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.

Much has changed about how people use their smartphones in the past two decades, but checking the weather is one habit that remains almost ubiquitous. In a 2019 study, roughly 90% of smartphone users reported having a weather app on their phone, and, per a 2023 YouGov survey, 53% of Americans use weather apps as their primary source of forecast information. Yahoo’s own data shows that the majority of its users opt to check the weather on the brand’s app rather than its website.

The options for weather apps are practically endless: from Google and Apple’s default offerings to The Weather Channel, the social media-style interface Appy Weather, and the rain gauge tool Precip, users have plenty of tools at their disposal. Despite this glut of options, Mike Park, Yahoo’s head of weather and self-described “weather nut,” believes that most apps out there haven’t entirely caught up with the way that people are habitually checking the weather.

“People are not just looking for data, but an easy way to make a decision,” Park says. “They want to know, ‘Should I go outside? What should I wear? What does it mean that the UV is 10? Is that good for me or is that bad for me?’” In real-life conversations and texts alike, Park says, these are the daily conversations that people are actually having about the weather—and their apps should cater to that.

Yahoo Weather’s new app design (powered by data from AccuWeather) is all about anticipating those key questions and building an information architecture that answers them before users even think to ask. Using snappy blurbs and clever visuals, it translates the weather from inscrutable data into easily digestible anecdotes for the group chat meteorologist in us all.

‘We want weather to be beautifully simple’

Park’s original pitch for his new Yahoo Weather app design had three stipulations: “It needs to be more visual, more social, and a little bit more fun.”

When you first open the app, that visual component is immediately clear. Yahoo has long invested in stand-out photography, Park says, and the initial image that users will be greeted with when they log in is a real photo of their local neighborhood representing that moment’s weather. Immediately below that image (no scrolling required), they’ll find the current temperature, an hour-by-hour forecast, and a summary of the current weather, like “sun giving way to clouds,” ”clear,” or “sunny and pleasant.”

This first screen was intentionally designed using user feedback. According to Park, users tend to be frustrated if they can’t find the hourly forecast right away—they don’t want to have to scroll or parse through tabs to locate that information. 

“They loved having all of the key information on one screen,” Park says. “If you look at competitors, you’ll see that you kind of have to jump around just to get to the hourly forecast. We’re showing you the hourly right away. The other thing that they really loved was the simplicity of how the information is presented. I worked with our designer and we came up with this design principle: We want weather to be beautifully simple.”

That simplicity is bolstered by the app’s custom voice. Yahoo’s early ‘90s “king of the internet” days might be long behind it, but today, the Yahoo network still has 250 million monthly users who recognize and trust the brand for its optimistic, silly, early-internet vibe. When it comes to the Yahoo Weather app, Park says, that strong brand identity is a key tool.

“Our differentiators are our design and our brand,” Park says. “It’s this focus on being really simple, but a little bit joyful as well. The Yahoo brand allows us to do things that others can’t.” 

On the app, Yahoo’s brand voice pops up in the small but informative blurbs sprinkled throughout the interface. Just above the daily forecast, a section called “Coming up” gives users a brief but informative glimpse at what to expect in the near future; like, “A thunderstorm Friday afternoon.” 

At the very bottom of the page, a quad of handy statistics give users a snapshot of the wind speed, humidity, UV index, and average visibility. Instead of simply presenting this data, Yahoo’s interface accompanies it with short sentences that answer users’ most common questions, written by Yahoo’s copywriters and content designers.

For example, 81% humidity is described as “Muggy. Wear breathable fabrics” and UV 9 is accompanied by the warning, “Limit sun exposure. SPF 50+ and sunglasses.” The app essentially predicts how users are going to need to interpret this information (what is 81% humidity, anyway?) and removes that step of the process.

“This is the voice of Yahoo coming through, and it helps answer the question of, ‘Why would you reach for Yahoo Weather over reaching for the default weather app on your phone?’” Park says.

Designing for a changing weather landscape

On the week of July 13, New York City was consumed by dense plumes of smoke from Canadian regional wildfires mixing with extreme heat. Throughout that week, many local residents became deeply familiar with a variety of air quality tracking radars as they sought clear intel on whether the air was safe to breathe. As climate change intensifies extreme weather events—including wildfires, severe heat, flooding, and storms—people are increasingly turning to weather apps for answers. Yahoo’s new weather app is designed with those use cases in mind.

“There are a couple personas we thought of when we were designing the new app,” Park says. “One was the group chat meteorologist. Maybe a friend is looking out like, ‘Hey, this is bad. Should we be going into the city or not?’ Or, ‘Hey, I’m going to go to this festival outside. It might be canceled.’ And people are comparing different apps. It proves that weather apps are really, really key at this time as weather gets more extreme.”

For those who want to stay abreast of weather updates, Park’s team designed a notification system that allows them to opt into receiving any advisories and warnings issued by the local government, including air quality warnings, tornado alerts, and flood notices. Users can toggle to settings and decide which locations they’d like alerts for, as well as whether they want alerts for “Extreme,” “Severe,” and/or “Moderate” conditions. Once those preferences are selected, any relevant notices will display directly underneath the app’s opening image. They’ll also pop up in the app’s widget, allowing users to click directly into the notice as soon as they’ve opened their phone.

This kind of more niche data is also woven elsewhere throughout the experience. Under the daily forecast, users can click into a bespoke map that shows a current radar, color-coded by elements like rain, snow, and ice. The map hones in on the user’s location, but can also be expanded into a rotating globe view to track conditions for family and friends around the world. A simple scrubber bar at the bottom of the screen lets users pinpoint exactly when the weather might affect them, accompanied by haptics on some devices.

Another feature helps users understand their risk of allergies (another factor that’s been worsened by climate change) in a digestible interactive that breaks down potential risks into three categories: “weed,” “tree,” and “grass.” By clicking into each of these sections, users can discover which potential allergens are in and out of season.

In the future, Park imagines that Yahoo’s weather app will begin to foster more community with what he calls “the weather geek in everybody.” That might look like allowing users to upload their own photos and videos of local weather conditions, or creating an in-app chat feature for folks to discuss weather happenings in a dedicated space. 

“Weather is important to Yahoo because it is a really healthy habit, and we believe we can win because we’re making weather more visual, more social, more fun,” Park says. “For us, success looks like building a weather app that’s so helpful and joyful that you’re going to tell your friends and family about it.”

“The Kaneda bike is too violent for Lego, and they’ll never make this because of their family-friendly policies,” says Eastern Brick, the company that is turning the bike into a fully working, buildable Lego kit. “Cyberpunk themes are too realistic with their weapons and violence. We’re just fans wanting to build for other adult fans.”

They are right. The entire ultraviolent Akira universe is a transgression against Lego’s all-audience core values. Despite having a fixed no-gun policy, the biggest toy company on Earth will happily license Star Wars blasters, Marvel superheroes, Indiana Jones’s guns, and wizard battles by the container ship. Fictional conflict is fine because fantasy violence sells.

But the company’s own 2010 published guideline is unambiguous: “The basic aim is to avoid realistic weapons and military equipment that children may recognize from hot spots around the world and to refrain from showing violent or frightening situations when communicating about Lego products.”

The public doesn’t want military bricks either, which forced the company to cancel its sanitized, no-military-livery set of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft after a German anti-war group targeted it because the real aircraft is used by the U.S. military. So it’s no surprise that Neo-Tokyo’s gritty, recognizably human violence—biker gangs, drugs, military coups—definitely falls on the wrong side of that line.

Which means anything Akira—like realistic military history, horror, and any number of adult subjects—didn’t even stand a chance of getting into Lego Ideas, the company’s line that turns fan-designed sets into real products.

And, as always happens whenever there is a ban on anything, other people will appear everywhere and sell you the goods, like Al Capone did with whiskey or the cartels do with drugs. The appetite for adult-themed Lego is so high that it has fired up an entire parallel industry.

The industry Lego built by saying no

Here’s how the shadow market works. In brick-fan culture, an original fan-designed model is called an MOC (“my own creation”), as opposed to an official Lego product. An MOC designer does the hard part: engineering the model, testing its structure, refining its parts list. Then, a company packages the bricks and instructions and sells the result as a consumer set.

Some of these companies sell only digital instructions. Some source genuine Lego elements and box them into complete kits. And some manufacture their own Lego-compatible pieces—like a U.S. Army helmet from World War II or missiles for a combat jet—and ship entire sets without Lego’s oversight. Lego sells bricks to these fan companies in bulk, no questions asked. You can do whatever you want with them, as long as there is no Lego logo on the box.

The Kaneda Bike is the perfect example of the byproduct of the Danish company’s policy.

“The design was created by a designer, Clement. He’s been designing this MOC since early this year,” an Eastern Brick spokesperson tells me via email. The set perfectly captures the original design of Kaneda’s low-slung red machine—as iconic to cyberpunk as the Millennium Falcon is to space opera—as a display piece for adults who grew up on Otomo’s Neo-Tokyo. Its characteristic shape, basically a chopper bike with an aerodynamic fairing and a curved glass canopy, is all there. Even the bike’s rear engine works in the Lego version, with an articulated chain that moves its wheel. It’s made of about 2,200 pieces, the company says, and it measures 50 centimeters, or almost 20 inches long. “This is the largest futuristic bike for any sci-fi fan to build and display,” it adds.

“We have a new upcoming Creator Set which we’re calling ‘Neo Bikes,’” Eastern Brick says. “The idea here is that you can make any style of 1:5 scale bike, but we will be starting with five specific builds that Clement has been hard at work on developing. We will reveal the actual designs soon.”

Unlike other MOC sellers, Eastern Brick uses alternative (“alt”) bricks—Lego-compatible parts manufactured in China rather than genuine Lego elements—and it sees itself as infrastructure for a whole class of creators. “EB is playing the role of making brick-building more accessible. We help designers turn their MOCs into sets that their fans can build with alt bricks,” the company tells me. “There are plenty of brands and designers designing what Lego won’t, because of various reasons, such as themes that aren’t aligned with Lego’s guidelines, like Cobi [another MOC seller] with their military sets.”

Merchants of the banned

The MOC-kit industry now spans an entire spectrum, from premium genuine-Lego packagers to full-blown alternative-brick manufacturers.

At the top end sits BuildaMOC, which represents the luxury tier. It sources authentic Lego bricks, boxes the parts and instructions for original MOCs, and pays royalties to participating designers. “We use genuine elements in every kit,” the company states on its site—turning fan models into purchasable, ready-to-build kits with the real plastic inside. MOCBoxing, StudBee, and MadeOfBrick operate in the same genuine-parts space.

Then there’s Brickmania, a company that has built a business exclusively on the military themes Lego refuses to touch, using Lego’s own bricks. “Brickmania has been the world’s leading producer of historical military custom Lego kits,” the company says, with subject matter spanning WWI, WWII, Vietnam, the Cold War, and modern military equipment. Its kits, it notes, “are comprised of new-condition Lego elements and quality products of our own design and select premium-quality, third-party suppliers”—including its own self-produced branded weapons and accessories.

There are also Lego clones serving these niches, the alt-brick manufacturers from China. Cobi is one of the largest dedicated Lego-style military brands on the planet, with an entire WWII range of tanks, aircraft, ships, and artillery sold as historical replicas. Blue Brixx ships compatible-brick military sets, too, including a WWII bunker with flak artillery, alongside modern vehicles. CaDA and MedievalBrick fill out niches from engineering models to fantasy and historical architecture.

Lego can’t chase these manufacturers with lawsuits. The patents for the core interlocking mechanism and internal tubes of the Lego bricks expired in the late 1970s. When I asked Lego about what they think about this alt-brick universe competition, a spokesperson told me that what is most important to them is ensuring that consumers are not misled.

“When they buy a Lego product, they get a product of impeccable quality that lives up to the strictest safety standards, which is exactly what they can and should expect,” the spokesperson said via email. “We welcome fair competition at any time. But if someone misuses our brand, IP, or consumers’ trust, we take whatever action necessary to protect consumers and our intellectual rights.”

Put it together and the catalog of the banned is enormous: realistic military hardware, adult pop culture, anime, religious architecture, dark horror, niche collector subjects—everything Lego’s all-audience brand can’t absorb, manufactured and sold by companies Lego doesn’t own.

Lego got a piece of the pie, too

Then there is BrickLink, the biggest MOC seller of them all. For years, it was the great unofficial marketplace of the brick world: a fan-built bazaar for parts, sets, and mini figures where adult collectors ran the show.

Then, in November 2019, Lego saw it needed to do something about that surprisingly large business and—oh, surprise—acquired it. “The Lego Group today announced it has acquired BrickLink Ltd. to strengthen its connection with its important adult fan base,” the company said at the time. Back then, chief marketing officer Julia Goldin pointed out that “BrickLink provides us with an exciting opportunity to connect with our adult fans through new channels and exciting experiences.”

Sure. But what adult fans also got was containment. BrickLink remains a marketplace, but now it sits inside the Lego Group and abides by Lego’s rules. Its Designer Program—a curated route where selected fan designs are crowdfunded and produced as limited-run official sets, “designed by Lego fans for experienced builders”—shows that Lego recognizes the appetite for fan-created, adult-focused builds. But only on its terms: its selection process, its production limits, its brand guidelines. Any theme that conflicts with those guidelines simply vanishes from the official pipeline.

Fortunately, companies like Eastern Brick and the others exist, so no matter how badly Lego’s Colonel Shikishima wants to control Neo-Tokyo, Akira always rises from the ashes to blind us with its brick-creating cosmic power. Soon, if all goes well, we’ll be able to buy the iconic bike designed by Otomo and perfectly captured by Clement in brick form. I just hope it comes with LED lights so I can race it at night across my home’s floor, screaming “TETSUUOOOO!!!” while my son screams “KANEDAAAA!!!”

A new Chiefs stadium might help them break it again.

The Chiefs previously set the record for loudest crowd in 2013 at 137.5 decibels, which was broken later that year when the crowd at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field reached 137.6 decibels. But since 2014’s game, when the Chiefs handed out earplugs to fans beforehand, the record has remained untouched.

When the team’s planned $3 billion stadium opens in 2031, though, that record could be at risk again. The lead architectural firm behind the stadium says it is designed to be as loud as possible by containing the sound through the actual size, shape, and roof geometry of the venue.

“We carefully designed the layout of the seating environment, the roof, and the concourse areas to contain the sound inside the seating environment, much more than the existing Arrowhead stadium does today,” David Manica, owner of Manica Architecture, tells Fast Company.

Manica, the Kansas City-based firm behind venues like Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas and the Oklahoma City Arena in Oklahoma City, designed the stadium, and HNTB, another Kansas City firm, is the lead design architect.

The team says the stadium was designed to prioritize fan experiences like tailgating, with parking lot infrastructure big enough to hold more than 20,000 parking spots, and the pre-game flyover, by using 400,000 square feet of translucent panels for a clear view through its fully enclosed roof. When it comes to maxing out the volume inside the stadium, the entire venue’s shape was optimized for loudness.

The biggest challenges revolve around the density of the crowd and their proximity to one another.

“The secret to making a stadium loud is its ability to contain the sound energy within the volume,” Manica says, so they designed the new stadium with as few interruptions in the seating sections as possible. All spectators are as close to the field and to each other as possible.

The more compact the venue, the more concentrated the noise. The new stadium removed exit passageways in the bowl, while seating was designed to be as dense with people as possible, with continuous seating tiers and fewer internal aisles. The new stadium is expected to seat about 70,000 people, fewer than Arrowhead Stadium’s maximum capacity of more than 76,000. The roof shape, which is parabolic, makes sound louder because the shape directs sound waves back down toward fans.

Acoustic engineers digitally tested and analyzed the new stadium design, Manica says, and their analysis found that a crowd of a certain volume in the existing stadium “will actually be perceived as louder in the new building.”

“The new stadium will be even louder than the existing record-breaking Arrowhead,” he says.

When the Jumbotrons at the new Chiefs stadium say, “let’s get loud,” they’ll really mean it.

The National Military Monument, an installation from the financial services company USAA for military members and spouses, is dedicated to all of the more than 41 million Americans who’ve fought in every war from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts of the 21st century. USAA installed the work to mark the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, and it was designed to mix the look of traditional monuments with cutting-edge tech.

The memorial is made up of two double-sided structures designed to look like fluttering U.S. flags. Each is positioned on either side of the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial. Each section is 18 feet tall and 62 feet wide, and the blocks used to make it were painted to resemble Indiana limestone, the stone used to build the Lincoln Memorial walls and columns.

Embedded in the structure are 528 LED screens that act like the stripes on the flag, and they display the names of U.S. service members, with each name separated by stars. It was designed by Atomic Designs, an event production company that’s designed staging for events like Jingle Ball and World’s Strongest Man.

With no single historical record of every American who’s served in the armed forces, USAA compiled its own list of veterans from sources including the National Parks Service, WWII Army Enlistment, POW lists, veteran service organizations, and USAA members who opted in.

There are currently nearly 41 million names being displayed. George Washington was the first name displayed for its public opening on July 28, and the Unknown Soldier will be the last. “John Smith” is the most common name in the installation, appearing 4,487 times.

It’s a living memorial. There’s an online portal and kiosks at the installation people can use to search for loved ones and submit the names of those who aren’t included. It can display as many as 2.54 million names a day for 45 seconds each, which means it would take about 16 days to go through every name.

A permanent memorial with as many names wouldn’t fit as neatly on the National Mall. By mixing the look of traditional monuments with video screens and public participation, though, the National Military Monument shows that it doesn’t take a permanent monument set in stone to make a big impact.

Since 2019, the region’s Bay Wheels program—along with a few dozen other bike share systems around the world—has been run by Lyft. Better known for its rideshare service which helped it make $1.6 billion in revenue in 2025, the company has spent the past decade or so diverging from its main competitor, Uber, by narrowing in on the global bike share market. Now, in the Bay Area, Lyft is making that side of its business more apparent. Starting today, Bay Wheels will be Lyft Bike.

But the rebrand is more than just a prominent surfacing of the Lyft name. It’s also a large-scale redesign of the hardware of the Bay Area’s bikeshare system. With custom-designed pedal and ebikes, and a charger-ready modular docking station design that can work in San Francisco, New York, London, or Madrid, Lyft is using the Lyft Bike system as a launching pad for what could be a broader takeover of bikeshare systems all over the world.

Two newly designed bikes—one pedal driven, the other equipped with an electric assist motor—will spread across the system, which covers five cities and includes more than 6,500 bikes. New docking stations will pop up throughout the network in a modular fashion, enabling anything from a vast multi-dock station at a transit hub to a single dock in a residential area.

All of this has been created in-house by Lyft’s San Francisco-based team of designers and engineers, pulling on experience in consumer electronics, automotive design, software design, and manufacturing, as well as Lyft’s years operating Bay Wheels and other systems, like Chicago’s Divvy Bikes, Boston’s Bluebikes, New York’s Citi Bike, and providing hardware and software to systems in Mexico City, London, and Barcelona. It’s also an effort to test out how this hardware might work in those cities and beyond.

“We are piloting a new product in San Francisco that we hope will scale at some point in the future,” says Michael Brous, head of Lyft Urban Solutions, the company’s micromobility arm.

Behind the design of the new Lyft bikes

The new bikes are the third iteration of bikeshare vehicles introduced by Lyft, and the second designed completely in-house. The new ebike, named Astro, has a proprietary electric assist drivetrain, compact 24″ wheels, a swappable battery mounted behind the seat post, a custom-made retroreflective powder coating, and a built-in rear wheel lock that can be activated away from a docking station.

The pedal bike, named Metro, has all the same features as Astro, aside from the electric assist. Both are designed to fit riders between 4’11” and 6’4″, and be easily used by both regular bikers and people who haven’t ridden a bike in years. “It’s a very wide demographic of riders. We want it to feel not too techy, not too scary, very approachable to all different types of riders,” says Erik Askin, senior staff product designer at Lyft.

Both bikes were built using the same frame, simplifying manufacturing and maintenance, which adds up for bikeshare systems like the Bay Area’s that can log millions of rides per year. Based on Lyft’s bikeshare experience all over the world, the design team examined how bikeshare bikes survive (or don’t) in the wilds of city streets, from the damage that comes from vandalism and attempted theft to the threat of salt spray on bicycle chains to the thousands of seat stem readjustments the bikes endure. The new bikes have been designed and tested extensively to ensure they can withstand all that nature and human nature can throw at them.

“They’re out there all year long, but they’re also getting used a ton more than any sort of commercial or personal bike,” says Benny Wu, a staff product manager at Lyft. He says the designers and engineers paid careful attention to the high-wear touch points of the bike, like the seat stem, to make sure it could perform through the tens of thousands of adjustments it would undergo.

They also brought in outsiders to try to break the bikes or steal components. Wu shows a video of one of these tests in which a person slams a hammer directly into the bike’s screen, located near the handlebars. “It’s a very physical process of prototyping,” he says. “Having these be reliable, having them available whenever people need them is a huge challenge that we tackle by building things from the ground up.”

Docking stations with an urban impact

The other new part of the Lyft Bike rebrand are the upgraded docking stations. Lyft will be rolling out across the Bay Area’s bikeshare network. Designed as a modular system of bollard and kiosks, the new docking stations can be installed piecemeal instead of in large clusters as they were previously. “Our new stations are more like parking meters,” Askin says. “They’re very easy to deploy. They can be placed in many different configurations that are not bound by a hardwired system.”

Each station is powered by an internal battery and a solar panel, allowing it to operate off-grid. A single station can be placed at an intersection and still function, or a group of stations can be chained together and paired with a kiosk geared toward casual riders. They’re all pre-wired to be able to connect to the grid and offer ebike charging when bikes are docked, which is becoming the norm for bikeshare systems in Europe.

“We’re building all the charging components into both the bollards and the kiosk so we can easily convert stations to charging because we really believe this is the path forward for bikeshare,” Askin says.

That has implications for the bikes themselves, which have been designed for the potential of charging while docked in the station, and for better fitting into the European bikeshare market.

They have small, 24″ wheels, and lighter batteries with shorter ranges, making the bikes lighter and easier to maneuver while relying on their in-dock charging to keep them powered up. Built-in charging would also have the effect of limiting Lyft’s battery swapping, the costly and time-consuming process of driving a van full of batteries around the city and installing them in dead bikes.

This new station design also cements the bollards and kiosks as foundational elements of Lyft’s bikeshare approach—in contrast to the dockless systems that have irked cities by scattering bikes and other vehicles haphazardly on sidewalks and other public spaces.

According to Caroline Samponaro, vice president of Lyft Urban Solutions, stations also just make bikeshare better. “The most successful bikeshare programs have an infrastructure component,” she says. “The station itself is this reliable fixture within the network that people can count on.”

The stations can also become tools for helping cities achieve their own city planning goals. Samponaro says that in San Francisco, Lyft has collaborated with local officials to plan out where its docking stations are located as a way of improving sightlines at busy or dangerous intersections.

Placing a few bollard docking stations at each corner of an intersection instead of parked cars creates much more visibility, improving pedestrian safety while also spreading the docking stations beyond a single spot at an intersection. Anonymized trip-level data from GPS devices in each bike can also be used to inform local planning, showing popular routes. “That gives them desire line insights to help support their planning efforts, and also support the community case they’re making to build a bike lane,” Samponaro says.

Brous says the design of the new Lyft bikes and stations enable these kinds of benefits for the company’s two main stakeholders: cities and riders. “Controlling the design, controlling the operation, maintaining the relationship with the end customer, whether it’s the rider or the city, we’re able to take all that feedback and quickly build and iterate,” he says. “It allows us to innovate at a faster speed than relying on third-party partners.”

It’s also part of the way Lyft is building its case as a premier bikeshare operator, in the U.S. and beyond. The company is hoping to expand on the 55 programs it directly operates or provides hardware and software solutions to, including the recently announced planned acquisition of the Spanish bikeshare operator Serveo.

Brous argues the new Lyft bikes and stations position the company for even further expansion. “This will be a platform that we’re really excited about to take across Europe and help support the overall company’s growth ambitions,” he says. “I think San Francisco is really the first stop along this journey.”

Until now, my only real option has been to scroll through thumbnails of dresses or fiddle with standard category filters. But there’s something new on Alice + Olivia’s site: a “Shop with AI” option. I give it a shot, describing how I need a dress that is chic, polished, and comfortable enough to sit on stage in. The system interprets my intent and instantly serves me an array of tailored dresses. I find a little black dress that fits the bill perfectly.

E-commerce search hasn’t fundamentally changed since Amazon first started selling books online three decades ago. Shopping for clothes on the internet has meant typing keywords into search bars and scanning through rows of static inventory. But that’s slowly beginning to change.

Daydream, an AI-powered fashion search and discovery platform, today launches Powered by Daydream, which allows fashion brands to bring natural-language search to their digital storefronts. Staud, Alice + Olivia, Couper, Cult Mia, and Hampden Clothing are currently live in the initial pilot, with more than 25 additional brands signed on—including Anine Bing, Mansur Gavriel, Sandro, and Maje.

Unlearning 30 Years of Search Habits

The launch comes as the retail industry wrestles with the broader question of where agentic commerce stands today. “We’re still in the early days,” says Julie Bornstein, Founder and CEO of Daydream.

Daydream, which first launched as a consumer-facing app last year, offers a chat-based shopping agent devoted exclusively to fashion. But it has encountered many real-world roadblocks—chiefly, helping shoppers unlearn decades of ingrained habits. Consumers have been so heavily conditioned to use rigid search bars that typing natural, expressive sentences into a shopping app feels unnatural at first.

“People are trained to use basic keywords,” Lisa Yamner, co-founder and chief brands officer, explains. “Getting people accustomed to using natural language is a journey.”

There’s also the problem of the results that AI returns. As Bornstein points out, large language models are non-deterministic, which means that running the same search twice can yield slightly different results, which can confuse shoppers into thinking the tool isn’t working properly. Bornstein says Daydream’s engineers are working hard to ensure search results are helpful to users—and she also believes that people are beginning to understand how results may vary. But in the meanwhile, Daydream wants to put its tools in the hands of more shoppers.

Turning Search Queries into Data

Powered by Daydream shifts the strategy by embedding this AI directly into the digital storefronts where consumers are already browsing. To use it, the shopper clicks on a “Shop with AI” button on the site, where they can ask for what they want using language they would use with an in-store associate or personal stylist.

For brands, introducing new site technology can be very labor intensive, and requires coordinating with backend engineering. Daydream has made the process so easy it can be up and running within a day. Carrie McMahon, senior product manager of e-commerce at Alice + Olivia, says that the ease of the deployment was a massive win for the tech team. “You can put this piece of code on the site and Daydream takes it from there,” she says.

While Powered by Daydream is designed to improve the customer experience, brands can also learn a lot from the questions that shoppers ask. In my case, the brand can understand that I’m not just shopping for a little black dress; I’m looking for something to wear to a work event. If they get many similar requests, the brand might decide they need to beef up their selection of corporate outfits.

“It’s given them a lot more data and insight into what their customers want because they now know why someone’s looking for something,” Bornstein says.

Yamner points out concrete examples of what these conversational insights reveal. In one case, a brand received lots of queries about shoes, when shoes only made up 4% of their catalog. Alice + Olivia keeps getting requests about a discontinued product line.

“This might prompt them to consider bringing this line back,” says Yamner.

Transforming how people shop won’t happen overnight, but Daydream’s founders are very familiar with how slow it can be for consumers to adopt new technologies. Bornstein was working for Nordstrom when the company was just building out its website, manually assigning each product to a particular category. “I remember what it felt like to get people used to buying online at all,” she says.

But eventually, a tipping point came, and e-commerce became the norm. She believes AI will similarly transform how consumers shop. “Tech adoption is moving so much faster than it once did,” Bornstein says. “Once they do adapt to this new behavior, they won’t be able to imagine shopping without it.”

Either way, the result is the same: Guinness turned drinking a pint into something people actively participate in.

That small act has become a cultural phenomenon. Posts tagged #SplitTheG have generated tens of millions of views across TikTok and Instagram, helping introduce a 265-year-old stout to a new generation of drinkers. Guinness sales grew 14% in 2024, followed by another 13% in 2025, while the parent company Diageo says it has gained 3.8 million new Guinness drinkers since 2019. The New York Times even dubbed Guinness a “Gen Z darling.”

The pint didn’t change, but the behavior around it did.

The brands people remember aren’t necessarily the ones with the loudest campaigns, but the ones that create small behaviors customers repeat until they become habits. Hospitality offers some of the clearest examples.

At the New York restaurant Coqodaq, guests begin by washing their hands at an elaborate sink before sitting down to eat fried chicken. It’s a theatrical moment that people film and tell friends about. The ritual has become part of the restaurant’s identity, adding to the allure that pushed it onto New York’s “toughest reservations” list.

This kind of thing isn’t entirely new. Corona—the world’s most valuable beer brand, valued at $9.7 billion—turned adding a lime wedge into a instantly recognizable ritual. Spotify’s Wrapped, a highly anticipated once-a-year ritual, hit 200 million engaged users within 24 hours of its most recent release, a 19% jump year over year, and generated roughly 500 million shares across social platforms.

And yet, rituals are often seen as nice-to-have flourishes rather than business assets. For some brands, they can be hard to quantify. But Spotify and Corona and others demonstrate the opposite. Add the lime. Share your Wrapped. Split the G. These companies didn’t simply sell products; they created repeatable behaviors that customers willingly perform again and again.

So how do you get it right?

Find the idea that’s already yours

Rituals have to emerge naturally from who you are. The quickest way to fail is to bolt on an Instagram moment that has no relationship to your brand. Start with local culture, your brand story, and what your customers already love doing. Don’t invent a ritual from scratch. Uncover something that’s already yours.

Take the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans, which rolls out a cart of beignets every day—arguably some of the best in the city—and they’re gone in seconds. People queue up for them. It works precisely because it’s specific to that city and that culture. It couldn’t be copy-pasted into a different market and land the same way.

Sometimes you have to prototype smaller ideas, watch how customers respond and allow a ritual to emerge organically. Either approach is better than forcing something simply because another brand made it work.

Own a moment

Every day contains emotional moments: morning coffee, sunset drinks, sitting down for dinner, returning to your room at night. The most successful rituals attach themselves to moments people are already primed to enjoy.

That’s one reason the Aperol Spritz has become so successful. Aperol didn’t just market a drink. It wanted to own a moment: the aperitivo hour. Early evening, golden light, outdoor terraces and meeting friends after work with an orange-hued drink in front of them. Campari Group reported 23.1% organic sales growth for Aperol in 2023, while noting that the brand now accounts for 24% of the company’s total sales. Rather than creating a new occasion, Aperol elevated one that already existed.

At the Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam, guests select a signature scent at check-in that awaits them in their room, while each evening’s turndown includes a locally crafted gift and a story from the hotel’s past. A routine part of any stay becomes something guests look forward to. It’s the kind of thoughtful ritual that has become synonymous with the Waldorf Astoria experience as the luxury brand expands globally, spanning 39 hotels across 18 countries with more on the way.

Invest in the emotion, not just the transaction

Branding isn’t what you say; it’s what you do. That’s why rituals create such powerful emotional bonds. I still remember the restaurant that let kids make their own soft serve. Now I have kids, and we go to a pizza place where they sit at the counter and get handed dough to shape their own pie. They’ll remember that for decades.

I love it when a client invests in emotion first, because that bond is usually the real reason people come back, and it pays a content dividend too. When people post themselves splitting the G, it’s organic, but it puts Guinness in front of an audience no paid campaign could reach at that price.

The hard part will be the consistency: Rituals work only if they’re reliable. Doing something every day, and doing it well, is far harder than staging a one-off campaign. That’s why the best rituals are often surprisingly simple. They’re designed to be repeated until customers expect them.

The brands that create lasting loyalty aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest campaigns. They’re the ones that consistently give people something worth repeating.

Because every repeated behavior becomes a memory. And every memory becomes another reason to come back.

A series of recent moves by the Department of Transportation deprioritizes mass transportation and bike lanes by removing information previously available online and proposing funding cuts, describing these strategic mainstays of good urban design as “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts.

In a letter sent to lawmakers this month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asks Congress to authorize the Trump administration’s new transportation priorities, which he positions through a lens of partisan politics. The proposal would also scale back funding for bike lanes.

Whether or not the rhetoric scores Duffy political points, in practical terms it could make American roadways less safe. “Secretary Duffy is asking Congress to ignore the facts about bike lanes: They improve safety, don’t cause congestion, and aren’t a partisan issue,” says Laura Jenkins, communications director for the League of American Bicyclists, a nonprofit association. Improvements like green “bike boxes” painted on the road or physical barriers have been shown to reduce collisions with motorists.

Duffy’s proposal also includes cutting funding for public transportation and EV infrastructure. It calls for eliminating the Highway Trust Fund, which includes a Reagan-era mass transit account that funds public transportation; prioritizes motor vehicle traffic over bike lanes; and ends a requirement that projects paid for through the Complete Streets program to increase pedestrian and cyclist safety also include sidewalks and bikeways.

In his letter, Duffy says bike lanes increase congestion and waste fuel, and he asks Congress to restrict federal grants for bike lanes and to remove bike lanes “that contribute to congestion,” though he offers no specifics on how that would be determined. It’s worth noting that recent research from cities across the globe has found that bike lanes can reduce traffic congestion.

Duffy puts bikes in the political lane

The Trump administration has worked to remove information about bike lanes from government web pages, including from the Federal Highway Administration website just this month. According to an internal email seen by NPR, DOT staff were told to remove pages that included language about bike safety from the site two days after a social media post from Duffy called bike lanes “DEI.”

Duffy previewed his proposal to Senate lawmakers with a post on social media that cast transportation as a culture war. “Remember when Biden and Boot-edge-edge used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change? THAT’S OVER,” he wrote.

The “DEI” reference seems to be a dig at Biden administration projects funded by the former president’s bipartisan infrastructure legislation, which includes money for pedestrian and bike infrastructure, recreational trails, and safe routes to school in communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by roadway fatalities.

There’s a difference in Americans’ primary modes of transportation that fall along the urban-rural divide, which today has become highly correlated with party affiliation. Democrats, who are more likely to live in cities, are thus more likely to ride bikes and take the train around town than Republicans, who are more likely to live in rural areas and need to drive everywhere. (The suburbs are more or less split evenly.)

Rather than presenting the Trump administration’s transportation priorities as being for Americans no matter where they live, though, Duffy frames the issue as an us versus them proposition, as if riding a bike is somehow “woke.”

Additionally, Duffy’s letter calls for more federal oversight of local public transportation systems by tying government funding to crime and safety, changing regulations related to autonomous vehicles, providing new grants for interstate funding, further privatizing air travel, mandating vehicles be capable of wireless data transmission or automated driving, requiring all knowledge and skills tests for commercial driver’s licenses be administered in English, adopting permanent daylight saving time, and providing an additional $1 billion for renovating New York’s Penn Station, which would be renamed.

Authorization of DOT surface transportation funding ends on September 30, so between now and then, lobbyists and lawmakers will hash out a funding bill that could include some of these proposals. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday he would block any proposal that renames Penn Station for Trump.

“Politics ahead of safety”

At least when it comes to the Trump administration’s views on bike lanes, the League of American Bicyclists, which advocates for cycling infrastructure and safety, is not on board. The group says DOT “needs to explain why it is putting politics ahead of safety.”

“DOT’s own data shows bike lanes reduce crashes up to 49% and don’t increase congestion, and polling consistently shows Americans want safer roads and more bikeable communities,” Jenkins says. “They don’t have the facts, they don’t have the law, they don’t even have the American public on this, so they’re taking cheap shots at people who bike.”

According to government research that Duffy’s DOT has removed from its website, adding bike lanes reduces all crashes—not only bike crashes but also vehicle crashes—by 53%, as well as reduces crashes on both four- and two-lane undivided and local roads.

Around two decades on from reality TV’s peak—think The Bachelor, American Idol, Big Brother—you no longer have to endure a grueling casting process or hope the editors treat you kindly to get a taste of fame. Instead, creators can now build independent audiences and monetize their content directly on TikTok and Instagram.

The impact on the industry has been widespread, with a once era-defining genre now competing against anyone with a camera. But while unscripted series premieres have plummeted by a third since 2022, and several hit shows like Queer Eye and Jersey Shore Family Vacation have disappeared in 2026 alone, reality TV’s influence remains more relevant than ever. In fact, we’re beginning to see brands themselves act less like advertisers—and more like fly-on-the-wall phenomena. 

The rise of the watchable brand

One example is Sour Strips, a candy brand founded in 2019 by the fitness personality and YouTuber Maxx Chewning. In five short years, Sour Strips hit $24 million in annual revenue before selling to Hershey, the confectionery giant. The secret is presenting the brand’s rise like a bingeworthy reality show.

Maxx’s audience watched him brainstorm, struggle, and scale the business in real time. He filmed himself meeting food scientists, opening the first manufacturing test bags, and physically packing boxes. He broadcast hurdles like risky formula changes, and even used his Instagram and YouTube community for real-time R&D—adjusting packaging and flavors based on immediate feedback.

This “build in public” strategy was a major engine behind Sour Strips’ explosion. Whether or not people are particularly passionate about sour candy, they follow because they’re invested in the story. Will the next retailer agree to stock the products? Will a product launch sell out? What challenge will the founder face next?

How brands’ stories can outperform superiority

For decades, brand building was largely organized around product: “We taste better,” “we look better,” “we last longer.” Product quality still matters, of course. But for a growing number of brands, the product is no longer always the main character.

In many cases, what a business sells becomes an artifact of the story; it’s the outcome of a journey audiences already feel invested in.

Sour Strips demonstrates that if brands are positioned in the right way, consumers will follow them the way they follow creators, influencers, and reality TV casts. They are drawn to the characters, setbacks, pivots, wins, and uncertainty along the way. They are not only buying what a company sells, but watching what a company becomes.

Graza is another example of a company demonstrating how this approach can work even in categories that wouldn’t traditionally inspire fandom. Rather than simply marketing olive oil, the brand invited consumers behind the scenes as it grew, sharing retail milestones, product decisions, and the realities of scaling the business. The bottle may have sparked initial interest, but the journey gave people a reason to keep following. Its recent expansion into adjacent categories, including potato chips, suggests that consumers aren’t simply loyal to a product; they’re invested in where the brand goes next.

This approach changes the way people relate to brands. Consumers who become fans are often willing to support a brand even when it’s no better than or functionally superior to the alternatives. The purchase becomes a way of participating.

Audiences want the messy middle

This trend of documenting business growth is happening when content has never been more abundant. Social media has flooded feeds with brand content, ads, and partnerships, and AI is making it easier than ever to generate them. But the result is that polished content is becoming less distinctive. When everything can be produced quickly, audiences start to value what feels harder to manufacture. Progress and vulnerability are tough to fake. A story being written in real time can be much more compelling than a perfectly packaged campaign.

Mid-Day Squares may be the clearest example of this philosophy in action. They went against presenting a polished founder success story and instead showcased the messy reality of building a business through the eyes of its three cofounders. Followers watch fundraising struggles, manufacturing setbacks, internal disagreements, hiring decisions, and major wins unfold in real time. It feels less like following a snack bar brand and more like watching an ongoing business reality series. The product is almost secondary to the question audiences keep coming back to answer: What happens next?

Brands shouldn’t manufacture their drama—backlash to “scripted” reality shows like Storage Wars shows how quickly viewers spot manipulation. The lesson from reality TV is that companies already contain tension if they are willing to show the process. Most traditional marketing filters out a business’s difficult decisions, near misses, and unexpected wins. But increasingly, those are the very ingredients that make audiences care.

Founder-led brands have an advantage here because the protagonist is obvious. The founder is the person taking the risk. Their personality and ambition give the audience someone to root for. Around them, a wider cast begins to form: employees, early customers, retailers, creators, collaborators, investors, and even skeptics. Together, they create a living narrative around the business, allowing viewers to feel like true insiders.

Chamberlain Coffee illustrates how this can evolve beyond creator content. Emma Chamberlain didn’t simply attach her name to a coffee brand; she extended her story through it. Fans follow product launches, creative decisions, and the evolution of the business, making the brand feel like a continuation of the world they’ve already bought into.

Why big brands need narrative design

Larger companies are often built to reduce uncertainty. They have layers of approval, risk management, and polished communications systems. But they can also make a brand feel distant at a time when audiences are craving authenticity and connection.

Not enough big brands ask: What is the narrative design of this brand? What story are people being invited into? How does it unfold over time? What are the chapters, stakes, and reasons to return?

Whatever a brand’s story is, it needs movement. It cannot simply be a static message repeated across channels. It needs development, tension, and progression. This is where participation becomes powerful. The strongest brand narratives make audiences feel like contributors. They vote on flavors. They react to prototypes. They comment on decisions. That sense of participation can turn customers into ambassadors in a much more organic way.

The new battle for attention is narrative

In a world of infinite content, the most valuable asset may be an unfolding story people want to keep watching. Product, positioning, and brand distinctiveness all play a role in shaping this narrative. Vulnerability can create a deeper form of trust than polish alone ever could, and herein lies the potential for a faster, deeper momentum in building brand equity and consumer loyalty.

Brands like Feastables show that this approach can scale well beyond startup culture. By making product improvements, retail expansion, and behind-the-scenes business decisions part of the entertainment, they’ve turned company-building itself into content that audiences actively choose to follow.

For challenger brands, the opportunity is clear: Don’t just launch products; build stories people want to follow. For established brands: Don’t confuse control with connection. The brands winning today are those with the most compelling journeys, the ones that let people see what happens next.

The move paid off. Butter is a well-established boutique studio of one, boasting clients like Nike, Puma, and the Morgans Hotel Group; and Sekendur has achieved the flexible lifestyle she long hoped for. 

“I really prefer to have the autonomy of controlling my time,” she says. “I love the freedom.”

Over the last eight years, the design industry has weathered a succession of storms, from the pandemic and political upheaval to broader industry shifts like design expertise moving in-house and the acquisition of smaller studios by larger strategy firms. But for Sekendur, it’s only been in the last year specifically—with the acceleration of generative AI—that she has noticed a fundamental shift in her daily business operations and its economics.

“I’m suddenly having to pitch for projects that I wouldn’t have prioritized in the past,” says Sekendur. “Some of them I wouldn’t have even considered before, because of how low they’re paid. Budgets have gotten significantly smaller, maybe like 50% or more than they were even last year.” 

According to Sekendur, clients are also taking far longer to move forward with a commission (it now takes “two months, not two weeks”). Project scopes have been stripped back, with services such as copywriting, illustration, and photography—which Butter once supplied and built teams around—disappearing from scopes of work entirely. 

“I’m very concerned about the big picture and what is going to happen,” says Sekendur. “Everything’s in such an unstable state.”

Across ten interviews with designers, agents, creative coaches, and industry leaders as well as a survey of nearly 1,300 independent designers conducted earlier this month, the same story emerges again and again: Freelancing in 2026 is fundamentally different than it was even a year ago. 

In this story, designers explain:

• How career ambitions (and income) have changed over the last year
• Why AI has changed designers’ relationships with clients and employers—and what to do about it
• The career advice that helps designers navigate uncertainty

A Whole New Game

From San Francisco, Kat Koh works as a creative career coach, advising creatives who she says, “look successful, but feel unfulfilled.” She is warm, empathetic, and curious; it is unsurprising to learn that her clients refer to her as “a career therapist.” When Koh first began working with designers, creative directors, and illustrators more than a decade ago—a time she describes as a “fairly prosperous period to be freelancing”—her sessions were largely built around helping individuals figure out what kind of designer they wanted to be.

“A lot of my clients were telling me at the time, ‘I’m making a living, but I feel very pigeonholed,’” she recalls. Koh helped them puzzle out questions like, How do I market myself beyond what I’ve become known for? Should I niche? Do I pivot? Where do I go next? “I was hearing from a lot of people who actually had time to think about what they really wanted to do,” she says.

Jumping ahead to 2026, Koh says that the questions that now arise in her sessions have shifted dramatically. “Almost everyone is having an existential crisis,” she says. Instead of refining their independent practice, many are questioning whether they should remain in the profession at all. 

“What I hear… is more just a kind of deep fear. A lot of them right now are worried about how their physical bodies are going to pay rent.” This brings Koh a lot of sadness: “I want them to be worried about whether their soul is thriving.” 

Sekendur frames this fear as emerging from “the pandemic, inflation, and now AI… It’s just one huge thing almost every year that really shakes the industry,” she says. 

AI is the—very large—last straw, so to speak. In Fast Company’s report, more than half of designers surveyed believe AI is undercutting their rates, and 68% believe it is eroding the value of human creativity.

“Clients now expect more while paying less,” wrote one survey respondent on AI’s effect on the industry. “Many clients are taking advantage of AI to underestimate our professionalism and pricing,” said another. 

While only 22% said they have lost work because of AI, Sekendur and others have a far more nuanced sense of AI’s impact on their life as a freelancer. AI isn’t replacing design, but it is changing how clients perceive it. 

As Sekendur says: “I feel like I’m charging less because AI has shifted how people think.” Independent art director and illustrator Eric Carter makes an apt comparison: “The desktop computer did not replace graphic design and neither will artificial intelligence,” he says. “But it will change it.”

The Change We Feared

In Birmingham, England, Luke Tonge runs an independent design practice while also organizing an annual design festival, Birmingham Design Festival, and heading up a co-working space that keeps him at the heart of the city’s creative community. Design is more than Tonge’s bread and butter; it is his lifestyle and an industry from which he has built community. 

Like 65% of respondents to the Fast Company survey, Tonge started freelancing after more than a decade working as a salaried employee at a design agency. Although being laid off accelerated the transition, freelancing was something he had long wanted to do, and looking back, he says he never truly felt at home in the agency world.

“I felt I was part of an industry that I didn’t really fit into,” says Tonge, describing the alcohol-fueled, work-hard/play-hard lifestyle of British design agencies. Freelancing, by contrast, gave him a sense of fulfillment he had long been missing. “Very quickly, I realized that the freedom and flexibility and joy quota was way higher,” he says. 

Over the past year, Tonge has watched the creative landscape change around him in ways he had not seen before. Initially, he wasn’t sure whether the industry’s anxiety around AI reflected genuine change or collective panic. “It was really hard to tell,” says Tonge, “Is this fear of change, or has change actually come into effect?”  

Then the redundancies began. “Last summer, there were agency staff based here at the co-working space who lost work directly because of AI,” he says. “I saw that on a week-by-week basis of people saying, ‘Can I come and see you? I’ve been made redundant. Are there any jobs going?’”

What began as a fear, says Tonge, has become tangible. “This is a very real thing. This isn’t just people getting laid off who are not very good. These are my peers who are now really struggling and they’re not getting the work that they used to get.” 

Yet Tonge is careful not to attribute every redundancy to artificial intelligence alone. “I think a lot of companies now are using AI as an excuse for layoffs when really… it’s just a numbers thing,” he says. Having experienced corporate layoffs himself, he is skeptical of the promise of employment as a refuge from uncertainty. 

“It’s unhealthy to believe that the company will always have your back,” he says. “The higher ups, especially, they just care about their bottom line.”

Tonge’s reflection reveals a contradiction that has always been at the heart of the creative economy, but has become sharply magnified in 2026. While freelancing is uncertain, salaried employment, especially in the time of AI, is also uncertain. For many designers today, the choice between independent practices and employment is not simply a choice between risk and security, but between an uncertainty that they directly manage or an uncertainty where decisions are being made by superiors. 

“I’d rather be at the helm of my own sinking ship,” says one independent designer of the tradeoffs between freelancing and salaried employment. “At least that way, I can sink while abiding by my own ethics.”  

Human Values

When Nike Kushick (who uses they/them pronouns) graduated from design school in Munich in 2022, they never expected to land a salaried design job. Heading into the working world without a firm plan, they initially scraped together income by working on the UX of an indie game for friends, but they ended up applying for a paid medical trial to cover rent while figuring out what to do next.

An opportunity arrived through their extended network, when a mutual friend mentioned an opening at the creative studio where she worked and encouraged Kushick to apply. “I didn’t have the guts to send out an application though,” Kushick recalls. Instead, the company reached out to them. “My friend had told them I would apply . . . and they thought I would be a match.”

At first, the role felt like a good fit. Kushick admired the agency’s attention to detail. But toward the start of 2025, they observed a radical change in the studio’s approach. 

“About the time when the company shifted towards being an AI-forward company, I started to lose my passion,” they say. Work that had once relied on an individual’s talent became increasingly centered on AI prompts. “Something that was previously done by a 3D designer would now be done by a 3D designer prompting something.” Most independent designers, similarly, have had to embed AI into their practice: According to Fast Company’s survey, only 10.92% say they never use AI. 

For Kushick, the issue wasn’t about new technology—something they themselves embrace in their work—but what the new technology did to the creative process. “The final output did not feel like it was my own,” they say. They also struggled with the ethical implications of using generative AI. “I always had in the back of my head how much water I am using, how many amazing artists’ work I’m stealing, and I don’t even know who I’m stealing from.”

Their experience resonates with one survey respondent’s concern for future generations: “We should be more worried about our younger creatives . . . It’s important that as more senior creatives we are helping to mentor their critical thinking skills and teaching them the importance of strategy and craft so they aren’t understanding a creative career as purely visual output.”

As the studio embraced AI, Kushick says that the pace of work accelerated and the pressure intensified—a finding seen across industries. “Clients now have an unrealistic expectation towards the speed at which thoughtful design takes,” one designer wrote when surveyed. Another: “[AI] distorts clients’ impressions of how long certain tasks should take.” Another: “Clients expect more ideas faster, and for less money,” and “people expect great things in minutes.” 

As Beth Pickens, an artist consultant based out of Los Angeles, says: “We live in a culture that wants content, but doesn’t care about the people who make anything. That’s always been true, but now it’s at hyper speed.”

For Kushick, the acceleration led to burnout. Eventually, they were signed off on medical leave, before deciding to quit the agency altogether. Now, they are considering what comes next, remaining open to either freelancing or salaried employment if the right opportunity presents itself. For them, what matters most isn’t employment status; it’s about finding an environment where human craft—and time—is appreciated. 

“I saw a job opening for a designer for a community garden,” says Kushick. “This is something I can imagine doing. I don’t want to work for tech companies anymore.” 

Shared Values

Every designer interviewed for this piece wanted to talk about AI. It’s the big question mark that designers are grappling with at this moment. And across all interviews, one discipline was repeatedly singled out as particularly vulnerable to AI: illustration. Countless Instagram posts by illustrators in the last year have also attested to the decline of illustration gigs. 

One former independent designer who recently returned to salaried employment as a creative director observed that her company is no longer “hiring the freelance copywriter or the freelance illustrator.” Survey respondents reported a similar trend: “Small projects for freelancers <$1000 are going to AI instead,” wrote one. Another says: “People are using AI instead of artists to do custom illustrations, videos, photo collages, paintings, etc.,” while a third describes “generating custom artwork for a client with no budget to hire an illustrator.”

Eric Carter, an illustrator whose clients include The New York Times, believes the disruption has been most acute at the lower end of the market. “There is this whole gig economy of illustrators doing smaller jobs,” he says from his studio in Los Angeles. “Fiverr was already cheapening everything… the bottom was already pretty low. And then having AI replace that, it just cut it out.” 

Carter has been insulated from that shift because, as he puts it, “I get paid to think.” This idea—that a designer’s value is increasingly about their taste and approach as opposed to pure craft or technical ability—reverberates throughout the freelance industry. “You can’t automate taste and creativity,” one survey respondent wrote. Another: “Ideas and taste is what is needed to succeed.” And another: “AI is only as good as the strategy and input.”

Other interviewees describe a different, increasingly valuable kind of protection to their freelance careers: shared values. Sarah Epperson, an illustrator in Los Angeles who specializes in social justice campaigning, works predominantly with progressive political organizations and non-profits. She hasn’t noticed any change in her income with the advent of AI and believes that people continue to commission her because doing so aligns with their principles. 

“I just think that they know that [using AI is] so counterintuitive to everything that they believe in,” she says, a contrast that can be seen in the Republicans’ embrace of AI in opposition to New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s celebration of human-led campaigns. “It’s way more about, like, ‘We want to hire you because of who you are and what you’ve done,’ not just, ‘We just want this quick flashy thing.’” 

Designer Kelli Anderson has noticed a similar shift in the design space. “The clients who are currently hiring artists, it almost seems like it’s a political move for them to treat them well and pay you well,” she says. 

What interviewees describe is a split in the market: There are clients who appreciate what a designer can bring to the table, and there are those that see it as a business expense that can be minimized. “AI is the new litmus test to see how someone values design,” wrote one of the survey’s respondents. 

The New Normal 

Kat Irannejad, director of visual artist management company Totally Reps, says the biggest change that she has observed for freelancers is the growing need to stitch together multiple sources of income across a variety of services. 

“Many artists are doing everything from teaching to going to artist fairs… selling prints online . . . They really have had to learn to diversify where income is coming from,” says Irannejad. 

A calligraphy artist that she represents, for example, used to get by on commercial illustration alone but recently took a part-time job at Trader Joe’s, where they now hand-paint the store’s signage. It is this kind of career diversification, Irannejad says, that is becoming increasingly common. 

“Diversification has always been the case. But right now it’s not negotiable,” agrees creative coach Koh. “I call it a layered career.” She points to Pablo Delcan as a prime example of a freelancer who has made this kind of layered career a success. Delcan works across multiple forms—from stop motion and cover design to title sequences—but also teaches, publishes books, and sells physical objects in his webstore (everything from totes and baseball caps to hand-painted artworks).  

To set yourself up for freelance, says Koh, more than ever, is “marketing all day long. If you’re not findable on Google, on ChatGPT . . . it’s going to be harder to run your business.” 

Across several interviews, it became clear that well-established designers, who are known in the industry for a personal aesthetic or approach, are the least financially affected by the changes wrought by AI. They say that they’ve seen an uptick in luxury clients commissioning work, as brands seek to differentiate themselves through creative that immediately reads as human-made craft.

“Craft and visual art is almost becoming something considered premium,” says Irannejad, citing brands like Hermès and Bottega Veneta as deliberately engaging human creators for their marketing as a new way to stand apart from AI slop. “There is a luxury and a beauty in the craft . . . you know the work you’re getting is 100 percent bespoke and ownable.” 

For those unable to penetrate into this most exclusive luxury market, the path is less clear. Koh is adamant that she would not recommend designers leave employment for freelance at this moment in time without already having some form of “stable income coming in,” which can support them while they build a client network; a couple of recurring clients, for example. 

“And let’s figure out if you actually want to play this game because the game is like 30-40 percent different today than it was before,” she says.

“Everyone wants an exit strategy . . .” Koh continues. “But what nobody talks about is what I call a staying strategy, and you need a staying strategy just as much as an exit strategy.”

What is evident across the survey data and multiple interviewers is that the labor of design is increasingly fragmented in today’s creative industry. Designers are forced to sell their labor in multiple markets simply to maintain the same standard of living that they used to and the market is not compensating highly skilled creative work in the way it did even a few years ago.

All of this raises bigger questions. For many years now, the freelance creative has been not only someone who simply sells their craft, but an entrepreneur expected to market themselves and build a personal brand. Diversification and resilience are emerging as absolutely vital and central capacities for freelancers navigating the age of AI. What gets lost in the urgent need to find sources of income and to adapt are questions like: Shouldn’t clients pay more? Why are corporations cutting budgets? The burden, as always, shifts to the individual. 

It’s human connections, ultimately, that are a small silver lining in this story: Irannejad and Anderson both encourage freelancers to “band together,” to join organizations like the Freelancers Union, as Anderson has done, and to share stories, exchange information about who pays on time and who doesn’t, to swap resources. The freelancers spoken to for this story describe finding most of their steady, reliable work through their community or referrals. 

As Pickins says, “The key is to get off the internet and be with people . . . People will actually take care of each other and help one another. They’ll help strangers, they’ll help friends. They will gather in large groups, they will organize.”

Thanks to AI and paid influencers, plenty of political ads don’t follow that standard script anymore, leaving voters in the dark that what they’re seeing. Instead of just paid traditional ads slotted between commercial breaks on TV or in between songs on the radio that clearly identify themselves as advertising, it’s also digital content designed to stop you mid-scroll on social media. This content isn’t always real, and it certainly doesn’t always say who’s paying for it.

A pair of bills introduced this week by a trio of California Democrats looks to change that.

A new era of political ads

California has faced these new, unconventional forms of political advertising during its primaries this year. During the Los Angeles mayor’s race, former reality TV star Spencer Pratt got traction from dramatic AI-made videos he reposted to social media, not traditional TV ads. (In one of the AI-generated videos, which was Batman themed, the former reality TV villain portrayed himself as the hero.)

Meanwhile in the state’s governors race, billionaire and former gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is facing a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission that the influencers he paid to post about his campaign didn’t disclose they were posting paid political ads.

Sen. Adam Schiff on Monday introduced the AI Ads Act, which would ban fraudulent AI in political ads, and the Promoting Authenticity with Influencer Disclaimer (PAID) Act, which would require influencers to disclose who prominently who paid them to post. The bills, first reported by Semafor, could help modernize political advertising law at a time when political communications is rapidly changing.

AI political ads and influencers paid to post without disclosures

The AI Ads Act, which Schiff first introduced in 2024 and reintroduced Monday with Rep. Ro Khanna, would update existing campaign advertising and fundraising law to expand a ban on fraudulent misrepresentation to include content generated all or in part by AI.

“Fraudulent AI advertising has already proliferated in races across the country, and if Congress does not act, this runaway challenge will only get worse as AI becomes increasingly capable of blurring the lines between fact and fiction,” Schiff said in a statement. “With November elections around the corner, time is of the essence to reign in false political advertising.”

The PAID Act, which Schiff introduced with Rep. Mark Takano, would update existing election advertising law to require paid posts online to include “clear and conspicuous manner that the communication has been paid for.” It makes exceptions for content posted on a political committee’s own website or content posted by political committee employees whose job is post content.

“Users deserve to know if a creator has been compensated by a campaign to post for them,” Takano said in a statement.

Adapting regulations for the way political actors communicate with voters now

When it comes to AI in political ads, the issue has so far been decided at the state level, with 31 states passing laws about deepfakes and AI disclosures as of June, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At the national level, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have before introduced legislation that would restrict deepfakes and mandate AI disclosures in political ads.

Federal law already requires influencers to disclose when their posts are paid advertisements, political or not, though studies have shown few do. In politics specifically, special interest groups and foreign governments like Israel and Russia have been caught paying influencers to post.

“Those who follow these influencers are deceived into thinking these messages are genuine independent thought, when the messages are simply paid commercials,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen said in a statement.

Both the AI Ads Act and PAID Act are endorsed by Public Citizen as well as the government watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, and Common Cause.

Transparency in the U.S. electoral system has “historically been a bulwark of our democracy,” says CREW vice president for policy Debra Perlin. Regulating the improper use of AI in ads will “help protect against the potential use of AI to confuse or mislead voters,” she said in a statement, while updating influencer disclosures will adapt regulations for the way political actors communicate with voters now.

Not every political ad today ends with the candidate looking straight to camera and saying their name and that they approve this message. By updating regulations to acknowledge that reality, voters will know when what they’re seeing is an ad.

The color on the fabric was not produced by dyeing. Instead, it’s a process that mimics the way nature gives fruits, flowers, and animals their color. The hues on the garments were grown into the material over the course of 24 hours by billions of E. coli bacteria engineered by OXMAN’s team of designers and scientists.

For Neri Oxman, the former MIT Media Lab professor who launched OXMAN in 2020, this project—called Vigils—offers a radical alternative to the way the apparel sector dyes clothing. But it also provokes us to think more broadly about how the fashion industry’s status quo is to extract and exploit nature. Oxman wants us to imagine a world where fashion works alongside nature to co-create in ways that are beneficial to both humans and the planet.

“There’s a wide array of relationships between design and nature spanning extraction and generation,” Oxman says. “You can extract dyes from flowers and use them in textiles, or you could replicate the exact genetic code in a bacteria to express that color.”

The traditional dyeing industry is highly toxic and polluting. Textile dyeing and finishing accounts for up to 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution, translating into a trillion gallons of polluted water discharged into the ocean. While several biotech firms have created more sustainable dyes, plugging cleaner chemicals into existing dye houses, OXMAN’s approach reimagines dyeing from the ground up, treating dyes and fabrics as living organisms that can be grown.

And while the Vigils project is still experimental, Oxman’s long-term goal is to commercialize and scale the technology, reshaping the future of fashion.

A Lab That Works Alongside Nature

After five years of building it in stealth, Oxman opened her new studio in Hell’s Kitchen last year. Together with her husband, Bill Ackman, who runs the hedge fund Pershing Square, Oxman has invested upwards of $100 million in the studio so far. Inside, roughly two dozen researchers work on projects at the intersection of engineering, data science, biotechnology, and design.

For Oxman, whose background includes degrees in architecture and design computation, the lab is a wonderland. One room reconstructs the atmosphere in New York on a specific day in 1864. In another room, scientists monitor an ancient oak-tulip tree forest to see whether they can rewild ancient ecosystems.

“You can move from a robot to a computer to a pipette in 30 seconds,” Oxman says, noting that the lab’s mission is “nature-centricity”—treating nature as a collaborator, rather than a resource to be extracted from.

Before Vigils, her most recent project was O°, a shoe made entirely from PHA, a biodegradable plastic that is produced and broken down by bacteria. The shoe is engineered to decompose in soil or seawater within weeks. Oxman says the pigmentation research that emerged from the shoe project provided the spark that led to Vigils.

How to Grow Color

Oxman has a fascination with bacteria, which she believes can be engineered in creative ways. It’s possible to program the genetic code of a microbe to build almost anything. In this case, her team has inserted genes that instruct E. coli to produce two pigment classes—indigos and melanins—the same molecules behind the blue in denim and the brown-black of hair and skin. “Bacteria is the workhorse of synthetic biology,” she says.

For Marcus Walker, a synthetic biologist who worked on Vigils, it’s important to consider where color comes from in the living world. A tiger’s stripe or the swirl in a fingerprint aren’t painted on; individual cells read their position and identify what pigment they should produce. “If you think about how nature dyes things, it comes from the inside out,” Walker says.

Borrowing from this logic, the Vigils team coats fibers with a chemical that the bacteria can sense. They then spray the whole garment with a bacterial culture, and the pigment appears only where those coated fibers have been knitted in, which allows the team to create patterns in the fabric.

“You cover the whole textile in those bacteria,” Walker says. “But only where we’ve knitted particular coated fibers will you [get] the pigment response that you’ve encoded into the bacteria.”

Vigils doesn’t depend only on the bacteria to work. It also requires thinking about the texture of the fabric. Textile engineer Jessy Lu knits the capes on an industrial 3D machine—the kind used to knit sneaker uppers—from silk whose filaments are close to the scale of the bacteria. “The materials offer scaffolding for the process that we’re doing with the bacterial pigmentation,” she says.

It’s an approach that’s very different from those of other companies on the market that produce more sustainable dyes.

Pili, the French company behind Citizens of Humanity’s bio-based Eco-Indigo, ferments engineered microbes in tanks, filters out finished dye, and drops it into existing dye machines. The British startup Colorifix, which has worked with Pangaia, grows pigment in a fermenter and applies it through a conventional dyeing setup. Both aim for a more eco-friendly, scalable replacement, which is designed to produce the uniform result consumers are used to seeing in clothing.

“You get a homogenous material that is yellow or purple that is visually indistinguishable from something dyed through traditional chemicals,” Lu says.

But the goal with Vigils is different. The point is to grow color directly onto the material, rather than to saturate the material with color. And ultimately, this process will result in retaining the inconsistency and variation that we see in the colors in the natural world. Oxman’s team wants to create patterns that aren’t possible through industrial approaches. “There’s variation that is always interesting,” Walker says.

Reimagining the System

For now, the capes at OXMAN look like a stunning art exhibit. But the lab’s founder believes the process of bacterial pigmentation can be commercialized and incorporated into the fashion industry.

To do so will require more research. But perhaps more daunting, it will require companies and factories to reimagine how they operate. This will be hard because the fashion supply chain—including industrial dyeing—has operated the same way for decades, if not centuries. Oxman’s vision is to reimagine the entire process of dyeing, rather than to improve it incrementally.

“We’re not in the business of adding on,” she says. “We’re in the business of rethinking the industry.”

This means treating color, decomposition, and texture as properties that can be manipulated and written into a garment’s genetic code from the start. “It’s inventing a completely new language of craftsmanship that is authored by genetics,” she says.

None of this will happen fast. Oxman estimates it will take decades for her vision to become a reality. But she believes future generations will expect the process of making clothes to be less extractive and polluting, proclaiming, “I believe in all of my 230 bones that the future of fashion is the future of science.”

“What people think of these sorts of worst-case scenarios is, ‘Well, I’m going to end up in some horrible ICU setting. It’s going to be in a lab space or something,'” says Dr. Julie Moldenhauer, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Nemours Children’s Health. The hospital upended that expectation and designed a space that feels “like a home away from home,” she adds.

Moldenhauer and her medical colleagues at Nemours worked closely with the Chicago-based architecture firm Perkins&Will on the unit’s design. It minimizes the stress and anxiety that comes with a high-risk pregnancy and accommodates the weeks, or even months, of care mothers and babies require before birth and postpartum.

“It’s not like you’re coming into a hospital, giving birth, and leaving in a couple days,” says Perkins&Will’s Laura Ethridge Morris, the project’s lead designer and a healthcare interiors specialist. “You’re kind of moving in.”

Designing for the family first

The Advanced Delivery Unit treats fetuses diagnosed with anomalies that put them at risk of birth defects, congenital diseases, or even death. It also uses practices from the world of hotels and hospitality to ease the psychologically challenging weeks and months mothers experience before and after giving birth.

Each room in the unit features elements commonly found in hotel rooms, from spacious bathrooms to distinctive wall art to large windows overlooking the Nemours estate, built in the early 1900s by the du Pont family. They’re outfitted with cabinets and shelves for food and personal items a mother and her family might need during extended stays.

Families can take breaks, have meals, or work here, too, thanks to desks, standalone phone booths for private calls, and lounge spaces overlooking the estate grounds.

The unit also has family pantries, which are large enough to host family dinners, baby showers, and other gatherings without having to cram people into the clinical setting of a hospital room. “It’s almost like a multipurpose room for the patients and the families to use while they’re there with us, which is unheard of on labor and delivery units,” Moldenhauer says.

Balancing specialized care

But the unit is still a hospital, and nurses and doctors often come and go. While that movement is unavoidable, it isn’t obtrusive. The unit rooms offer as much privacy to patients as possible, with care team areas set right next to each room’s door that can be fully closed off from the rest of the room.

“It was very important to this team to be directly adjacent, but not feel like they’re in the family’s way or in the patient’s way,” says Morris, the designer, noting the care team can have the light on to complete their work without interrupting mothers’ sleep.

Details like that ease the long stays patients are often expected to have at the hospital, but they’ve also been integrated into how the rooms function during deliveries.

Most rooms in a typical labor and delivery unit have areas for what’s known as the “stork team”—the nurses who weigh, measure, and otherwise treat babies in the first moments after they’re born. For the high-risk pregnancies at Nemours, these teams can be upwards of 12 people who are standing by to perform life-saving procedures on newborns. “You can imagine you don’t want them like hovering in the room while you’re giving birth,” Morris says.

Each room includes a separate space for these procedures that is blocked from the patient’s view by frosted E-glass. (E-glass, or electric glass, is frosted with the power off, unfrosted with it on.) The stork team can observe delivery without intruding.

“As soon as the baby is born, the baby’s handed to the stork team and they can unfrost the glass and the mom can see that they have the baby, that they’re taking care of the baby, and that everything is going as it should,” Morris says.  

Preparing for the unpredictable

The unit is also designed and wired for when things don’t quite go as planned. “These moms are also high risk to give birth at any point in time,” Morris says. “In every space, even in the family lounges, even in the respite spaces, we had to allow for the infrastructure that if mom went into labor right there and they didn’t have time to get her to a labor room, we could roll in everything they need.”

It’s an unusual level of preparedness, but one that matches the unpredictability of high-risk pregnancies. And though the unit includes many elements that account for the challenges that come with these pregnancies, it was important to both the clinicians and the designers that the patient experience was as comfortable and calming as possible.

Moldenhauer, the maternal-fetal specialist, sees Nemours Children’s Health as a model for delivery wards to follow. “You can have the ability to make it a medical setting, but it can still be very warm and inviting at the same time,” she says.

When people in Maricopa County vote early, they sign green affidavit envelopes that are scanned into a county system; election officials then compare that signature with the voter’s signature on file. The county uses an an enterprise-built, custom system designed in-house to do the comparisons digitally, but the previous version of the software required officials to scroll down to see the signature on file.

That scroll might have taken only a few seconds, but that can add up in a county where nearly 88% of the more than 2 million ballots cast in the 2024 election were cast early. That year, Maricopa County reviewed 973,029 early ballots sent by mail, and another 631,006 early ballots returned to a vote center or drop box.

To speed up the process, the new version of the software shows signatures side by side, including a voter’s signatures from recent elections. It’s a simple change they estimate will cut down on review time per signature by about 50%. The change could also help improve accuracy, remove bias, and speed up a ballot-counting process that on average takes about 13 days to complete.

“The new system shows the three most recent signature examples we have for the voter, plus the signature on their voter registration form on the screen at the same time alongside the current signature that’s under review,” Sam Stone, chief of staff for the Maricopa County Recorder, tells Fast Company. “There is no scrolling, as the signatures can all be seen on the monitor screen at the same time.”

The updated software has other changes, too, including a new “back” button, as well as the option to note a “household exchange” if two people in the same household mistakenly signed each other’s affidavits.

To eliminate implicit bias, the new system shows signatures in isolation, rather than alongside the rest of the affidavit that would reveal a voter’s party affiliation, and it also shows real-time tracking data for reviewers to track their accuracy and speed to improve performance, Stone says.

No one signs their name the exact same way every time, and the Office of the Arizona Secretary of State recommends reviewers take into account characteristics like the type of writing (cursive versus print), the slant of writing, and overall spacing, size, and proportions to determine whether signatures are consistent. By seeing multiple instances of a voter’s signature together, all at once and at a glance, officials can make those determinations quicker and with more confidence. It’s a simple update that could make a meaningful difference in rebuilding trust in the election process.

Faith in the accuracy of elections has fallen in the U.S. over the past decade, driven largely by attitudes among Republicans as President Donald Trump falsely claimed he won the 2020 election (which he lost to former President Joe Biden), sowing distrust in voting by mail.

Local election officials have worked to rebuild trust, like one Idaho county that put all its ballots online, while in Arizona, a battleground state, county election officials livestream tabulation rooms. By improving speed and accuracy of signature verification with a simple UI fix, officials in Arizona could further build trust with voters.

Their latest collaboration, the Nike Air Zoom Hyperslide, looks like an everyday recovery slide, but hidden within its simplistic design is a combination of Air Zoom cushioning, heat, and vibration technology. During Nike’s media briefing, Tobie Hatfield, senior director of athlete innovation, described the Hyperslide as a product designed to begin recovery in the first five minutes after activity.

For decades, athletic innovation focused on helping athletes run faster, jump higher, and generate more power. Recovery was treated as something that happened after an effort was completed—an hour on the training table, a dip in the cold tub, or active stretching. Today, however, recovery is intrinsically a part of performance itself. Teams spend millions on sports science; athletes are extending their careers well into their late thirties and beyond, and longevity is talked about almost as much as explosiveness.

Hyperice believes recovery shouldn’t start once an athlete has time to be still. It should start the moment the final buzzer sounds

“The opportunities around this wearable tech segment just become limitless,” says Jim Huether, Hyperice’s CEO. Rather than viewing the Hyperslide as another product across their portfolio, he sees it as part of a larger evolution where footwear and apparel become intelligent, connected technologies that work while athletes go about their day.

That vision extends well beyond a singular product launch. Along with last year’s launch of the Hyperboot, the Hyperslide signals what Nike and Hyperice believe is the beginning of an entirely new category: tech-enabled footwear that blends performance equipment and wearable electronics.

The Hyperslide will be available on September 29 for $249 on Nike.com and Hyperice.com, as well as at Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods in the U.S.

Recovery: The new performance frontier

The conversation around elite performance has shifted beyond what happens during competition. For years sports technology used to revolve around making athletes perform better.

The question driving many a research lab and product development team across the industry today is: How quickly can athletes recover so they can do it all again tomorrow?

That evolution has transformed recovery from a postgame routine into a strategic investment.

“You have recovery and longevity, and those two words are somewhat synonymous because you need recovery to enhance longevity.” Huether says. “There was a time 15 years ago where everybody was just focused on training. Athletes were overtraining; their bodies were breaking down. Over the last decade, as science has evolved, athletes have understood it’s not just about my performance; it’s about the duration of my performance over time.”

This shift has reshaped product development. Companies are now focused on how technology can help athletes stay healthier over the span of their careers.

Huether believes the shift is creating a new competitive edge.

“If you’re feeling better, if you recover properly and you’re coming back the next day feeling in top form, you’re performing better,” he says. “If you’re an athlete who keeps your body intact for 15 years . . . you’re going to have a lot more contract dollars.”

This has extended well beyond professional sports. As recovery science has become more accessible, the same technologies that were once limited to training facilities have found their way into the routines of weekend golfers, runners, and anyone who is hoping to stay active later in life. The opportunity, Huether believes, isn’t simply helping people recover faster but helping them continue to do what they love for years longer.

Why a slide?

Innovation comes in various forms. Sometimes it’s inventing something new, and sometimes it means reimagining something so common that people won’t notice it.

For athletes, slides are as common in locker rooms as towels. That familiarity was intentional. Rather than inventing a new recovery ritual, Hatfield said the team wanted to build around one athletes already embraced.

 “The Nike and Hyperice brains got together . . . and really started thinking about how do we innovate a slide, which is so common for athletes to use in all sports,” says Huether.

While last year’s Hyperboot introduced many athletes to wearable recovery technology, its form represented a new category consumers had to gain some understanding of. A slide doesn’t require much education.

Huether believes that one of the hallmarks of successful product designs comes from not changing consumer behavior but making the behavior they already have more valuable.

Beyond competition

“We learned a lot with the Hyperboot,” Huether says. “If you know the history there, we announced that at the Olympics in Paris. But we had done a whole bunch of product testing with Olympians prior to the actual games, getting their feedback.”

What they discovered was that recovery wasn’t lacking because athletes didn’t believe in it. It was lacking mainly because of the complexities of their schedules.

“Athletes needed innovation for recovery, and they needed something for on the go,” Huether says. “They’re doing a ton of travel. They’re getting on planes, walking to arenas, and have very little time in between to take care of their body.”

Hatfield said Nike initially viewed the Hyperslide primarily as a post-performance recovery tool but realized athletes were also wearing prototypes before practices and competitions, using the gentle heat to loosen their feet and ankles before activity. The discovery reinforced the idea that recovery and preparation often overlap.

Nike and Hyperice began focusing on providing recovery while athletes were on the move. This thinking shaped nearly every aspect of the Hyperslide.

“The ecosystem of tech-enabled footwear and apparel is designed in a wearable format to meet the athlete with their lifestyle,” he says. “The more advanced our technology gets as time goes on and battery and sensor technology gets better, then we can make things smaller, lighter, more powerful. The opportunities around this wearable tech segment just become limitless. And it’s really, really exciting.”

Prototypes

Innovation often comes down to a willingness to discard good ideas in pursuit of better ones. For Nike and Hyperice, this meant building and rebuilding the Hyperslide dozens of times before arriving at the final product. Huether estimates the teams cycled through up to 40 prototypes, refining details from the heat settings to overall feel underfoot.

The challenge wasn’t just about integrating heat and vibration into a slide. It was also ensuring those technologies worked in tandem with Nike’s Air Zoom cushioning, leading to an experience that feels naturally and not heavily engineered.

“We wanted the vibration and the heat to feel like it was going through the whole foot,” Huether says. “But you’re using Air Zoom technology that’s meant to be very comfortable. So we changed the vibration sequences. We changed the strength of the settings. We explored a ton of different heat temperatures . . . and we ended up with something really great driven by athlete feedback.”

Hatfield, the athlete innovation director, said many of those refinements centered on restraint rather than adding more technology. Unlike the Hyperboot, whose compression system is designed to prepare the lower leg, the Hyperslide’s heating and vibration systems had to remain subtle enough that athletes could comfortably walk in them. The goal was to make recovery feel effortless.

The final Hyperslide utilizes magnetic, independently operable Hyperslide Pods to provide three levels of “HyperHeat” and three levels of vibration to the top strap while maintaining the plush feel Nike fans have come to expect from an Air Zoom platform. Users will be able to personalize vibration intensity and session settings via Bluetooth through the Hyperice app. The slide is designed to work immediately out of the box with a default 15-minute recovery session.

As for Nike, athlete testing is of the highest value for Huether and Hyperice. It’s about bringing athletes into the design process long before the public sees the final result.

“When we bring on a pro athlete, it’s not just about marketing,” he says. “We want your feedback with products in the early stages so that we can use that knowledge, funnel it to our product development team, and get better.”

Every adjustment to the vibration pattern, heat profiles, shape, and feel of the Hyperslide reflects countless hours of testing from the very individuals who depend on the product during the demands of their profession. The final version is defined by how seamlessly all of those technologies disappear once the slide is on foot.

Footwear meets recovery

Footwear companies and consumer electronics companies used to operate in separate worlds. Material, fit, and biomechanics were the focus of one, and the other homed in on software, batteries, and processors.

The convergence of Nike and Hyperice is all the more intriguing when you consider future possibilities. While Nike brings decades of expertise in performance footwear, Hyperice approaches product development in an entirely different way. The company’s reputation is around connected recovery technologies, from percussion devices and compression systems to heat and thermal therapy.

Huether says that combining these disciplines has expanded what footwear can do beyond cushioning and support.

“Nike is the expert on creating performance-driven footwear and apparel,” he says. “We know so much about consumer electronics and these different modalities and how they change the physiology of the body. Those together are just unlocking tons of new capabilities.”

The partnership between the two brands required more than combining technologies. It commanded a different approach to design. Hyperice has long looked outside the sports industry for inspiration, particularly to Apple, whose products, while technologically sophisticated, are rooted in simplicity.

“Everything they do is very intuitive and simplistic,” Huether says. “It is so advanced on the back end . . . but from a consumer experience perspective, it’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it’s easy to understand.”

Early concepts of the Hyperslide explored more complexities before the teams intentionally simplified the experience.

“We wanted to make sure it was easy to understand, really comfortable, really convenient,” Huether said.

Hatfield believes that convergence works only if athletes stop thinking about the technology altogether. Every design decision was intended to create a product that feels familiar first and technologically advanced second.

Within its familiar silhouette is a carefully orchestrated combination of Air Zoom cushioning, integrated heating elements, embedded vibration motors, rechargeable electronics, and app connectivity. The goal for users isn’t to think about those individual systems but for the product to feel as seamless as slipping on a pair of slides after a workout.

In that lens, the Hyperslide is more like a wearable device for your feet. It blurs the boundaries between sports equipment and consumer electronics and could very well influence how future performance products are designed.

An ecosystem of products

The Hyperslide may be Nike and Hyperice’s newest collaboration, but it’s only another building block in what both brands believe will become an interconnected ecosystem of wearable performance technologies. The Hyperboot introduced athletes to tech-enabled footwear, and the Hyperslide expands that idea into a more casual form. The broader ambition is to create products that work in tandem rather than in isolation.

This vision began to crystallize during the Paris Olympics. As Nike and Hyperice watched athlete after athlete experience the Hyperboot for the first time, Huether says the reaction confirmed they were onto something much larger than a single product launch.

“We knew we had something big,” he said. “We went back to the drawing board after that Olympic experience and said we got to create a long-term roadmap and get ahead of the game on everything footwear and apparel and really own this ecosystem.”

Huether says multiple products are planned over the next four years, each building on lessons learned from the last. Longer term, he envisions those products becoming increasingly intelligent and working together as a coordinated system.

“When you think about apparel and footwear and having a whole ecosystem of products that communicate with each other . . . you can have a full-body experience on recovery, body maintenance, or warm-up,” Huether says.

As battery technology and sensors continue to evolve, he believes those systems will become more adaptive than controlled—adjusting the level of recovery on an athlete’s activity rather than relying on fixed routines.

It’s a vision that mirrors the evolution of other technology industries. Smartphones have become lifelines. Smartwatches have become health hubs. These are individual devices that have gradually transformed into ecosystems where each new product makes the others more valuable.

Nike and Hyperice appear to be set on the idea that performance technology will follow a similar path. In this version of the future, athletes won’t think in terms of individual recovery products. They’ll think in terms of connected experiences that will aid them before training, during competition, and long after the game is over.

The iPhone for feet

Every product launch comes with great promises. However, it’s rare that a company will compare their newest innovation to one of the most influential consumer devices ever created, the iPhone.

Huether doesn’t shy away from the comparison. When asked how he hopes people will look back on the Nike-Hyperice partnership a decade from now, he didn’t talk sales or market shares. It was about changing expectations.

“We believe that the Hyperboot . . . we want people to look back and [say] that’s like the iPhone 1,” he says. “It’s going to get smaller, lighter, more dynamic, and more technological.”

It’s a bold analogy, but one that reveals how both companies are thinking beyond today’s product cycle. The first iPhone was revolutionary because it fundamentally changed what people knew a phone to be. Huether believes wearable recovery technology is coming to a similar inflection point, where footwear and apparel will transform from passive equipment into active performance tools.

That future will require advances in batteries, materials, and the increasing ability to integrate sophisticated technologies without sacrificing comfort or simplicity. For Nike and Hyperice, the Hyperslide is a step in that evolution. If the past decade of sports innovation was defined by helping athletes perform at their peak, the next decade may be defined on helping them stay there.

Peach & Lily’s Advanced Rebound Bioglow Zombie Cream is designed to target “zombie cells” that can contribute to visible signs of aging. The $59 cream launches July 27 on the brand’s website and as a retail exclusive at Ulta Beauty—where Peach & Lily tops the K-beauty category and is the second-largest prestige brand.

For the cream, Peach & Lily is combining the latest in skin science with clever marketing to get people curious about the cells being addressed by the cream.

What are zombie cells?

Zombie cells, aka senescent cells, are damaged cells that haven’t died. In skin, they release signals that cause inflammation, which contributes to the aging process. Peach & Lily’s CEO, Alicia Yoon, says the presence of the cells—and the havoc they wreak on skin—was something she’s wanted to tackle but didn’t have a good solution for until recently.

“We can have science that understands the mechanism of things that are happening in our skin, but sometimes it takes a minute for the research to catch up on ingredients that can actually do something about it,” Yoon says. “We kept testing and formulating and seeking out the best ingredients and so forth. Through the advancements in skincare, [we can address] visible damage from senescent cells in a scientifically rigorous formula.”

One of those new ingredients is Eterwell Youth. Introduced in 2024, the ingredient is derived from an alpine willow plant and included in Peach & Lily’s product to remove clear signs of senescent cell damage. Peach & Lily’s product also uses an antioxidant called fisetin to calm signs of inflammation linked to the cells, and includes a biosynthetic placenta growth factor complex to repair the signs of damage left on the skin.

Penny Coy, senior vice president of marketing at Ulta Beauty, says the cutting-edge formulation was part of what enticed Ulta to be the product’s exclusive retailer. “It’s not just another product launch,” she says. “It’s innovation [in] treatment-inspired science . . . which very much excited us.” 

Undead outreach

As it rolls out the product, Peach & Lily is combining the need to educate consumers about the product with an out-of-the-casket marketing campaign. 

“One thing that has been a winning combination for us is pairing breakthrough innovation with breakthrough marketing,” Yoon says. When it teased the launch on July 23, the brand posted a video of a model whose face transforms into a zombie’s visage. For the launch, it has enlisted actors in full zombie makeup to advertise the product.

In New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Peach & Lily will deploy the zombie actors to install interactive, tear-away ads on streets across the cities. “[The ad] is only showcasing zombies,” Yoon says. “It sets up the consumer to already be asking the question, ‘Why zombies?’ So . . . there’s a natural resolution when we educate on zombie cells.” 

It’s not the first time Peach & Lily’s influencer marketing has taken an unconventional approach.

Last year, the brand sent content creators unbranded samples of its MiniProtein Exosome Bioactive Ampoule, encouraging an unbiased review, before revealing that it was behind the packages. With the Advanced Rebound BioGLow Zombie Cream rollout, it’s hoping to revive its reputation for viral marketing.

But, as in an actual hockey game, the two sides of this mutually beneficial $4.7 billion bridge are scuffling over its control. For months, the bridge has been the lightning rod for diplomatic tensions between President Donald Trump and Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, who have turned the bridge’s financing, operations, and even its opening date into points of contention.

Designed as a symbol of collaboration and shared interests between the two countries, the 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometer) bridge now highlights their divisions.

Delays and conflict

The bridge adds a crucial transportation option to the busiest trade corridor between the U.S. and Canada. An estimated $300 million worth of commerce flows between the two sides every day, including a significant amount of material related to the region’s automotive industry, which spans the border.

Before the Gordie Howe International Bridge, many of those goods moved across the Ambassador Bridge, which sits 2 miles away and also connects Detroit and Windsor. The owners of the Ambassador Bridge, the Moroun family, had opposed the new crossing since studies for it began in 2001. Work officially started on the project in 2013, and building has been underway since 2018. After several delays and a COVID-related slowdown in work, construction was completed in late 2025.

Then more delays arrived. In February, with the bridge nearly ready to open, the family leader, Matthew Moroun, met with the U.S. commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick. Hours later, Trump threatened to block the opening of the bridge.

Canada—which fully funded the Howe bridge and shares ownership of it with the state of Michigan—pushed back, if gently. Carney said shortly after that “the situation will be settled.”

Tensions subsided, and the bridge’s opening was loosely planned for the summer. Then Trump complained about the financial details. Under the original agreement, dating to 2012, Canada would split the toll revenue with the state of Michigan, but only after recouping the bridge costs. Trump blasted that arrangement, calling for more money to flow to the U.S.

Under a new deal signed in mid-July, half of the bridge’s net revenue for the first 15 years will be placed in an economic development fund controlled by the U.S., appeasing Trump. Both sides seemed to be content and set a grand opening date for the bridge on July 27.

But then, Trump announced 50% tariffs on Canadian goods, further inflaming the relationship. Canada responded by disinviting the U.S. from the grand opening festivities and reframed them as a “Canadian celebration.”

The Gordie Howe Bridge finally opens

Despite the conflict, the Gordie Howe International Bridge is now open to traffic.

Designed by AECOM, a Dallas-based infrastructure consulting firm, the bridge is cable-stayed, which means its road surface hangs from the two towers on either end. Composed of 216 long cables, it is now the longest cable-stayed bridge span in the U.S., stretching nearly 2,800 feet (853 meters). Those hockey stick towers, shaped like inverted Ys, rise 722 feet.

There’s a reason for the bridge’s scale. Because the towers are anchored on land, they “avoid major disruptions to the fish habitat in the Detroit River,” according to Grant Hilbers, chief capital officer of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, and allow “uninterrupted marine traffic on one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world.”

But the biggest design move may just be one of the bridge’s smaller elements.

On the eastern edge of the bridge, a nearly 12-foot-wide space has been set beside the traffic lanes to create a multiuse path for pedestrian and cyclist crossing. It’s one of only a few international bridges between the two countries to have a pedestrian pathway, and the first in Detroit since the pedestrian path on the Ambassador Bridge was closed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

A coup for cyclist groups in Michigan and Ontario, which had lobbied for the path since 2015, the pathway will offer a unique way for people to cross the border.

And for those hoping to steer clear of the financial conflicts the bridge has spurred between the U.S. and Canada, people using the shared pathway will be allowed to cross the bridge toll free.

That’s precisely the market Tonies, a decade-old toy company, is chasing. Gaming time among kids age 8 and under has surged 65% since 2020 while overall screen time has held steady at around two and a half hours a day. Much of that gaming arrives marketed as educational or harmless. But the volume alone has rattled parents. More than half say they’ve felt their child was addicted to screens.

Tonies thinks it has found a middle path. The company, best known for its screen-free storytelling cubes, has partnered with Hasbro to turn three of the toy giant’s best-known board games—Monopoly, The Game of Life, and Guess Who?—into screen-free adventures that run on its newest device. It’s part of a wider push, among toy and tech companies alike, to build products for kids that are engaging without being engineered to keep them hooked.

“Our goal isn’t to have you never leave Toniebox,” says Ginny McCormick, Tonies’ first-ever chief experience officer. “Stories end. They’re appropriately balanced.”

Screen-Free Storytime

Tonies was founded in Germany in 2016 by Patric Faßbender and Marcus Stahl, two fathers who met at their children’s preschool and bonded over a shared frustration of trying to play stories to their kids on scratched CDs. They built an indestructable foam cube speaker that would tell stories when you placed a figurine on top: A little Pinocchio toy would play fairytales, a Little Mermaid toy would play the Disney story with some songs. The system was designed to be intuitive enough for a toddler to use on their own, allowing parents to have their kids entertained without a screen.

The company arrived in the U.S. in 2020 and has become a fixture in Target and Walmart aisles, growing largely through word of mouth. McCormick says families use the device consistently—an average of 240 minutes a week—for everything from bedtime routines to long car rides, and that the appeal cuts across income levels even though the device is pricey. (The box costs $130, and the Tonie figurines start at $20.) The common thread, she says, is parents who want something their kids can operate independently, but that is not algorithmically driven.

That growth accelerated with Toniebox 2, which launched in the U.S. on October 5, 2025. The new device added a light-up ring, sleep and wake alarms, deeper parental controls in the app, and—for the first time—Tonieplay, a library of screen-free games that you can play with a small companion controller.

Hasbro Games In A New Format

Hasbro just launched three games for the system: Monopoly, Game of Life, and Guess Who? All of them run on the same physical interface: A controller serves as a dial or can be pressed like a button. And each game has its own set of additional pieces.

In Monopoly, you tap your player card to the Toniebox 2 to bid in speed auctions for properties like the railroads and the electric company. You can compete with a partner on little challenges, like seeing who has the quickest reaction time when pressing the button. Mr. Monopoly’s narration keeps a running, spoken tally of everyone’s money.

In Guess Who? an inspector walks players through each case while the player lays out 30 plastic monster cards. Kids listen to a spoken clue, physically flip over any monster that doesn’t match, and then turn the controller to lock in their final guess once one monster remains. The Game of Life turns the controller into a spinner, which kids turn to move their piece around the board and press to answer career and life questions.

McCormick says the Hasbro and Tonies teams worked closely to find ways to spark kids interest through the storytelling. “If you show everyone a dragon, they know exactly what it looks like,” she says. “If you tell everyone about a dragon, there’s a thousand different ways they can imagine how it looks and feels. That’s what sparks the imagination and lets children drive the narrative.”

The hardest part, McCormick says, was resisting the urge to stick too closely to the board games. Guess Who? is the clearest example. The original is a visual game, built around scanning faces on a board. Tonies’ version swapped in monsters that a narrator describes. The company also built in solo modes for Guess Who? and The Game of Life, since McCormick says one of the biggest barriers to family game night is simply getting enough people to the table at once. Monopoly still requires at least two players.

What’s Next

Tonies has worked with Hasbro for years on other licenses, including Peppa Pig, which Hasbro owns. Now, McCormick says the companies are exploring how to bring more of Hasbro’s game catalog into audio form.

Internally, Tonies’ development studio—a mix of music producers, storytellers, and child-development researchers—is constantly testing new mechanics. “It’s a combination of art and science,” McCormick says. “We do wild ideation and we have a very strong curation process to match that game mechanic to the right stage of development for that child.”

The bet, McCormick says, is that the next generation of kids’ technology won’t be judged by how long it keeps a child’s attention, but by how well it lets that attention go.