

When Customer Input Is Valuable to Your Rebrand (and When It Isn’t)

Customer input should support your brand strategy — not lead it. When it comes to brand strategy research, the most useful insights usually come from inside your company, not outside it.

Brand Refresh vs. Rebrand: What's The Difference?
While there isn’t a quantifiable difference between a “brand refresh” and a “rebrand,” we do our best to explain the most common situations we see in our work.

F O L L O W   U S