The brightest spot in the company’s portfolio? Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, which E.l.f. acquired just over a year ago in a deal worth up to $1 billion, just three years after the brand launched. Rhode has built a niche demonstrating that skincare products under $30 can feel luxurious. It has also created viral ad campaigns starring unexpected celebrities including the actor Harris Dickinson and the Love Story star Sarah Pidgeon. In doing so, it has also lent the mass-market conglomerate E.l.f. increased cultural relevance.

This quarter, Rhode reached roughly $160 million in net sales, a giant leap forward given that it achieved $212 million in net sales in the full year preceding its acquisition.  Rhode also became Sephora North America’s number one brand by some metrics. Upon launching at the retailer, the brand sold three Rhode products every second; it achieved similar success in the U.K.

Rhode’s CEO, Nick Vlahos, told Fast Company that the brand has embarked on an ambitious international expansion plan. This June, Rhode entered the Latin American market when it launched in Mexico. It also launched in seven European countries (Rhode sells direct to consumers in 25 countries). Soon, Rhode will also be in European branches of Sephora.

E.l.f. does not disclose how much of its business comes from direct to consumer versus Sephora, but Rhode reports that it drove $27 million in DTC sales in a single day when a limited edition collection dropped. Vlahos says that, by comparison, 90% of beauty industry brands do less than $25 million over a 12-month period. While the company acquired 90,000 new customers in a single day, it has also seen enormous success from returning consumers: 70% of its direct-to-consumer sales came from existing customers.

“E.l.f. has grown this past quarter [by] 36%, and with that $160 million [Rhode] are driving a significant portion of that overall growth,” Vlahos says, adding that Rhode has benefitted from E.l.f.’s expertise to streamline its supply chain, building out seven global facilities to serve retail and direct to consumer.

The brand has continued releasing a steady cadence of limited-edition exclusive collections to keep customers coming back. “Our largest DTC waitlist in our history was around the summer collection. We had over 700,000 people sign up,” Vlahos says.

Many celebrity-led brands like Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty have seen success in recent years. But some that once flew high, like Rihanna’s Fenty, are losing momentum. Though increased retail presence in more territories is a quick way to expand the business, once a brand hits those ceilings, it can be difficult to keep sales momentum going. Vlahos says Rhode will stay the course by keeping brand offerings tightly edited, and surprising and delighting consumers to keep them coming back.

“A lot of times when you go into retail, the DTC business starts to stagnate,” he says. “What’s great about our business is that we continue to make sure that there’s a reason to come visit our DTC business.”

Breaking through on late-night

March 3, 2014, was the day that changed everything for the rock band Future Islands. The synth-pop group was a stalwart of America’s underground music scene due in no small part to its charismatic front man, Samuel T. Herring, and his idiosyncratic voice, somewhere between Tom Waits and Rammstein’s Till Lindemann. That day, they performed on Late Show with David Letterman, and the host was transfixed. “I’ll take all of that you got!” Letterman cheered, and the DIY band was cast into true virality.

“At the time that we played Letterman, we were in a transitory period for the band,” said the bassist, William Cashion. They’d signed to the larger indie label 4AD Records, hired management, and gotten a promise of a late-night TV spot, but never thought it would pan out. “Our team, they told us, ‘It’ll be good for your fans and your friends and family, but it’s not really going to move the needle. These things don’t really do what they used to,'” he recalls.

But that wasn’t the case.

“All the festivals that initially turned us down all of a sudden wanted us to come play. Everything kind of shifted after that moment,” he said. “It was definitely a huge turning point and gave the band much greater exposure.”

New media offers an alternative place for discovery

A dearth of late-night spots particularly affects independent acts—the kind that could really benefit from the exposure. Representatives for CBS, NBC and ABC did not return The Associated Press’s requests for comment.

Chloë Walsh, cofounder of The Oriel, a publicity firm, points to the music bookers behind the scenes. “Of course, they have to book all the biggest things in the world, but they also have things that they want to champion,” she says. Fewer slots means developing artists are competing with big names for dwindling opportunities.

But there are other avenues to discovery.

“We’re kind of an anomaly in the way that our song and that performance took off,” says Cashion of Future Islands. “But we’ve seen other bands have TikTok viral hits and stuff like that.”

There are many examples of artists cracking the code online. The singer-songwriter Gigi Perez’s career was launched with the TikTok smash “Sailor Song,” as was Malcolm Todd’s with a few viral hits, landing him a major label deal with Columbia Records. The indie band Beach Bunny saw their punky-pop go viral with “Prom Queen” just ahead of the pandemic, leading to performances on Kimmel and Fallon.

Even legacy artists are experiencing second winds of music discovery. Weezer’s 2010s power-pop track “Go Away,” featuring Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino, recently made the rounds on TikTok and became a top song for both on Spotify.

“It seems like a lot of different aspects of the album cycle have kind of been replaced with short-form content,” the Beach Bunny singer Lili Trifilio explained. “And it is a bummer because late-night is a service to musicians in such a major way. You are helping people reach new fans.

“And I think now a lot of the responsibility of advertising is falling on the artists to be their own late-night special on TikTok or whatever,” she continued. “I don’t think that these 30-second, one-minute self-made clips hold the same value.”

Internet creators reimagine traditional formats

“The media landscape is always changing. Sometimes that’s good for music and sometimes it’s bad for music,” says Walsh at The Oriel. “There’s a whole breed of young creators at the moment doing really interesting stuff. . . . Hopefully there will be more opportunities out there and we don’t have to rely on the networks.”

She points to Track Star(asterisk), the online music trivia series, which has begun hosting live performances, and to Julian Shapiro-Barnum of Recess Therapy, who has launched a late-night YouTube show, Outside Tonight, that features live performances.

Shapiro-Barnum says Outside Tonight was born out of necessity. “We know that the entertainment industry is hard to break into. And so, what’s been so cool about digital media is that it’s circumvented that,” he says.

“How can we do late night, but different?” was his approach. The show takes place outdoors, bypassing a traditional studio. The musical bookings also lean independent. Recent performers include the rapper Erick the Architect, the indie rock soloist Annie DiRusso and the multiinstrumentalist and experimentalist L’Rain.

“There was no version of the show that didn’t have music,” Shapiro-Barnum says. “To me, it feels like a staple.”

Beach Bunny performed during the first Outside Tonight episode.

“It’s so cool to see people that are like movers and makers be like, ‘Hey, this is a gap I’m seeing. Late-night is being placed on the back burner. We need to revive this; I’m gonna figure it out,'” Trifilio said. “I hope that it inspires other people to step up.”

She sees it as part of a larger YouTube renaissance, shifting away from prioritizing short-form content.

“I think that people are yearning for some longer-format stuff,” she says.

The power for live performance is exposure—not sales

In traditional late-night TV spots, artists benefit from exposure—but that doesn’t necessarily mean a jump in sales. Ideally, that will also translate to these new media spaces.

“It’s a showcase for touring. And that’s really where artists make their money,” says Walsh. “People say, ‘It doesn’t really give you a bump if you’re on a late-night TV show.’ They’re looking at the sales, they’re not looking at a promoter in Minneapolis going, ‘Oh my god, I want that,’ or a radio playlist director saying, ‘Oh that was fantastic, we should add that.'”

“Every musical guest who’s come on Outside Tonight, everyone in the crew, everyone in the audience, has not stopped listening,” says Shapiro-Barnum. “In real time, it spreads and creates all these fans. So, I have to imagine that happens online as well.”

But for many, landing a late-night TV performance is still the North Star of a press run.

“For a lot of people—especially international artists that are coming to slog it out across the U.S. in some club shows they may not even be headlining—if you could get on Jimmy Kimmel, it’s like we’ve cracked it,” says Walsh. “The whole thing was worth it. And that’s huge.”

—Maria Sherman, AP Music Writer

Vega, who has stuttered since he was a kid, believes implantable brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence will change the lives of disabled people in the future. But he wanted something that could help now—without surgery. “I couldn’t let my friends who live with quadriplegia wait so long,” he says. So Vega left Neuralink to return to graduate school at MIT’s Media Lab. He wanted to build an interface “as expressive as an implant without all those constraints.”

So, alongside cofounder Corten Singer, he created MouthPad with Augmental.

MouthPad looks like half a retainer that is placed against your palate and back molars. At its center there’s a golden capacitive trackpad. A tongue press applies positive pressure and produces a left-click; a sip applies negative pressure and produces a right-click. In tongue-control mode, touch location becomes a virtual joystick. In head-control mode—which works using its internal gyroscopes if the user can move their head—head movements move the cursor while tongue touch operates virtual buttons for vertical and horizontal scrolling.

The device doesn’t seek to reproduce Musk’s brain-interface ambition more cheaply or more discreetly. It rejects the premise that high-agency human-computer interaction must begin with surgery—or that accessibility must announce itself on the wearer’s face with some cyborg machine interface.

MouthPad seeks to use the body’s remaining abilities. Its most provocative proposition is that the best assistive technology might be the kind that gives someone control without forcing them to look like they are using assistive technology. Basically, it’s a mouse that disappears into your mouth. “We [Augmental] are people-first,” Vega says. “Technology should disappear so that you see a human involved.”

The long way to the tongue

Vega’s time at Neuralink clarified his approach, but it did not create it. The roots of the idea go back to when he was five and began stuttering. He says a keyboard and mouse helped him work around limitations he experienced in speech. “I became obsessed with input devices,” he says.

Vega started programming at 11, and worked with people with multiple sclerosis in high school before studying brains and computers at UC Berkeley. He tried scalp electrodes, EOG, EMG, and voice interfaces. He even shaved his head daily for an electrode-based setup, he says. They could make for arresting demos, Vega tells me with a smile, but they were not useful enough in everyday life.

“But the better I understood how the brain and the body work, the better I could probe it and the better I could hack it,” he remembers. “And the better interfaces I could design to augment human ability.”

After leaving Neuralink, Vega began with a more practical question: What part of the human body still has extraordinary range, precision, and endurance for people who cannot use their hands? “Thinking from first principles, what is the area of the body that is the most expressive?” he recalls. “That’s our tongue.”

The first prototype was a sensor-packed lollipop called “Chupetín” (“small pacifier” in Spanish). Its purpose was to test the user experience of a tongue-computer interface. “It worked great,” Vega says. “It was intuitive. I didn’t have to think about it.” That led to Augmental, which Vega says started in a basement in Somerville, Massachusetts.

A mouse built like a retainer

MouthPad is custom-fit through an intraoral scan of the user’s mouth. That matters because the device needs to sit thinly on the palate—the part the tongue touches—while still allowing the user to speak. Augmental began with putty impressions but moved to optical intraoral scanning after finding too much human error in physical impressions.

Building the hardware was an exercise in hostile-environment design. The device uses a serpentine microfabrication approach applied to flexible electronics, so one electronic design can stretch and compress to accommodate different mouth shapes and sizes. A bridge passes through the occlusal plane, where the teeth meet, creating a protected channel so a bite does not destroy the circuitry.

The earliest version used pressure-sensing films. Those deformed and affected the baseline signal, Vega says. The company now uses capacitive sensing—the same fundamental technique used in phones and laptop trackpads—to detect the tongue’s position on the palate. A small air chamber and barometer register pressure changes, allowing MouthPad to distinguish a tongue press from a sip.

That is the physical interface. The harder part is making it behave like an interface rather than a science experiment. That’s where software comes in. MouthPad’s algorithm analyzes a matrix of sensor data to infer intent and identify tongue position despite saliva. Vega compares the problem to using a touchscreen on a rainy day.

The device is meant to connect as a computer mouse. Users can point, left-click, right-click, and scroll through tongue gestures; those who can use head control can move the cursor with head movement and use the tongue for other functions.

Beyond point and click

Computer mice are limited tools, which is why the modern computer is reliant on keyboard shortcuts, contextual commands, tiny click targets, and repetitive actions that would otherwise exhaust anyone forced to do everything through a pointer.

Augmental’s answer is a companion app that layers profiles and gesture-triggered shortcuts on top of the core mouse interface. Its central interaction is a context radial menu that can be opened by remapping the sip gesture. Once it appears, the user can select on-screen virtual buttons with tongue touch location.

That can make everyday operations less punishing. The radial menu can offer common shortcuts such as copy and paste without forcing someone to aim at a tiny right-click menu. Vega says Augmental has also demonstrated functions for dictation and AI-agent commands.

The idea is not that the tongue becomes a keyboard in the familiar sense. It is that profiles can make the same gesture mean different things in different contexts. In a first-person-shooter profile, head movement controls aim via the mouse while tongue touch generates WASD movement. In a mechanical CAD profile, the context menu can trigger keyboard shortcuts for pan, orbit, and zoom, while head movements control the mouse for the selected translation or rotation.

Augmental calls this a five-degree-of-freedom computer controller: two degrees of freedom from head-pointer movement, and three from tongue gestures. The point is not a marketing-friendly number. It is the company’s effort to recover some of the expressive range that hands bring to computing through continuous control, pressure, sequences, and context.

The performance argument

Augmental’s report—which is company-authored and not peer reviewed yet—says it has worked with approximately 150 people during nearly two years of early access. Its point-and-click dataset includes 58 people with hand impairments who completed a one-minute grid-selection game and recorded a score; the group included people with spinal-cord injuries, quadriplegia likely related to SCI but unstated, ALS, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, repetitive stress injury, and other conditions.

In the test, 44 people with limited hand use controlled a computer cursor by moving their heads and using MouthPad with their tongues. The company says their typical score was 3.43 bits per second (BPS)—a technical measure of how quickly and accurately someone can select targets on a screen. Thirty-four people tried the MouthPad test on their first day using it. The middle score was 3 BPS, and five people scored above 5 BPS. Augmental says users generally learned the basics in less than two hours.

But the numbers have limits. The test asked people to click targets on a screen arranged in a 30-by-30 grid. It did not test how fast they could type, whether the device caused fatigue, whether they could use it independently, or whether it helped them work through a normal day. Augmental says its fastest MouthPad user outperformed the fastest users of the other systems included in its comparison. It also says that 45.45% of its head-control users scored higher than the best result in the published brain-computer-interface study it cited. The company did not include Neuralink’s public results in that comparison because those results have not been reviewed by outside scientists.

This is not a case of a mouth retainer “beating” an implanted brain-computer interface. It is evidence that a noninvasive system can provide meaningful computer control for people who retain tongue control and, in head-control mode, head movement.

The company’s own review acknowledges that camera-based head tracking and eye tracking can produce better typical performance than MouthPad in the Fitts’ law comparisons it cites for typically abled participants. But head control is not physically possible for every user, can be uncomfortable while lying on one’s back, and can become noisy in a bumpy vehicle. Plus, MouthPad is invisible.

The case for invisibility

For Vega, the point of placing the hardware inside the mouth is not merely elegance. It is social. “Because our users, many of them use interfaces that are on their face, like the joystick and whatnot,” he says. “That creates a lot of stigma.” MouthPad is an assistive interface that does not sit between its wearer and everyone else in the room. This does not make visible assistive technology lesser, nor does every user want their technology hidden. But invisibility can be an important form of control—one more decision that belongs to the person wearing the device.

The mouth is also useful because it leaves speech intact. That was a design requirement from the beginning, Vega says. Speech remains one of the fastest ways to produce text for people who can use it, but ordinary voice control can be loud, public, and unreliable in noisy places.

That is why Augmental has built Vox, its next product. Vega describes it as a “stethoscope-like microphone” optimized for voice traveling into the body. “It listens to you, not to the world,” he says. Vox originated as a low-volume speech feature for MouthPad users who may have reduced lung function, impaired diaphragm function, tracheostomies, altered phonation, or no privacy when using standard voice interfaces. The company describes it as a microphone engineered to capture low-volume, body-conducted speech in noisy environments.

Together, the two products are supposed to close the loop: MouthPad can explicitly start and stop dictation; Vox provides the quiet voice signal. Augmental calls the pairing an efficient mouse-and-keyboard replacement, though it has not published a formal performance study of the combined workflow.

For Vega, that use case is personal too: “When I whisper, I don’t stutter as much,” he says. He also says Vox has allowed him to work while walking, doubling his average daily step count from 8,000 to 16,000. “I’ve reclaimed an hour under the sun,” he says, “and I think that’s beautiful.”

He says Augmental has shipped 180 devices and has more than 120 users. Since the device’s battery lasts about seven hours, some users have bought second or third devices to cover longer days or keep a backup.

While the product has not been approved by the FDA yet, the company works with rehabilitation centers and occupational therapists in the United States. MouthPad costs $1,400, according to Vega, and once they get the FDA’s green light, insurance companies will reimburse part of that cost. Vox costs $200. Vega wants to expand to Europe, Japan, and other markets while lowering MouthPad’s price toward mainstream consumer-electronics territory.

He says that eventually, both devices could evolve to jump into the mainstream market. Vega does not want to rush that move, he tells me as he points to Humane and Rabbit’s failures as warnings against scaling hardware before it is ready: “Let’s go fast. Let’s iterate. Let’s have new versions every quarter. Let’s learn. And when the market screams for it, then we activate it.”

That may be the most revealing difference between MouthPad and the usual brain-interface sci-fi fantasy that’s still years away from materializing in the real world. The fantasy begins with a superhuman future and asks people to wait for it. Vega’s project begins with the person who needs an interface today. And then we can see where that leads us.

MouthPad’s version does not begin with drilling into a skull. It begins with an ability many people still possess, a tongue moving against the roof of the mouth or a hidden microphone that listens to your whisper through your flesh and bones. Devices small enough to vanish and useful enough to make big problems disappear.

The button, which debuted the week of July 27, allows users to flag content on LinkedIn that they believe may be “AI slop.” The option appears in a three-dot menu in the top right of any post, and shows a diamond with an exclamation point, followed by the phrase, “Seems like AI slop.” 

In a post to the platform on July 30, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, explained that the button will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds.” It’s just one part of the brand’s overall strategy to reduce AI slop or “generally low-quality content.” Essentially, LinkedIn is using an AI-versus-AI approach by training its own detection models to distinguish between content that contains original thinking and content that’s just regurgitating existing thinking. 

As AI-written content begins to take over social media, platforms like LinkedIn are faced with the challenge of bringing human ideas back to the surface. For several sites, that means baking AI detection and mediation features directly into the UX, allowing individual users to have some say in how AI content is handled.

Care for some LinkedIn with your slop?

Any LinkedIn user knows that the platform has long suffered with an AI slop epidemic. According to a July study from AI detection service Pangram, one in four long-form posts on LinkedIn, Medium, X, Reddit, and Substack were flagged as AI over the past two months. Of those total flagged posts, a whopping two-thirds came from LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn may be an AI slop hot spot, but the whole internet is suffering with a similar problem. In June, tech company Cloudfare, which manages traffic for millions of websites, reported that bots now generate 57.5% of web page requests. That finding is essentially proof of the “dead internet theory,” or the idea that most activity online today is generated by nonhumans.

Right now, platforms are actively in the thick of dealing with this influx of automated content, and there don’t seem to be many cut-and-dry answers. Per Srinivasan’s post, “On comments alone, everyday we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts, and have blocked billions of other automation attempts (posting at scale, slop) in the last couple months alone.”

As brands work through this conundrum, several are opting to hand some of the moderating power back to users—which presents a novel UX challenge. Though there can be overlap, AI slop often lives in a separate category from the kinds of posts that social media platforms are used to moderating, like violent or threatening content. Thus, brands need to create entirely new visual markers and categories to help users recognize AI moderation features.

How AI slop is presenting a novel UX challenge

Last October, Pinterest approached this problem by creating a new section in settings titled “AI content” and allowing users to toggle AI recommendations off by category, like “Art” and “Sports.” TikTok followed suit by testing an “AI-generated content” slider feature under its “Manage content” category in settings, letting users dictate their feed’s concentration of AI on a sliding scale. Most recently, during the week of July 20, Substack announced an integration with Pangram that gives users the ability to scan newsletters for an estimate of how much was written by AI.

All of these features are designed to hand the reins of AI moderation over to users in some capacity. The same can be said for LinkedIn’s  “Seems like AI slop” button, which, according to Audrey Davis, LinkedIn’s director of product design and creative systems, is purposefully placed in a flow where members would typically report or provide content feedback, to make it easy to find. 

“We are starting with the exclamation point, as that is indicative of an alert or caution, but also wanted to make sure it felt different from a formal report which uses a flag,” she explains. In other words, the AI slop button isn’t necessarily designed for narcing on individual users, but rather to help LinkedIn formulate a broader approach to cutting back on low-quality content. Davis says the platform “may explore other icon options in the future based on member feedback.”

Social media brands are in the thick of dealing with the AI slopification of their platforms. For users, that means a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain at how their feeds are made. 

“We weren’t finding some sheet pans or something at a restaurant supply place,” Levain Bakery’s cofounder, Pam Weekes, tells Fast Company. “We kind of wanted something that was a little more unique and special.”

Now the bakery has collaborated with the home goods brand on a 17-piece collection.

The two brands announced their collaboration Tuesday, which includes items like plates, glasses, dish towels, spatulas, mixing spoons, and a $15 ceramic Mini Crate inspired by the berry box colanders Levain Bakery has long used to display their cookies. The collection’s $18 Cookie Glass is hand-blown, and the $20 Perfect Silicone Cookie Mat was designed to make Levain-sized cookies at home.

Everything in the collection is something the bakery’s cofounders would use themselves.

“It was a real collaboration, which was really nice because I think we’re pretty particular, and we’re pretty clear about what we like and what we don’t like,” Weekes says. “But they’re pretty particular as well.”

The design process brought together Levain Bakery’s baking know-how and playful visual identity with Crate & Barrel’s manufacturing expertise and functionality.

When the bakery said they wanted to make a cookie jar, for example, Crate & Barrel had plenty of experience with making them. And when they wanted to make a bench scraper, a tool used to cut dough and scrape messy counters clean, Weekes and her team could explain their specific needs. Bench scrapers at restaurant supply stores are typically too big and clunky, so Levain Bakery has gotten theirs from France. (The bakery also got its name from France, as levain means leavening.)

“They’re not expensive, but they are hard to replace,” the other cofounder, Connie McDonald, says of their bench scrapers. “So . . . we explained it to the Crate & Barrel team like, ‘This bench scraper has to kind of fit in your hand and it has to feel good.’ And they did it, and it feels great.”

The $50 cookie jar, which comes with a maple lid, includes original illustration in Levain Bakery’s signature blue style by the artist and longtime collaborator Libby VanderPloeg, as do the collection’s textiles, tools, and serveware.

For Levain Bakery, which opened as a bread shop in 1995 and is now preparing to open its 21st location, the collaboration helps get its brand name in more places, as Crate & Barrel has more than 100 stores, outlets, and franchise locations globally. Finally, fans of the New York City bakery you could get only in a few select cities can bring it to their own home.

The opposite is true.

Generation was never the hard part. What generative AI has done is shift the bottleneck. Producing a hundred names may now easy, but finding names that are distinctive, legally available, and sonically appealing in every market you intend to enter, in every class of goods you’ll eventually sell, is a much harder task.

And few naming waters are more congested right now than those around agentic AI — assistant, copilot, and agent: three blurring terms on a single axis of machine initiative, from answering when asked to pursuing goals on their own. The industry has no settled name for the group; “agentic AI” is the working umbrella, and the shorthand used here.

So how crowded are these waters? No one can say exactly. The global technology group Prosus and the venture-data platform Dealroom have mapped more than 1,500 AI agents; River + Wolf’s own census of the category turned up 450-plus names clustered into just eighteen recurring territories shown in the graphic below.

Why the Models Fish the Same Waters

A generative model learns language from what has been written — and what has been written about agentic AI is the existing landscape of agentic AI names. Ask one to name your product and it begins fishing in one or more of the 18 territories illustrated here. Inevitably, its suggestions feel right because they resemble what’s already familiar.

But resemblance is the raw material of trademark conflict: the AI tool that founders trust to carry them out of crowded waters is the anchor holding them in place.

A useful frame here is W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s red and blue oceans. They applied it to markets, but it transfers almost perfectly to naming, because a name is strategy compressed into a word. Name in the red ocean and you inherit your competitors’ sameness, collisions, and crowds; name in the blue and you claim space the category has yet to populate.

What follows are three ways out of the crowd: two escapes to bluer water — the compound and the coined name, each in several varieties — and one deep cast into the red.

The Magic of Compounding

Like founders in many industries, AI founders favor short, single English words (Glean, Dot, Pod), which is exactly why those words are largely exhausted. One way to get beyond this style of naming is to fuse two ordinary words into a distinct whole.

The fusion can join two distant words, as in Moveworks, the enterprise AI assistant that resolves employees’ IT and HR requests on its own.

You can also create a compound in which an adjective modifies a noun as with TinyFish, an enterprise AI platform that deploys autonomous web agents to navigate, research, and extract data from the live internet. The craft lies in the seam: the compound must feel inevitable rather than welded together.

Also avoid building on overused category parts: mind, bot, chat. Trademark examiners often deem such parts “merely descriptive,” registrable only with a disclaimer that leaves that half of the name unprotected. Even OpenAI was refused a trademark on GPT for exactly this reason.

A compound can also cross tongues, welding a word that is archaic, or little known to the target market, to a familiar one. Wraithwatch, the AI cyber-defense firm contracted to defend U.S. federal networks, fuses a 16th-century Scots word for ghost to plain English. The old word supplies depth, the living word familiarity, and the seam alchemizes the two into a name that feels distinct and approachable, with potentially less trademark risk.

Remaking a sound entirely, though, is a craft of its own — which brings us to coined names, also known in trademark parlance as fanciful marks.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Freshly Minted

The bluest water belongs to the fully invented name, and its coins are minted two ways. The first is pure abstraction. Kodak meant nothing before Kodak — and that was its strength: pure sound, free to stand for anything the company would ever do.

But such names are not easy; the phonetics must carry what the dictionary does not. If your promise is ease — the core promise of most agentic AI — choose sounds that flow: the liquid letters l and r, open vowels like the a in calm, and the soft sibilance of s. A name built on these sounds suggests ease before the customer knows what the product does.

Still, abstraction is open territory for a reason: a name built from nothing familiar is hard to warm to and filling that emptiness has historically taken media budgets few challengers can afford. Hence the better bet is often the other side of the coin — a coinage that carries a trace of an existing word within it.

Minted with Meaning

True inventions from nothing — what linguists studying word formation call “root creations” or, more evocatively, “creations ex nihilo” — are rarer than the naming industry admits; most coinages are built from fragments of existing language.

At River + Wolf we call these trace names. Nvidia is the classic case: the founders’ internal NV file label sent them hunting for a real word to inhabit, and they landed on the Latin invidia — envy — a meaning the name faintly radiates and their logo underscores.

Gradium, which builds the voice layer for AI agents, works this way: the grad- of gradient, machine learning’s technical heartbeat, softened by the elemental -ium that makes the name sound mined, like titanium or uranium, rather than manufactured. Such names clear the distinctiveness bar while sparing customers the coolness of total abstraction.

A trace name can also be clipped from other languages, especially the old myths, whose characters often anticipate today’s products. Many words from archaic languages resist the English tongue, but with intelligent clipping they can sometimes work.

Ratatoskr, the name of the Norse squirrel who carries messages up and down the world-tree, is an unwieldy word to both eye and ear — but it clips handsomely to Tosk: clean, blunt, one syllable.

Clip with care, though, because the shears can cut. Tosk is Norwegian for fool. If you use this approach, remember that every clip must survive linguistic hooks as well as trademark ones.

But whether a pure-sound invention or one carrying a trace of an existing word, familiar or less so, every invented name faces the same hazard: land too close to an existing mark — in sound, appearance, or sense — and trademark trouble follows. The defense is built in at the mint: when a name runs near a soundalike or lookalike, its parts must pull toward a different meaning and a different market channel.

Plaud, the AI note-taking recorder, sits one letter from Anthropic’s Claude, yet the two coexist on the trademark register — and not for lack of vigilance. Anthropic has shown it will act: in January, it pressed the viral open-source project Clawdbot to rename after its mascot borrowed the name of Anthropic’s own Clawd.

That Plaud remains untouched suggests something else is at work — the names diverge where it counts. Claude is a French first name; Plaud reads as a clip of “applaud.” Examiners may also have reasoned that a recorder that employs AI is not the AI assistant itself. The divergence, it seems, did the work — so that no lawsuit had to.

Fathoms Down

An additional escape requires no new territory at all: stay in the red water but cast deeper — even the reddest territories can sometimes turn blue at depth. Greek mythology, for example, is exhausted in the shallows; every chatbot offers the same tired Olympians, and the marquee names of other pantheons are going fast.

But farther down lie treasures.

When Apple built an internal system for making machine-learning models run swiftly on its devices, its team reached past the god Mercury and named the tool Talaria — the winged sandals that bore him along. A name about speed and delivery, and liquid on the tongue.

In agentic AI, Arm’s Metis reaches further back — to one of the oldest figures in Greek myth. Metis was a Titaness, a generation older than the Olympians everyone names their chatbots after. Her name doubles as a common Greek noun: mêtis — cunning, wily, an adaptive intelligence. For a security framework, that’s pitch perfect.

The Naming Expedition

But however a name is found or formed, every mark faces the same legal challenges. Happily, in less-fished waters more names can surmount these challenges, and what survives may be more distinctive than the least-blocked version of what everyone else is already using.

The lesson for the fleet of thousands searching crowded waters for agentic AI names, or any names, is simple: stop fishing where everyone is anchored. Fresh territories for naming still exist, but only for those willing to leave the red ocean behind — or, if they stay, to drop their hooks many fathoms below.

The two separate species overlapped for more than 200,000 years, but eventually the Neanderthal faded away. What happened? There was no single event, but rather a gradual shift that saw Homo sapiens dominate thanks to factors like living in larger social groups, better dietary flexibility, and faster innovation in things like tools, fishing and hunting tactics, and more. Today, 95% of the human genome can be traced back to Homo sapien lineage.

The Homo sapiens clearly won.  

Look, I’m no anthropologist, but there’s a clear analog in our modern media ecosystem: Influencers are the Neanderthals, and creators are the Homo sapiens. While influencers still offer marketers a transactional relationship for broad reach, creators are more authoritative media partners delivering a deeper connection to their fan communities. They’re the same genus, but one has proven superior to the other, with creators emerging as a more modern species for brand communications. 

Earlier this summer, at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, creators were the undisputed stars. Meetings, panels, and parties were backed with the whole creator spectrum, from studio giants like Mr. Beast and Dhar Mann, to waves of smaller, more niche creators like avant-garde make-up artist Cindy Chen. There was as much buzz about the rise of the creator as there was excitement for all things AI—and that’s saying a lot.

That buzz has started to translate into action, though, and it doesn’t bode well for influencers. Rocket Companies spent about $1 billion on marketing and advertising in 2025. The mortgage and real estate company (owner of both Rocket and Redfin) had been consistently working with both influencers and creators, but CMO Jonathan Mildenhall says the difference in value is stark, and the strategy has changed. 

“I was seeing the rise of creators, and I was seeing the boring predictability of influencers,” says Mildenhall. “And about this time last year, I pulled my team together and I said, ‘I don’t want to work with influencers anymore. I don’t want to work with shiny, happy people who are hawking products the whole time that don’t have authority, true authority, on their content and all the products that they’re endorsing.”

The influencer bubble has popped. 

Like the good ol’ Neanderthal, there may be some traces of influencer DNA left, but we’re entering the era of the creator. According to the industry sources I spoke to, creators are the future of how brands want to find, engage, and capitalize on new audiences.

In this Fast Company premium subscriber exclusive, read on to learn:  

• How brands like Rocket, Chime, and e.l.f. Beauty are riding the creator wave
• Why the almighty algorithm and LLMs prefer creator content 
• What the DoubleClick of the creator economy looks like 

Reach vs engagement 

Influencers were born into a social media ecosystem that prioritized reach over engagement. These social media stars brought brands into their feeds and vlogs, often organically at first, to sell products that often had little to do with them or their interests. It was a baldly transactional relationship, and it worked for both brands and influencers for years. 

But starting around 2014, Meta began deprioritizing organic brand content in favor of ads that paid Meta. Influencers’ “organic” brand posts, which functioned largely as “rented reach” or “socialite billboards,” started losing eyeballs, engagement, and impact. And a new kind of algorithm—one based on interests instead of followers—became the norm.

Creators, a sub-breed of influencer, whose followings were based around their areas of expertise, started to rise in power. Creators have established subject matter authority—whether it’s sports, beauty, streetwear, or anime—and have become vertically integrated media companies who own their audience and distribution. They’ve figured out how to seamlessly integrate brands into their existing content, which is attractive to both brands and followers.

According to 2025 research by Influencer Marketing Hub, long-term creator partnerships “generate 70% higher engagement than one-off activations” primarily associated with influencer content. 

For many years, the metrics most favored (or hyped) by influencers have been views and impressions. Look how many people saw this. But anyone who’s scrolled a feed knows the difference between absent-mindedly thumbing through posts and actually paying attention. More and more brands are seeing a clear differentiation between reach and creative partnership. The focus is increasingly on earning attention through authentic cultural relevance, rather than simply chasing views. 

Take e.l.f. Beauty, for example.

Last April, Oliver Widger took his cat Phoenix and climbed aboard his boat to begin his journey to sail solo for 2,400 miles from Oregon to Hawaii as the first stage in an attempt to sail around the world. He chronicled his journey on a social feed called Sailing with Phoenix, and quickly amassed a loyal following for their adventure. By late May, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Widger was in need of some more Pringles and cat treats, and e.l.f. Beauty saw an opportunity. 

The brand quickly mobilized and airdropped a care package of Pringles, cat treats, and sunscreen. Widger’s post about it quickly had 8.2 million TikTok views and 10.5 million on Instagram.  E.l.f.’s chief integrated marketing officer Patrick O’Keefe says the goal in getting involved with Widger was to introduce the brand to a large, but incredibly engaged, audience in longer-form, serial content. It was a result of the brand’s aims to move quickly when getting involved, while also making sure to not steal the spotlight. Widger wasn’t making commercial content, the brand prefers a natural, fun stunt like this and believes audiences do too. 

“He was creating this subculture of people that wanted to be a part of his journey and his storytelling, so we leaned in,” says O’Keefe. “But we were a subplot, we were not the main plot.”

O’Keefe says that creators are a strategic entry point into diverse subcultures where they can build deep, authentic connections with specific communities. Basically, the brand is aiming for a fun and effective halo effect, rather than being the sole focus of commercial content. In the case of Widger, it was a travel and adventure audience. Others they have targeted at various times include “pottery heads” who use makeup brushes for their craft, and gamers on Twitch and Roblox.

For O’Keefe, and e.l.f., there is a Venn diagram to balance between influencers and creators. O’Keefe distinguishes between influencers, who tell their daily stories within the beauty space, and creators, a more “elastic” category that includes individuals outside of traditional beauty, such as athletes like Indy 500 driver Katherine Legge or WNBA star Flau’jae Johnson. 

Vineet Mehra, CMO of fintech bank Chime, echoes that approach. He looks at the differences between influencers and creators as a spectrum. While some may be treated as “advertising inventory” to create “impressions and scale,” the most successful partners are “vertically integrated media companies.” 

Mehra says the brand works with massive creators like Dude Perfect, and compares their operations to a “mini-Disney.” “They create content, they own their audience, they launch products, they shape culture and increasingly they’re actually controlling distribution of their content and where the attention is captured,” says Mehra. “I’m not really buying media from them, I’m actually partnering with them to integrate my brand into the entertainment.”

In that way, Chime’s approach to creators reflects its ambitions in sports and entertainment—from its past partnership with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, to investing in brand entertainment with its in-house entertainment studio. The brand measures success of these types of investment with cultural relevancy and overall engagement metrics like new followers and relevancy perception. It’s no longer just about attention. 

The new marketplace

The biggest disconnect when it comes to brands and creators, according to Mehra, is the gap between the content’s influence and how much brands are actually spending on it. “Eighty percent of the world’s attention is on these creators and it’s only four or 5% of marketing budgets,” says Mehra. “There’s two reasons for that. One is that it’s so fragmented to work with all these creators because there’s hundreds of thousands of them. And second, there’s been no marketplace, like a programmatic platform like The Trade Desk, to scale the investment in it.” 

But that’s quickly changing, says Mehra, thanks to people like  Arthur Leopold, a former Cameo exec who founded Agentio in 2023. Leopold’s company is an AI-powered advertising platform that automates how brands and digital creators buy and sell sponsored content. He says the next step in creator-brand partnerships is the ability to scale while still maintaining the meaning and audience connection brands crave from these relationships. 

Historically, managing creator campaigns was a more manual process that took months, as brands found, selected, and worked creators on a largely individual basis. That evolved to working with influencer and creator agencies like Viral Nation to make that process faster and more efficient. 

Arthur says that new AI-driven infrastructure is taking that to a new level, with brands now able to move from “insight to action in a matter of minutes” and clear seven-figure budgets in hours. This allows creator spend to scale beyond the current 2% to 5% of marketing budgets. He cites greens-supplement start-up Gruns (acquired by Unilever in April for $1.2 billion) which runs its entire social advertising program through Agentio to achieve massive creative diversity across a wide spectrum of creators, running over a thousand ads simultaneously.

“It’s important to consider that when the majority of brands today think of influencer content, they still think of the old school organic sponsored posts,” says Leopold. “And that’s why they’re seeing diminishing returns.”

Leopold says a few years ago platforms started suppressing “unpaid ads,” or posts where a brand has paid a creator but not the platform. “Short-form organic is not a performing ad unit on social media anymore because the platforms are incentivized to ensure that if it’s an ad and they’re not making money, that ad isn’t reaching your feed,” he says. Influencers who consistently post these types of organic sponsored updates have seen their views “fall off a cliff,” according to Leopold. 

Agentio’s platform proposes a solution to this issue through its analysis of billions of signals within creator content to find the best fit for any given brand, that will also integrate with any given platform. Leopold says this data-driven matching can identify specific life moments—such as a creator mentioning they are expecting a child—allowing brands to attach themselves to stories organically. Arthur argues that this actually “protects authenticity” by moving away from forced, one-off sponsorships toward deeper partnerships with creators who have high trust with their niche audiences.

Authority and trust

At first glance, Cindy Chen might not be the most obvious creator partner for a food brand. But the avant-garde make-up artist has worked with a number of food brands over the years only if they naturally fit into her art content. She says her collab with Goodles back in February is a perfect example. “They were just so chill,” says Chen. “I loved working with them because they were just like, ‘We just want you to do anything that’s inspired by our brand.’ It was just genuine, and it was a good snack afterwards!”

Being selective and making sure she has creative control is what allows Chen to maintain the trust of her more than 3 million followers. 

And the role of that trust has become much more important. 

According to McKinsey, at least half of consumers use AI-powered search, and it could take up to 50% of traffic from traditional search. LLM search prioritizes trustworthy authorities on any given subject, including user and community comments on platforms like Reddit, and on YouTube. Mildenhall says this adds more importance to how popular and credible creators are talking about your brand, and how their audience responds in the comments. 

“I spent a fortune on a Super Bowl commercial and an LLM doesn’t give a damn about it,” says Mildenhall. “But what people say in the comments on YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn, the LLMs really care about. So my measure of success with creators and with influencers now, is not the size of the audience, it’s the comments underneath it. Does this feel authentic? Does this feel authoritative? Are people literally sharing and creating a conversation around trust, authenticity and authority?”

Leopold says that Mildenhall’s strategy is becoming more common among leading marketers. Because they spark so many community comments, creator content is becoming a key citation layer of LLM search alongside major media. 

“Brands now understand that they need to build the foundation to properly influence the way that people search in the future,” says Leopold. “If you look at the most cited sources for AI content, it’s usually a mix of YouTube and Reddit, depending on the platform. If a creator is talking about why they love a certain product or brand, that metadata, the YouTube transcript, the reviews, all becomes gold for an LLM.”

Yet another reason the blatantly transactional product promo reads that were long the bread and butter of social influencer content has reached its evolutionary dead end. 

Success in this new era will be defined by who wins over both humans and machines by using creators to generate the authoritative metadata, transcripts, and community sentiment essential to AI search engines. By strategically using macro-creators for broad reach and micro-creators for high-conversion niche engagement, marketers can do more than just capture attention; they can convert cultural participation into brand growth, substance, a reason to engage and trust over the long term. Meanwhile, with its hold on our attention—and resulting influence on LLM search—the creator economy is now a key pillar upon which brands’ relationship with modern pop culture is built.

Since last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has moved to phase out synthetic dyes from food. Now, research shows that consumer demand is trending in the same direction as shoppers opt for products that use natural colorants like beets, grape, paprika, and turmeric instead of artificial dyes.

According to a new report from the trade group National Confectioners Association and the research firm RTI International, sales of food and beverage with “natural colors” listed on their packaging grew by 24.4% from 2024 to 2025. In the same period, products with “artificial colors” listed on their packaging grew just 0.1%. Products with some artificial colors like Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, and Yellow No. 6, have seen sales fall.

The sales growth in products with natural colors was most pronounced in prepared foods (up 52.5%), diet and nutrition products (40.6%), and baking, seasoning, and toppings (27.1%). It was also up for things like candy (19.1%) and beverages (12.1%).

“Consumer demand for natural ingredients, clean labels, and greater ingredient transparency has grown steadily over the last several years,” the report’s authors wrote. But the shift isn’t without challenges. “Without coordination, the industry may face higher costs, supply instability, and uneven implementation,” they wrote.

The great food recoloring has shown up at retailers like Target, which removed all cereal with synthetic colors in May, and Walmart, which plans to remove all synthetic dyes from its private-label brands by January 2027. Kraft Heinz and General Mills both announced in June 2025 that they would remove artificial dyes from their products by 2027.

For food and beverage companies and dye makers, this transition isn’t quick, cheap, or easy. It took Welch’s Fruit Snacks, for example, a decade to transition to natural colorants. Reformulation can be a difficult process, as natural colorants can be less consistent and stable, and can cost as much as 10 times what synthetic dyes do. There’s also just not enough supply at the moment.

One ingredient supplier estimates that if the entire U.S. food industry switched to natural colorants, there would be a 400% to 500% increase in demand for the colorants, pushing up prices, according to the report. The authors recommend realistic timelines to transition to natural colorants that take into account factors like testing time and supply chains.

Then there’s the psychological aspect. The coloring of foods made using natural dyes can look dull or muted, while synthetic dyes are brighter, which can trick the taste buds into thinking something tastes sweeter. General Mills tried in 2016 to remove artificial dyes from Trix cereal, but consumers revolted and it switched back the following year.

Might the transition to natural dyes work better 10 years on? In addition to “Make America Healthy Again” pressure from the federal government, eight states, including California and Texas, have laws regarding artificial dyes as of January. Nearly two dozen others are considering their own. But consumer demand could perhaps be the ultimate factor. If a growing number of shoppers are looking for products with natural colorants, the ultimate incentive for food and beverage manufacturers could be their bottom lines.

The problem is that this will continue to happen until it gets dangerous to humans. According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, “This impact will not be a problem. But in a future where there are long-term bases on the moon, similar impacts would be an issue and we need not to leave rocket stages in chaotic orbits of this kind.”

Unless we stop SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other space organizations in the U.S. and China from recklessly using space, we will keep hearing these stories until something really bad happens. These companies must design their mission plans to dispose of any trash in a safe way, now and forever.

The new race to the moon will continue to increase its pace throughout the twenty-first century. The United States and China are competing to put bases and mine operations on the lunar surface within the next several years. Robot fleets and astronaut crews will be roaming the moon, and billions of dollars will be spent on the regolith in search of riches. Keeping humans—and all that expensive infrastructure—safe will depend on a predictable orbital environment.

Path to collision

The upper stage of a Falcon 9 is a cylinder that stretches 45 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. It lifted off on January 15, 2025, from Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, carrying two privately built lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which completed the first fully successful lunar touchdown ever achieved by a private spacecraft, and ispace’s Resilience, which was destroyed during its landing attempt. Being expendable—meaning it was not designed to return to Earth like the space shuttle and concepts like Aspire Space Technologies’ Oryx—the stage never returned to Earth after deploying its payloads. It remained in a highly elliptical orbit that periodically carried it beyond the distance of the Moon’s orbit.

While hitting the Moon was never part of SpaceX’s plan, subtle forces including solar radiation pressure gradually reshaped its path over the months following its launch. That eventually pushed it into its current collision trajectory.

“The orbit of the Moon and of this object, roughly speaking, intersect,” explains space tracking expert Bill Gray, who computed the impact prediction. “Usually, one goes through the intersection point while the other is someplace else. But on August 5, they’ll reach that point at the same time.”

That moment arrives August 5 during the early morning hours, within a few minutes of 2:35 AM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time. Because the Moon has no atmosphere, the stage is expected to reach the lunar surface intact rather than breaking apart. It will strike at an estimated 5,400 mph, a velocity equivalent to seven times the speed of sound at an angle of 34 degrees from the vertical, matching the force of the detonation of three tons of TNT and making a crater about 90 feet across and 16 feet deep. The crater will be too small to be resolved by telescopes on Earth, though spacecraft orbiting the Moon—like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter—will be able to image it.

While the flash produced by the collision is expected to persist for under one second and will most likely be too faint for direct visual detection, the ejecta plume will linger. This lunar material—thrown upward by the force of the impact—could travel several miles into space and stay detectable through telescopes for tens of minutes. “The gravity on the moon is low and there is no wind to blow the dust away,” says Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All of this could have been avoided had the stage been designed with enough fuel to redirect itself into an orbit around the Sun instead of leaving it in a chaotic orbit around Earth. Reserving that fuel would have made the mission heavier and more expensive—the same trade-off that leads operators to abandon most upper stages in orbit. The logic is that space is so big that leaving trash behind doesn’t matter, so let’s take the profit instead of taking care of our junk. But this moon crash shows that’s not actually a sound strategy.

Houston, we’ll have a problem

NASA has deliberately crashed hardware into the moon before. Rocket sections and lunar modules were sent down during the Apollo era to generate seismic measurements. In 2009, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage were intentionally driven into the surface to hunt for ice close to the lunar south pole.

But this impact is unplanned. It will be the second documented case of a defunct rocket body striking the moon by accident. The first occurred in 2022, when a Chinese rocket segment carved out a pair of craters on the lunar far side.

The disregard for what this impact means is jarring, especially when you consider that space is public. It belongs to all of us, but organizations keep treating it as private real estate in the name of profit. SpaceX has already filled low Earth orbit with thousands of Starlink satellites that are falling at an increasingly alarming rate, vaporizing into metallic dust in the atmosphere we all breathe.

Then there’s SpaceX’s insane IPO, which was largely premised on Musk’s promise for a constellation of thousands of AI data centers in orbit that will further contribute to atmospheric pollution and, according to McDowell, dramatically increase the possibility of a Kessler syndrome, the theoretical scenario popularized by the movie Gravity in which a cascade of accidental collisions can render entire orbits useless.

You can argue that the risk of overpopulating orbits and increasing launches are worth taking in the name of progress, sure. Even necessary for our future as a spacefaring civilization. But none of these organizations can justify leaving their junk behind just because it is more expensive not to do so. That’s why traffic control and controlled deorbiting measures must be strengthened before the fleets and crews begin arriving on the moon. The moon, like Earth’s orbit, like its atmosphere, like space itself, does not belong to SpaceX or to any flag. It belongs to all of us. The least we can demand is that those who profit from it stop leaving bullets in our sky.

New York City-based Lemonade created “The Slow Sign,” a digital sign that compliments drivers for following the speed limit. Made with the creative agency Cash Studio, the insurance company set up a pink, branded digital roadside sign outside Austin with a radar speed sign and a message board that works only if you’re obeying the speed limit.

When motorists drove past the sign at speeds over the limit, the radar speed sign flashed with their speed. When motorists followed the speed limit, though, the message board came to life.

The message board identified the color and make of an approaching car with a personalized message thanks to a spotter down the road with a walkie talkie, and that was followed by language like “Obsessed With Your Safe Driving,” “Way To Drive a Fast Car Slow,” and “You Understood The Assignment.”

“Tasked with coming up with a nontraditional campaign to promote Lemonade car insurance, where safe drivers pay less, we homed in on Texas, a state most in need of safe driving, with more car crashes than any other state,” Cash Studios’ founder, Ivan Cash, tells Fast Company. “Texas also issues a record number of speeding tickets each year, yet during our research we found that only 10% of drivers actually follow the speed limit.”

Depending on the messaging, digital signage has been found both to slow drivers down and cause an increase in crashes.

The Federal Highway Administration found that installing speed signs leads to an average drop of seven miles per hour, but other well-meaning electronic messages don’t always lead to similarly positive outcomes.

Researchers discovered in Texas that displays indicating the number of local road fatalities on electronic signage actually increased crashes by 1.52% within about three miles of the sign. The authors of study, published in Science in 2022, wrote that one explanation for their findings may be because these “in-your-face,” “sobering,” negatively framed messages “seize too much attention” and interfere with drivers’ ability to respond to changes in traffic conditions.

Officials in Finland once tried a similar approach to Lemonade’s activation, but with symbols instead of words. Motorists who drove near or at the speed limit were shown a green smiley face on signage. Those driving 10 kilometers per hour (6.2 mph) over the limit were shown a red frown face and anyone going faster than that was shown a red exclamation point.

The study found a statistically significant reduction in speeding at most of the sites it tested the new signs, and what’s more, those speed reductions remained even after the signs were taken down. Sometimes, a simple carrot-instead-of-stick approach really works to improve behavior.

For centuries, the women of Gee’s Bend faced extreme poverty and isolation. They would save up whatever scraps were on hand—worn out denim workwear, faded rags, old feed sacks—sewing them together to make blankets for the winter. The quilters had an eye for beauty, taking these mismatched, multicolored pieces to create geometric patterns. And today, there’s a movement among fourth- and fifth-generation Gee’s Bend quilters to preserve this craft.

“These quilts kept families warm when there wasn’t any heating in the house,” says Claudia Pettway Charley, one such artisan. “They didn’t have money to buy new fabrics. So you think about the struggle, the hardship, and how they turned sorrow into something beautiful.”

This craftsmanship takes center stage in a new partnership between Ralph Lauren and Gee’s Bend, the fifth installment of Ralph Lauren’s Artist in Residence Program. It highlights two renowned craftswomen—Charley and Loretta Pettway Bennett—who have created limited edition products that highlight traditional Gee’s Bend patterns, including quilts, pillows, a jacket, and a tote bag. It is part of Ralph Lauren’s effort to broaden our imagination of American art and design, and move from aesthetic inspiration to equitable collaboration.

Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, remains a close-knit enclave of roughly 200-300 residents who all know each other and who have a shared history. Growing up, Bennett says that that quilt making was just part of everyday life. She often saw her mother and aunts sitting together, chatting while they worked on a quilt.

As Bennett has developed her craft, she’s created a style that is inspired by the signature elements of Gee’s Bend—the denim, the rows of rectangles—but has also generated her own aesthetic. Her pieces have a modernist quality. She doesn’t reach for straight-edged or rigid symmetry. She’s developed her own improvisational, organic rhythm that results in geometric designs that are both architectural and also intentionally nonuniform.

In one quilt Bennett made for the Ralph Lauren collaboration, there’s a single red triangle that stands out among the layers of blue. She says that pop of color represents her granddaughter, who is five-and-a-half and spends her summers in Gee’s Bend. Bennett is already teaching her the basics of quilting. “That one red piece represents another bloodline that’s coming,” she says, remembering that she also learned the tradition from her grandmother. “Now it’s my turn to be the grandma. I am giving her a taste of what I had when I was growing up, passing down the legacy.”

The Ralph Lauren x Gee’s Bend collection is grounded in denim, a fabric historically valued in Gee’s Bend for its durability as workwear. The items in the collection include Ralph Lauren textiles pieced together into fashion and home products. There’s also hand-painted ceramic tableware produced in Italy, featuring paintings based on Bennett’s quilting pattern, including the red triangle. The pieces are priced to reflect that these objects are collectable pieces of art: The jacket costs $4,998, the tote costs $2,198, and the quilts are $3,995.

Over the years, the Gee’s Bend quilters have been recognized by the art world. In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art debuted The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, and eventually, the pieces were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, Ralph Lauren wants to introduce their work to a wider audience, and acknowledge how this textile art has influenced the designs that appear in the fashion world. It ensures that the legacy of these craftswomen is recognized as a pillar of American design history.

This collaborative approach is central to Ralph Lauren’s Artist in Residence program, which was formalized in 2020 in the midst of the racial reckoning that swept across the fashion industry. Historically, Ralph Lauren—among other fashion brands—frequently drew inspiration from diverse cultural aesthetics, as it developed its own vision for what defined American style. At times, however, the brand was accused of appropriating from other cultures. Ralph Lauren has taken this criticism seriously, and worked hard to change how it works. The company has shifted from being inspired by American artists to direct collaboration with underrepresented craftspeople.

Ralph Lauren has sustained these partnerships, even as diversity initiatives in the U.S. have faced pushback from an administration that is determined to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Previous Artists in Residence drops have including a multipart collection with the seventh-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver Naiomi Glasses, the multidisciplinary Diné artist Zefren-M, and the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota/Lakota) artists Jocy and Trae Little Sky of Tópa, a clothing and design brand. This commitment also builds on Ralph Lauren’s historic partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and its deep ties to Oak Bluffs, a town on Martha’s Vineyard that is an important center of African American culture.

To provide direct community support, 5% of the purchase price of each item in the Ralph Lauren x Gee’s Bend collection is donated to the Equal Justice Initiative to fund hunger relief and direct assistance for low-income families across Alabama, including Gee’s Bend.

Every parent has been here. Kids thrive on routines, but sticking to them can feel impossible. For decades, the go-to fix has been low tech. You taped a chore chart to the fridge, and gave your kid a sticker for every task completed. But what if the chart could respond—and get a kid excited to use it?

That’s the idea behind Skylight Buddy, a palm-sized touchscreen device that effectively gamifies children’s routines, easing the challenge of getting out the door or going to bed. Buddy treads a delicate line with technology. It uses a few simple animations—a character who encourages the child to keep going and a celebratory shower of stars—to motivate kids to complete tasks, helping them develop important executive functioning skills and making family life go smoother. But it also leaves out any of the addictive qualities that get kids hooked to devices. When I tested Buddy with Lily, my 4-year-old, she was eager to earn her stars, but when she was done, she happily moved past the screen back to her busy little life.

It’s a winning formula. Skylight Buddy launched June 1 at $139 (or $119 with a subscription), and its first run sold out instantly. The company is restocking today.

Design for children and parents

Buddy sits on a child’s nightstand and walks them through their routines. At first it looks like a simple, squarish digital clock, complete with a round yellow button on top to switch off the alarm. Parents customize their daily tasks, the child bonks the button when they have completed each one, and they receive fun animations when they have finished the full routine.

Getting to that design was an iterative process. Skylight’s first product, launched after a Kickstarter campaign, was a digital, connected photo frame. The founder, Michael Segal, came up with the idea as a way to share pictures with family scattered across the country. But as customers began interacting with the frame, Segal began to realize that there were many ways a family could use a shared digital screen. That led to Skylight’s family calendar, which makes it easy to see everybody’s schedule for the day. Based on customer feedback, the team added chore charts for kids.

According to Nichole Rouillac, founder of the San Francisco industrial design studio Level, whom the company hired to design Buddy, the calendar never quite spoke to kids the way Skylight hoped. Its interface was too complicated for younger children and it didn’t have kid-friendly animation that would motivate them to complete tasks. “They wanted a dedicated device that can help parents with the chaos of those morning and nighttime routines that we’re all too familiar with,” she says.

Skylight tapped the woman-led design firm because they knew its team intimately understood parents’ struggles. With Buddy, Rouillac essentially built the device she wished she’d had when her eldest daughter—who is now 13—was little and really struggled with transitions. Rouillac remembers dealing with massive meltdowns getting out the door right when she needed to get to work. “Buddy is a reflection of the struggles I had with her,” she says. “There were mornings when I was almost in tears.”

Rewarding interactions

In many ways, Buddy is a very simple device. A child sees their routine laid out step by step on the screen—read story, brush teeth, get into bed—and bops a physical button on top after finishing each one. When the child completes an individual task, they get a star. When they complete the full routine, they get a celebratory shower of stars, which feels very exciting to a small child. In fact, sometimes, Buddy gives them a shower of flamingos, or cats, which makes the experience even more fun.

The interactions reflect proven behavioral psychology. Rewards are a well-established motivator in child development, and Skylight built in flexibility for different ages. Older kids can trade accumulated stars for a prize or a privilege, like getting to pick the family’s dessert at the grocery store. Younger ones tend to be satisfied by the stars themselves.

“My 4-year-old doesn’t even understand that she can exchange the stars for anything,” Rouillac says. “She’s just happy to get her stars.”

The device mixes digital and analog tools. Roulliac fought hard to include the big yellow button. Skylight’s team, more software-minded, initially wanted everything handled on the touchscreen. But Rouillac pointed out how kids gravitate toward tactile controls, like the oversized horn buttons on toddler bikes. She designed the button to be large enough for small children who are still working on their fine motor skills, and created enough resistance that it feels satisfying to push down on. And kids immediately feel the joy of simple cause and effect.

The device is also meant to replace the many other tools parents now use to help their kids go to sleep. When not being used as a chore chart, it defaults to being a clock. At night, it turns into a gentle nightlight and a sound machine. And in the morning, you can either use it as an alarm clock to actively wake your child up, or have the screen turn green so the child knows they’re allowed to leave their room.

Rouillac was also very focused on the silicone case, which comes in different colors and neatly covers the device. With two kids at home, she’s very familiar with the ugly rubber bumpers that cover many tablets and devices for kids. The cover fits tidily on the device, but is made from a material that will protect the screen in case it is hurled across the room. “You never know what’s going to happen,” she says of life with kids and hardware.

Less tech, but better

Buddy arrives as many parents are trying to claw back their kids’ screen time. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation became a rallying point for the movement, has pointed to average screen time among kids reaching eight to 10 hours a day, not including school. But the reason parents are so wary of technology is that many platforms—like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Netflix—are engineered to keep users on the screen because this is how they maximize advertising revenue.

Rouillac, who works in the tech industry, believes it is possible to create tech tools that are helpful to children but deliberately designed not to keep them glued to it. Buddy is designed to give the child a little endorphin rush when they finish their routine and receive their stars, but after that, there is nothing else to look at on the screen. “The graphics are really simple and low fidelity,” she says. “There’s nothing flashy, no crazy animations, there’s nothing that’s just really trying to suck their attention.”

Buddy fits into a small but growing category of devices for children carefully designed to do less, not more. Audio players like Yoto and Toniebox skip screens altogether; they have very simple controls and allow the child to focus on hearing stories.

As a hardware designer, Rouillac says many companies are now coming to her in search of lower-tech solutions. “We are seeing this huge trend of technology becoming a little bit quieter and calming for children,” she says, “and I think it’s going to shift even bigger, based on what we’re seeing coming through the studio these days.”

Girard created his throw blankets in 1965 as part of an extensive brand identity system for Braniff International Airlines. The visual language consisted of vibrant colors and graphic shapes applied across aircraft, ticketing counters, and small objects customers received, like in-flight dinnerware, matchbooks, and blankets. Braniff called the brand campaign “The End of the Plain Plane.” Produced in a multicolor checker pattern, the wool and cotton blankets became a signature of Girard’s joyful sensibility.

Girard Studio, a family-run entity that preserves and promotes the work of Girard, who passed away in 1993, developed the patterns by sourcing from the Herman Miller archive. Two of Girard’s grandchildren, Aleishall Girard Maxon and Kori Girard, codirect the studio and work to ensure his legacy is “accurately and thoughtfully represented.” 

Girard was the founding director of the Herman Miller textile division and worked at the company from the 1950s to the 1970s. Together Girard and Herman Miller reimagined modern contract textiles to be bright, colorful, humorous, and sometimes whimsical—a legacy that shapes design today.

“For our grandfather, color was more instinctual than academic; he was interested in creating environments and products that evoked deep feelings from their inhabitants,” Aleishall and Kori told Fast Company in an email. “He could be shrewdly subtle with a multitude of neutrals, adding saturated pops of color sparingly or he could create a riot of hues that were at once bold and yet cohesive.”

It’s a perspective that still feels fresh. “Girard’s work was, and continues to be, completely intertwined with so many of the products we produce at Herman Miller,” said Noah Schwarz, vice president of product design at the company. “Whether applied to a textile, ottoman, or throw, Girard’s designs help bring the joy and humanity which has made Herman Miller so unique and enduring.” 

When deciding to revive this product, Girard Studio and Herman Miller moved to collaborate with Pendleton, the textile manufacturer, whom Herman Miller has been collaborating with since 2016. Together, the three parties worked to expand the existing collection, pulling pieces from the Girard textile archive for the design. 

The redesigned blankets will feature Pendleton’s wrinkle-resistant virgin wool and breathable cotton, similar to the original. They’re available from Herman Miller’s store for $325.

Edwards says his design philosophy is not about him or his approach, but about the task in front of him: “I focus on becoming the creative or the designer for the problem I’m trying to solve.”

He is now leaning on his career in product design to reshape the state and future of design education at Detroit’s Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design, the only design-focused HBCU, and what Edwards hopes sets the standard for a design education of the future. Tethered to these philosophies and his lifelong love of art, Edwards frames design in problem-solving, business, and education. Here are his rules.

Break your life into chapters. I started out as an artist—I could draw anything I saw. Then I discovered design, and I used my artistic ability to become a designer. But the thinking was completely different; now I have to imagine things and make them real. I then started to understand that the human brain dictates my output. That’s when I transitioned from being a designer into being a creative. 

Make creativity a daily exercise. We’re all creative. I look at creativity as an everyday action of walking down the street. How am I going to get past this pothole? I have to make a decision. Embracing everything through a lens of creativity is a much more fun, and more open, way to experience life. Wouldn’t you want a creative accountant? A creative lawyer? I would want to put “creative” in front of any person or word that can make my life better. You won’t get the same results. You won’t get the same static thing. 

To best honor the task in front of you, avoid a design style. I have a visual design language that comes through when you see my work. If there is a philosophy, I’d say focus on becoming the creative or the designer for the problem you’re trying to solve. 

Look at other industries for insight. I started meeting other types of designers or creatives, who live in different places and have a different approach to life. I developed creative circles that I can tap into for conversations, because something will come out of it. These people are energy givers. You are way better than before you talked to them. Then, there are energy takers, and there are way more of them in the world than givers. You have to be disciplined with who you allow in your life.

Have a morning routine. I developed mine when I was 20 and worked at Skechers. I wanted to know why Robert Greenberg, the chairman of Skechers, got in so early. When I got in “early” at 8 a.m., the dude was already there. It became a game. I showed up and he showed up. It was 5 a.m. He asked me, “Why are you here?” I said, “I’m trying to understand why you’re here.” He had a routine. He read industry and business information. He used a dictaphone from which his assistant wrote out his daily schedule. He settled himself before the day came. Now, I read inspirational quotes. I read industry information. I read sports. I protect what I receive. I’m not on social media. Good in, great out. Bad in, worse out. 

Go into everything empty, with the goal of filling your cup. I’ve designed shoes for professional athletes, like Carmelo Anthony and Michael Jordan. The inspiration can be wide ranging. One time Carmelo said, “Man, my focus is I want to be quicker and more agile.” I said, “Damn, you’re 6’8″ and 230 lb. Let me dive into every word.” I had to understand what “quicker” meant to him; what “agility” meant to him. What is 6’8” and 230 lb., and quick and agile? 

That led me to a jaguar. I went to the Oregon Zoo and talked to the people who care for the big cats and jaguars. As I got deeper, I better understood how they move. Consolidation of movement. Compression. That led me to pantyhose. The panty hose squeezes your muscles and ligaments to increase blood flow which makes you have more energy as you walk. It clicked. I designed it, and he tested it. He loved it. I usually hop from hole to hole and I try to find synergy between the holes. And then, you need a cohesive story. 

Make boring subjects more interesting by problem-solving through a new medium. About five years ago, this math teacher in Boston reached out to me and said, “Can you come teach our kids geometry through sneaker design?” I thought, “Goddammit, she’s right.” Before this, I hadn’t explicitly realized that when you design a sneaker you start with a square foot. Your goal is to maximize all of the material in that square foot because you pay for that whole square foot. You have to learn the math, shapes, and outcomes to get to the maximum use of that material. If I knew that was geometry, I would have done a whole lot better in school.

Design is a broad term. Give it clarity to focus your career. There’s an incredible variation of design jobs out there. If I’m a parent and my kid comes to me and says, “I want to be a designer,” where can I go to find out what type of designer you want to become? If you’re a product designer, you don’t hang out with fashion designers. We have our own lanes. It’s so separated. That’s part of the problem. So clarifying your definition of design is the first step. Then, how closely does it mirror exactly how you’ll work in the job you want? You have to make the education mirror the reality of the job as closely as you can in order for it to truly be an effective design education.

Think about design education differently. I didn’t actually go to college and get a design education. I learned what a design education was by reviewing 1,000 portfolios every year for close to four decades. I was able to see what these kids were spending a lot of money on.

Education is now at a really serious impasse. It has to change its model. I came to this realization 16 years ago when I left the industry to become an educator. I looked at education as a designer, and with open eyes. Why are you paying for this? And what would make you want to pay for it? 

It’s also the stuff of nocturnal horrors. So much so, that you might think it’s a joke (Satyress did not respond to a request for comment by publication). But strip away Guillermo del Toro’s demonic styling (a deliberate decision that connects the design to the brand, which is named after the female version of the Greek satyrs), and Threehalves becomes the latest entry in a long parade of form-factor gambling. Bipeds, quadrupeds, wheeled torsos, snake robots, drones with arms, ‘replicants’: every lab and robot company on Earth is betting on different form factors, each one a wager on what the future robotics market will actually pay for.

The design logic of Satyress is a frontal assault on humanoid dogma, but it’s not new. NASA explored centaur-type platforms for otherworldly surface operations; the Italian Institute of Technology already experimented with a similar form, a disaster-response robot called Centauro back in the 2010s, although that one used a hybrid of legs and wheels.

“Humanlike torso and arms allow for natural teleoperation and interfacing with designed-for-human tools and environments,” Satyress says on its website. Human upper bodies are useful. But the legs are a liability. As Satyress puts it, “quadruped body with friction braked joints allows for a stable platform with no latent power consumption when not in motion, and increased stability and failsafes over a biped in both normal operation and in the event of loss of motor control.”

Translation: a biped that loses power collapses onto the survivor it was dispatched to save. A centaur just stands there, brakes locked, drawing zero watts. It’s a robot design philosophy we have seen from other companies.

Then there are the hands—or rather, the absence of them. Dexterous robotic fingers are the humanoid industry’s most expensive vanity project, and their logic is that they’re too fragile for real work. So Threehalves doesn’t have any. “Quick connect wrist interface provides uncompromised tool positioning accuracy and repeatability. 12v, 18v, and 48v power, as well as air, can be provided to attachments from the robot side,” the company explains.

Each arm terminates in a rugged socket that channels electricity and compressed air straight into chainsaws, drills, impact guns and wrenches. Why imitate a hand when your arm can be the power tool?

Work harder

The whole machine is engineered for abuse. “All limbs, torso, and head can be replaced and recalibrated in minutes if damaged, and share three common fasteners for the entirety of their serviceable assemblies,” Satyress claims on its website. The machine is also designed to be easily carried around to work sites, as two of them “can fit side by side in crouched position in a pickup bed of 5’6″ [about 1.7 meters] or longer with tailgate closed.”

But it’s not only its form that separates Threehalves from every other humanoid out there: the robot has zero autonomy. Threehalves is pure teleoperation—a human pilots it with joystick-style controls, latency-free, wearing it like a durable avatar from a safe distance. “We are taking a teleoperation focused approach not to replace skilled workers, but give skilled workers superpowers,” the company’s mission statement reads, “in jobs that are dangerous for humans now, or impossible, due to risk of injury or death, extreme heat, bitter cold, pitch darkness, or other inhumane conditions.”

They want to use the robots on wildfire fronts and in toxic industrial zones; they plan to operate them during mudslides, rubble searches, and in places where the business case gets measured in funerals avoided.

As robotics analyst CyberRobo summarizes on X: “The idea is simple: don’t replace the skilled person. Give them a body that can survive the job. Remote operation keeps the expert safe while the machine takes the heat, impact, and exposure.”

Kill switch

Threehalves isn’t alone in betting against the biped humanoid idea popularized by science fiction and most famously championed today by Tesla’s Optimus. The industry is going through a Cambrian explosion, splintering into a menagerie of rival body plans, each hunting its own niche in a market that may shape the future of civilization and the world economy.

On one end there are the “replicants,” like China’s UBTech U1, billed as the first mass-produced ultra-realistic human robot, wagering that the future belongs to “emotional companionship” for the millions of people who live alone. On the other end there are small transformers like the Qiyuan T1, the first transformable personal robot, designed to follow you around and record your life. It’s a machine that morphs between a wheeled humanoid stance for face-to-face interaction and a crouched quadruped configuration for uneven terrain, selecting its own posture automatically from what its sensors read.

And back in California, Genesis AI built Eno, an “anti-humanoid” pairing human-like dexterous hands with a minimalist wheeled base that folds away origami-style—conceived, its founders argue, to repair the deepest design flaw in modern robotics: human ego.

My favorite detail, though, is that Satyress has published instructions for killing its own robot. The company openly plans around a “machine uprising” scenario with three layers of defense: a raised-palm gesture stops it mid-task, fail-on air brakes and pin locks engage automatically if power or air pressure drops, and as a manual last resort, the pressurized tanks mounted on its chest and back can be deliberately punctured with a purpose-built pistol to physically freeze the unit.

There’s even containment by geometry: the machine is intentionally too large to pass easily through a standard American 81-centimeter door, cannot turn around in a 107-centimeter hallway, and its horns can extend to block pedestrian entrances.

In a market drowning in humanoids that dance at trade shows, a goat-headed monster that holds a chainsaw steady and fits in a pickup might be the most honest robot design of the year. The industry keeps asking what shape the future will have. Satyress conjured three halves of a nightmare and built a demon with a body that is its own cage.

Almost anyone who has tried to follow a recipe they discovered online can relate to this problem: You find an enticing treat, have to scroll down past a soliloquy by the author, then have to keep scrolling past ads until you finally arrive at an ingredient list and instructions with varying degrees of clarity.

It’s annoying. And frustrating. There is a better and more straightforward approach to reading recipes: a nested table.

“Just made this killer banana bread without having to go through 10 paragraphs of life story,” content designer Juan Buis wrote in a now-viral X post. Alongside the post, Buis shared the recipe—but rather than a standard written list of ingredients and instructions, the recipe is depicted as a tidy infographic.

Meant to be read from left to right, each horizontal row begins with an ingredient followed by a vertical column indicating the next action. Columns merge if the same action applies to multiple ingredients.

For instance, “4 oz Unsalted Butter” is next to “melt,” while the next column merges to include all the other ingredients with the instruction “fold it together.”

The updated recipe design is not new to 2026, as Buis points out. “I can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it,” his post read.

In fact, the style was developed in June 2004 by Michael Chu, an engineer who shared his method for posting recipes on his website, Cooking for Engineers. Chu used an HTML table to communicate recipes in a simpler visual design.

“Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!” the website’s tagline says. The page itself looks sort of like something out of a time machine—simple typefaces, many links, and just a few colors—transporting visitors to an earlier internet era where simplicity was the norm for website design.

It began after Chu decided to store his recipes on a Palm handheld device synced to his Outlook work email account. But due to storage issues, the recipes were lost to the ether. He then decided to try out Blogger as an alternative. Building the site from scratch in PHP, Chu figured out how to translate the way he usually jotted down recipes with pen and paper into something readable on a website—and then came the HTML and CSS tables.

“The format is based on how I write down recipes for use in my kitchen. I would take a ‘normal’ recipe that I wanted to make and just write down the ingredients, scaling them as needed, so I would be able to have everything ready and measured before I start actually making the recipes,” Chu tells Fast Company. “Next to the ingredients, I drew curly braces to remind myself which block of ingredients would go together and a word or two on the action I needed to take. To this day, this is still how I prep for a recipe when I enter my kitchen.”

Chu’s system presents a clear, direct way of sharing recipes, particularly for those who may prefer a more visual and synthesized approach to cooking.

“That structure fixes the real failure mode of cooking from prose,” said AI-focused newsletter writer Aakash Gupta about the recipe design. “A written recipe forces you to hold state in working memory while your hands are covered in batter, which is why you reread step 4 three times to find where you were. In Chu’s table, your place is a physical location. You can’t lose it.”

Still, Chu didn’t entirely reject the storytelling that often comes with recipes. In one for Smoked Beer Can Turkey, he explained how he stumbled upon the original recipe and his process of adapting it. And at the bottom of the page, various tables indicate how to make each component of the dish.

Users on social media have become so captivated by this ingenious method for displaying recipes that many have turned to creating their own generators. Buis, for instance, launched RecipeTables.com, allowing users to paste a URL to a recipe or prose onto a text box, with the platform then generating a table.

Another user followed a similar approach, using Gemini-3.5 Flash-Lite to create a website where users upload links and images to transform recipes into a table that can then be exported as a PNG or pasted into a spreadsheet for safekeeping.

For Chu—who created Cooking for Engineers not as a startup but as a personal reference website—seeing his creation find new popularity today, thanks to technology, has been refreshing.

“It’s fun and inspiring to see so many people trying to improve and iterate on the design and make it suit their personal preferences,” he says. “This was definitely not something that was easily done 20 years ago, and it’s exciting to see now.”

For many, the design is simply a new way to record recipes. But for others, it’s a trip down memory lane—as good recipes are.

“I’ve loved this website for decades. The buffalo chicken chili is a winner,” one user said. Another added: “Hello 2004 web design! But still works. Brings back memories.”

But as YouTube’s user base and content have expanded exponentially, the platform’s actual design has struggled to keep pace. Historically, YouTube’s product team was guided by boosting traditional KPIs without any clear design infrastructure, resulting in cluttered interfaces, distracting pop-ups, inconsistent iconography, and an overall clunky user experience.

Now, for more than a year, the company—headed by design lead Jonathan Terleski—has been quietly working behind the scenes on what Terleski calls the “most significant design overhaul in YouTube history.” Terleski’s team is working to cut back YouTube’s unnecessary features and replace them with a streamlined design that includes fewer buttons, clearer user and creator homepages, and a better viewing experience.

“We’re at a pretty incredible scale, and as part of that, many of our surfaces have become noisy, less clear, and less simple than they otherwise could be,” Terleski says. “What I’m trying to do here is really step back and say, ‘Let’s look holistically at this. If we were designing all the things that we now know as YouTube, how might we have done it differently?’”

The resulting changes are evidence that often it’s the least obvious features that make the biggest impact on user experience. And, Terleski hopes, they’re also a key “business lever” that will keep viewers coming back for decades to come.

YouTube’s new design culture

The first step in YouTube’s design decluttering didn’t actually have anything to do with the platform’s visuals—it started with the company’s culture and organization. 

Before Terleski’s major initiative, YouTube’s design was handled with a fairly siloed approach. Teams dedicated to different components of the platform, like the YouTube Music and YouTube Living Room teams, would be responsible for owning the design of their products. 

Without any formal guiding design principles, UI decisions were made primarily with performance KPIs in mind, turning aesthetics and usability into more of an afterthought. For example, illustration styles might differ across the brand’s apps; information was often not organized in the most legible order; and layers of updates over time resulted in repeated information or defunct buttons. 

To start addressing this lack of a cohesive design approach, Terleski instituted a new cross-functional “design systems team.” Composed of engineers, product managers, and UX designers, this team’s sole job is to create a unified, “delightful” design system across the entire platform, working in tandem with smaller product teams.

“The question we really started asking ourselves was: ‘Do we have the right design system in the first place?’” Terleski says. “And I think that’s been the biggest shift, to say, ‘No, we don’t.’

Terleski’s objective with the new design system was to turn YouTube into the “world’s best stage” for creators. This goal was the north star as they created a list of guiding principles that the design systems team could keep coming back to. The playbook revolves around five objectives:

• “Make content the star,” which means keeping any UI around or on top of videos as minimal as possible.
• “Prioritize relevance ruthlessly,” which requires looking at user data to judge whether a feature is working.
• “Choose the simpler option” by eliminating redundant user journeys.
• “Be a good neighbor” internally by ensuring that new features fit within the overall UI.
• “Build for the ecosystem” by considering design at the very beginning of any product engineering process.

Terleski says the combination of a new design team structure, a clear design playbook, and top-down support from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is already having a noticeable impact: Today, his design teams are able to ship UI fixes in days that would have before required entire weeks.

“Previously, we didn’t have any top-level goals for things like simplicity and clarity,” Terleski says. “Now, those are company-level goals that we have at YouTube that really incentivize teams to come along on the journey.”

Inside YouTube’s Lego-style decluttering

Terleski imagines YouTube’s new design initiative as a kit of Lego components for the platform. First, his team decides which visual components—like fonts and icons—are actually worth making a part of the kit; next, they make a manual of how and when those components can be joined together. 

“That’s been a big step forward—going from just component reuse to being like, ‘Yeah, but are we using them correctly? What’s the instruction manual that comes with the box of Legos that tells you actually how to put the thing together versus just assembling how you will?’” Terleski says.

Some new pieces have been added into YouTube’s overall design language, including a font called “Marquee,” inspired by the brand’s wordmark; subtle aura backgrounds; and dynamic glassmorphic buttons. In combination, these features are helping to make YouTube’s information hierarchy more clear. 

On an old viewer homepage, for instance, the name, image, and handle of the viewer got lost in one undifferentiated section of the screen. Now, the viewer’s profile picture and name, set in bold letters, take up a much larger chunk of the screen, offset by an aura background that draws attention to those details. These changes, though small, help the user’s eye to more smoothly travel down the page and focus in on its most important features.

Oftentimes, the bulk of the design systems team’s work has consisted of weeding through layers of redundant UI cues that have accumulated on YouTube’s surfaces over the years and distracted from its actual content. One example he points to is an old watch page that included two different play buttons, a non-functional back button, overlapping captions and chapter titles, 10 repetitions of a channel name, two different callouts to YouTube’s “Ask” search feature, an action bar with 13 different choices, and two different references to the creator’s store. 

The redesigned version of the page has culled out those repetitive features and streamlined the action bar so that the video itself, its title, and the comment section are the three elements that stand out the most. Terleski’s team even swapped the former white background with a dark screen which, he says, has been shown in user testing to keep viewers’ attention focused on what they’re actually watching. 

“The cleaner we keep this page, the more engaging it is to people, because we’re letting them focus on what they’re here for—which is watching the video and sticking around,” Terleski says.

What’s next

These subtle tweaks are already having a measurable impact on how viewers engage with YouTube. Terleski says cleaning up the watch page has significantly boosted user engagement and watch times, though YouTube was unable to provide metrics. He says that, in turn, has resulted in a revenue bump, which his team has used as an opportunity to eliminate billions of “leave-behind ads,” or the small ad bars that used to show up at the bottom of a video after the full-screen ad had already played. 

“Those kinds of things that are seen as either distractions or requests for attention from users, we find that they’re actually correlated in an opposite direction with engagement and watch time,” Terleski says. “It’s not true all the time, but there’s a big class of problems where, when you simplify the experiences to focus on why most users are there, it correlates strongly with core metric gains and revenue gains.”

In essence, YouTube is finding that simplifying its viewing experience is both better for users and for business—and, Terleski says, the changes that have already been made are “only the tip of the iceberg.” Going forward, users can expect to see the platform slowly becoming more “dynamic,” “immersive,” and “animated.” The updates will continue to roll out in bite-sized pieces to allow viewers and creators to adjust over time. 

YouTube is making a bold bet that an obsessive focus on design will boost its health in the long term—and Terleski, for one, is confident it’s going to pay off.

“There’s a lot of competition out there,” Terleski says. “At the end of the day, we want people to choose YouTube because they love to use it. We want creators to choose YouTube because they feel like it’s their home and it’s the best stage for their content. At the end of the day, that’s why we’re here.”

Oh, who already owned a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and was experimenting filming content with them, says she was immediately influenced to buy Jenner’s sleek and cat-eye shaped collab. The aesthetic was reason enough. “I wanted to transition into more beauty and lifestyle content, and when I’m filming front-facing in a mirror, the Kylie glasses look a lot better,” she says.

At a time when there’s growing resistance to smart glasses, edging at times into a moral panic about surveillance culture, influencers are finding their stride with them. Oh is among several lifestyle influencers who tell Fast Company that this new release not only sold them on smart glasses, but has encouraged them to start filming through them more regularly. 

Meta positions their AI glasses to have all-around utility, with their hands-free calling and messaging capabilities and in-ear walking navigation; but influencers, who vlog their day-to-day, have taken to filming themselves wearing the glasses as its own kind of fashion statement. 

Since launching in 2021, Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley SKUs have grown in popularity; in 2025, Meta sold 7 million pairs. But the styles, which skew more sporty and masculine, left a significant segment of the market underserved. The Kylie glasses are more modish and distinct, which helped to fill the gap for a type of aesthetics-focused female consumer. 

“Ray-Ban is not a premium brand,” says Michelle Shen, a 24-year-old beauty and wellness influencer. “I’ve always been interested in Meta glasses, but I don’t like that they were the Ray-Ban brand … within the content creators’ circles I’m in, it has to be luxury or look luxury. If the brand was Prada, for example, more people I know would be buying in.”

Shen appreciated the “cute” shape of the Kylie glasses and purchased a pair a week after they were in stores. She says she’s returning hers only because the nose bridge doesn’t sit comfortably on her face, an issue other consumers have already flagged. Still, the new release has her convinced that filming from a first-person vantage point is the direction she wants to take her content. 

“I think it’s this very interesting POV-type of content, and it’s shot from an angle that is lifelike, and because it’s so new people are more intrigued to watch it,” Shen says about videos she’s recorded with smart glasses. She and others also note that videos where she flips the camera to capture herself in the glasses, or in a mirror selfie shot, tend to perform better.  

“I’m going to do more talking in the mirror videos,” says Oh. “Brands want to see a face at the beginning of the video, and a lot of influencers who wear Ray-Bans don’t get a lot of brand deals because their faces aren’t always in [videos].”

It seems like a relatively small detail, but for creators whose brand affinity and business is about the curation of aesthetics, the release signals a significant shift in wearable tech adoption among their cohorts. While Meta would not provide any specific sales data about the Kylie glasses, the company tells Fast Company that they’re among their most popular SKUs, adding that creators have reached out to the company trying to get their hands on a pair.

Samantha Lee Rodriguez, 32, works full-time in tech, but wants to eventually transition full-time to being a beauty and lifestyle influencer. Her TikTok channel is still growing, with a little under a thousand followers at the moment, and she’s hoping her new Meta x Kylie glasses will help give her an edge. 

She had already been interested in smart glasses after experimenting with her husband’s pair of Ray-Bans, but Jenner’s collab convinced her to buy in. She purchased a pair soon after they launched. Rodriguez has overall enjoyed wearing and recording in her Meta glasses, putting them on for 30-minute intervals at a time when she’s recording for “POV.”  

“It won’t replace all my phone recording,” she says, noting that the film quality is still not as good as recording with her phone or a digital camera. “The tech is good enough, but there can be improvements on them, as well. Sometimes the content can come back looking grayish, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re good with editing and color grading.” 

The privacy tradeoff

Influencers have been among the earliest true adopters of smart glasses, but Rodriguez and others say wearing them has surfaced the new, more existential hurdle of navigating around the weird and sometimes withering looks they get when they’re filming in public.

Obtrusive, raw, POV-style vlogs have become more popular in recent years due to the rise of smart glasses. Creators like @Elizabetheatsnyc have garnered millions of followers from filming herself interacting with strangers and visiting different business establishments with her Meta glasses (many influencers I spoke to said they were directly influenced by her and her success). 

Despite the proven engagement of POV content, a growing number of people are upset by the new norms that come with being able to record anyone in public so seamlessly now. The rise of so-called “manfluencer” street-style videos, where men in AI glasses approach women to hit on them and to record their reactions, has brought the issue to a head. Many women subjects of these videos say they had no idea they were being filmed and had not been asked for permission or consent. 

The creators I spoke to for this story say the loud resistance has made them more nervous to film their own vlogs. They’ve noticed the growing chorus of commenters who refer to the gadgets as “pedo glasses” or “pervert glasses.” The pushback hasn’t stopped these creators from wearing the glasses, but  it has encouraged them to be more conscious of the format and led them to experiment with how to use the glasses in an interesting but responsible way. 

“It’s such a grey area, as I’m figuring things out myself,” says Rodriguez. “I know my intention is not to use it in any creepy or harmful way, but there are people who are using it that way.”

She says she tries to be generally “mindful” about who she’s recording, often trying to get people’s backsides or editing footage to blur or cut people’s faces out as much as she can. 

“I ask for consent, especially if you’re walking into someone’s workplace; even if you’re going there to promote the business, ” she says. “It’s the most respectful thing to do.” 

“They get rigid or uncomfortable,” Oh says when she approaches someone in her Meta glasses, whether she’s recording or not, that’s indicated by a light that flashes. “No one has ever told me they have an issue, but it’s a sense you feel, like you can tell that someone isn’t happy with the interaction.”

Shen and the other creators say they’ve become hypervigilant to people noticing that they’re wearing a novel tech thing that is inherently controversial. “I just feel insecure wearing them, I’m just like, ‘Who’s that freak wearing the Meta glasses,’” Shen says, adding that she’s only had one confrontation IRL at a hot yoga class where another attendant asked that she not film (she obliged, and noted that it was not an aggressive exchange at all). 

It’s a tradeoff for influencers whose lifestyle and business depends on keeping up with trends and showing people the intimate and stylized aspects of their everyday life. For them, the increased focus on making smart glasses more of a fashion play is helpful in normalizing a piece of technology they believe is truly valuable to their businesses. 

“This type of content is closer to who you are and you can’t fake it,” says Oh. “It’s a great opportunity for influencers to connect to their audience by showing who they actually are.”

Freelance designers are a vital part of the business ecosystem. They slide into companies’ work streams and make sure that products, apps, websites, logos, and other key deliverables not only function well but look great and attract the right kind of attention.
 
Yet being a freelance designer can be difficult. It’s hard to know exactly what to charge for various projects, what other designers are earning per year, how to stay on top of relentless AI developments (which may actually be hurting quality), and more. 
 
Which is why Fast Company, in collaboration with the American Institute of Graphic Arts, produced  the first ever Design Pricing Transparency Project.  The Fast Company editors behind the project, Jill Bernstein and Liz Stinson, together with AIGA’s Lee-Sean Huang, co-executive director of learning and programs, discuss the project and the insights it yields.
 
If you are a freelance designer, you’ll learn:

• What other designers are charging for various types of projects
• How much money other designers are making
• What companies are paying
• Which AI tools companies want you to know

 
If you work at a company that hires freelance designers, you’ll learn:

• The market rate for design projects
• Designers’ biggest pain points when it comes to clients
• Which AI tools designers prefer

 
If you care about how AI is affecting creative work, you’ll learn:

• Where in the design process AI is proving to be the most useful
• How AI is affecting design quality  
• Whether AI is affecting freelance budgeting forecasts for the coming year

But one crucial detail is missing from the announcement: Who actually designed the project?

Plenty of architecture firms tried to get the job, including some of the biggest firms in the world. In December 2025, USDOT issued a call for proposals to “revitalize” Dulles Airport. By late January, the department released submitted design concepts from more than 30 global architecture firms, including HNTB, AECOM, Zaha Hadid Architects (recently rebranded ZHA), Adjaye Associates, and Grimshaw. One proposal, from ZHA and Bermello Ajamil & Partners, even put Trump’s name on the main terminal building.

Six months later, a design for the Dulles modernization has been selected. But during the project’s announcement, none of the 30 firms were named as the project’s designer. Instead, Trump himself appeared to take at least some of the design credit.

“We’ve had over 30 architects and 30 different designs. And we did a little cherry-picking and we spoke to a lot of people about it, and we’ve come up with a plan that’s efficient and really beautiful,” Trump said during the announcement in the Oval Office.

Duffy, standing beside Trump during the announcement along with United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and MWAA CEO Jack Potter, framed the revitalization as Trump’s mash-up of the submitted designs.

“We are blessed that not only does he give his time to really important matters, but he gave his building skill to take the best of all the designs and come up with this concept,” Duffy said. “I think this is one of the best designs, Mr. President, probably because you actually did it.”

“I was involved with Sean [Duffy] and with a lot of other people actually, but Scott [Kirby] was very much involved,” Trump added.

Few other details on the Dulles modernization’s design authorship were offered. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. United Airlines declined to offer any additional information. MWAA spokesperson Emily McGee noted only that “more details will be developed and shared as the project moves forward.”

The project could be just the latest major Washington, D.C.-area building project in which Trump has gotten directly involved. From the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the construction of a new ballroom to the design of a proposed monumental arch and announced renovations of the Kennedy Center, Trump has taken an aggressive interest in reshaping the capital’s built environment.

The Dulles modernization project drew a particularly passionate interest from Trump, who referred to the airport as “really horribly thought of,” “impossible,” and “the worst airport.” He highlighted one of the less popular elements of Dulles, the large “mobile lounge” people movers that are required to move passengers across the airfield between concourses, which sit in parallel bands. The new plan would replace the mobile lounges with an underground rail system and a central walking tunnel between concourses.

Despite Trump’s complaints about the airport, Dulles is regarded as one of the best-designed airports in the world, featuring architect Eero Saarinen’s soaring main terminal building from 1962, which is considered a masterpiece of modernist design. Trump’s administration claims the proposed $22.5 billion redesign would preserve the iconic terminal, but renderings show additional structures built onto and around it. Modernization plans also call for the construction of a 32,000-space parking garage directly across the street from the terminal. “It needs some work, it needs some fix-up, but it’ll be architecturally amazing,” Trump said.

Trump claims the project is “largely financed” by MWAA and could be completed within two years. Construction could begin as early as spring 2027.