Just across the U.S.-Mexico border on the southern tip of Texas sits Starbase, a SpaceX rocket development and launch facility that’s also a municipality. It’s a modern company town of about 500 people that’s mostly home to SpaceX employees who voted last year to incorporate (SpaceX’s vice president of Texas test and launch is mayor), but it has one unfriendly neighbor in the middle of town.

Near the part of Starbase where SpaceX executive housing is located, the company behind Cards Against Humanity owns about one acre of land, which it purchased with crowdfunded money back in 2017 to block construction of a border wall. Now, it’s employing that crowdfunding strategy in service of a new goal: an anti-Musk monument.

All it takes to join the design committee for the monument—officially titled the “Official Elon Musk is a Sad Little Bitch with No Friends Monument Design Committee”—is $10, and ideas are already coming in.

“We haven’t officially requested ideas from the committee yet, but a lot of excited people have sent us their thoughts,” a Cards Against Humanity representative tells Fast Company.

So far, ideas including turning Musk’s email chains with Jeffrey Epstein into a billboard or making phallic jokes since the area’s now a rocket launch site. They’re also open to the idea of working with an artist or someone who knows the area well or has a background or body of work particularly tailored to annoy Musk.

“We’re going to take the proper amount of time and care to make sure we do this right. We’re going to design a monument that our committee can be proud of, and hopefully, spark a moment of introspection for Elon,” the representative says.

Before Cards Against Humanity bought its acre in the area previously known as Boca Chica Village, SpaceX had begun buying up plots of land in the area beginning in 2012. While SpaceX paid locals for their property, Cards Against Humanity isn’t selling.

Tens of thousands of people have signed up to join the committee, according to Cards Against Humanity, and the company is also putting 10% of sales from new products towards the monument, including their Super Box with 300 new cards for 2026, and packs like the Bad Billionaires Pack and Big Balls Pack.

Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX over violating “No Trespassing” signs on its land and using their property as a dumping ground for construction materials, debris, and equipment. The space company reached a settlement with the card game company over the suit last year, but with a monument poking fun of Musk on its way, Cards Against Humanity still hasn’t had the last laugh.

The spot, titled “The Season Is Your Stage,” debuted on August 20 to drum up excitement for football season, which begins on September 9 with the annual NFL Kickoff Game. It was created in partnership with the NFL’s lead creative agency, 72andSunny, and includes cameos from players like Bijan Robinson of the Atlanta Falcons, Dion Dawkins of the Buffalo Bills, and Travis Hunter of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Each player is shown practicing their “cellys” for the coming season. That’s internet jargon for the celebration dances that have become popular fodder for viral NFL content on social media. 

According to Marissa Solis, NFL senior VP of global and brand marketing, the campaign is one way that her team is working to bring the NFL’s digital fan base—which tends to skew younger and more female than its regular season viewership—into the league’s main stage programming. 

“I think it’s a way to acknowledge that all of these platforms are now interconnected,” Solis says. “They can’t all live in silos, especially because this [younger] audience is always on, watching everywhere. We have to be where they are, not the other way around.”

Inside the NFL’s social media playbook

Over the past several years, the NFL’s fandom has been seeing a kind of modern day renaissance—and the brand has been working to adjust in real time. 

In 2023, after years of predictions from analysts that the NFL was on the decline, the league got a major boost in the cultural zeitgeist from the reveal of the relationship between the Kansas City Chiefs’ star tight end, Travis Kelce, and the pop megastar Taylor Swift, leading to a jump in viewership from young and female audiences. On social media, the relationship’s ties to the NFL have been an durable topic of conversation, one that the league has embraced. 

As the league benefits from the “Taylor Swift effect,” it’s been investing in its digital presence in a big way, working to meet young audiences where they are by turning pivotal moments in the season into short-form content extravaganzas. 

“Five, six years ago, we started a concerted effort to reach what we call ‘growth audiences,’” Solis explains. “One of the critical growth audiences is young people. When you think about Gen A, Gen Z, they’re the digital generation. We know that they’re not necessarily just viewing four hours of a game—they’re engaging day in and day out, 24/7, on social platforms.”

This April, the league gave Fast Company a behind-the-scenes look at its social media strategy for its three-day college draft, an annual marquee moment for the brand. That effort included a programming team of 10 people hunkered down in their social media command center in Pittsburgh, churning out about 1,000 social posts every day. According to the league, on TikTok during the draft in 2025, 30% of the audience was female, and 44% was between 18 and 24 years old, significantly younger and more female than the NFL’s reach during the regular season.

Solis says the start of the season is another major opportunity for the NFL to lead the fan conversation on socials. Last year, the league’s internal data showed that NFL kickoff week video views were up 13%, minutes spent on socials were up 25%, and engagements up 6%—all records for a kickoff week. This year, they’re looking to maintain that streak. 

According to Solis, two key genres of NFL content tend to perform especially well with younger generations on platforms like Instagram and TikTok: giving fans an inside look at players’ lives off the field, including their relationships and hobbies; and referencing how the NFL is intersecting with culture more broadly. “The Season Is Your Stage” includes a bit of both.

“There are many times when what happens on the field influences what happens in culture,” Solis says. “But then there are times when what happens on TikTok or on these platforms will influence what happens on the field, our own players. This is one of those moments. The touchdown celebration started on the field, then it went viral, and now our players are looking virally to get inspiration. There’s just this relationship between the two that is really unique and special that we wanted to explore in this campaign.”

Cellys in the spotlight

Over the course of the 2025-2026 football season, celebration content on the NFL’s socials drove 340 million views, 603 million impressions, and 18 million interactions.

And it’s no surprise that cellys have become such a broadly popular topic online, considering that they have all the ingredients for viral content: subverting expectations (i.e., watching tough football players pause after a touchdown to bust a move), editability (there are infinite ways to remix a celly clip), and replicability (who doesn’t want to invent their own celly?)

For all of these reasons, Zach Hilder, chief creative officer at 72andSunny, says that cellys were the perfect fodder for this year’s kickoff campaign.

“Before every season, our team, along with Marissa [Solis’s marketing team], starts to do research,” Hilder says. That means scouring the internet ecosystem to understand what fans are talking about, where the league is headed, and what the big story of the year might look like.

“One of the things that we saw were the touchdown celebrations exploding across TikTok,” he says. “I mean, the cellys are built for TikTok—you see what happens on the field go into TikTok, and then the players are getting influenced, and they’re making these TikTok dances into celebrations and calling people out in culture. It felt like a really cool way to bring this all together.”

To capture the process of celly creation, 72andSunny built a full-on celly studio—complete with a giant mirror and turf—where players were asked to rehearse cellys before they’re unveiled on the field. The Indianapolis Colts’ Cam Bynum, who’s known for choreographing some of the most viral cellys, was cast as the “NFL celly coordinator,” and is seen throughout the spot helping his fellow players perfect their moves. 

Hilder says a good chunk of the video was guided by the players, who were asked to bring their own percolating ideas to the shoot. 

“We asked the players when they came in, ‘Okay, what’s bubbling up in your mind? What are the things you want to do this season?’” Hilder says. “One of the most unexpected ones was Nico Collins, the wide receiver for the Texans. He got on the floor and started gear shifting. I’ve never seen anyone move their butt to look like a car before.”

The final ad stitches together snippets of players ironing out their cellys with clips of fans’ own viral celly interpretations. It also includes multiple cameos of the iconic sugarcane grass costumes from Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, which Hilder says cost $1,000 on eBay (apparently, the NFL wasn’t keeping any in the archives). 

Now that “The Season Is Your Stage” has rolled out, Solis says the goal is to keep the conversation going throughout the season. The campaign will show up as short-form videos on socials and a hashtag, via live celly studios before games, and potentially even at local bars. 

If fans are lucky, they might even see one or two brand new moves from the spot—like Collins’s gear shift—out on the field.

Heinz has released its first-ever customizable lid that comes with three settings for light, medium, and heavy labeled “Like,” “Love,” and “Crazy Love” for an increasingly heavier pour. If the biggest challenge with old-school glass bottles is not knowing how much ketchup will come out when you have to tilt a half-empty container and hit it with the palm of your hand, a Heinz squeeze bottle with the new “Love Lid” is just the opposite.

The “Love Lid” is designed with a patented adjustable cap that Heinz developed in partnership with Beta Design Office and Wieden+Kennedy London. It works thanks to a two-part mechanism that controls the ketchup flow while creating a distinct “click” sound as it’s turned to the three different settings.

“The biggest challenge was making something that feels incredibly simple to use but is actually quite complex behind the scenes,” Jamie Mack, associate director of brand communications for Heinz U.S., tells Fast Company. “Getting that satisfying tactile feedback, a secure seal, and three different squeeze settings into just two components required significant design and engineering, but the end result makes finding your perfect squeeze as easy as twist, click, and enjoy.”

For now, the Love Lid is available for a limited time for shoppers online in the U.S. for $3.78 as well as in the U.K., but Mack says the brand “is always listening to fan feedback on whether to extend the innovation.”

Heinz has worked to differentiate its ketchup through a number of creative packaging products. Its “Heinz Dipper” box, a french fry container released earlier this year, includes a pull-out compartment for ketchup built into the box. And in 2023, Heinz Turkey released bottles with the exact same shade of red as its ketchup on the bottle’s front sticker, with labeling that pointed to the clear portion of the container and asked, “Is That Heinz? Check With the Color of the Label” to dissuade restaurants from refilling Heinz bottles with off-brand ketchup.

Together, the innovations show how the brand is managing to draw attention to its ketchup without changing the actual product. Instead, these packaging innovations provide new, culturally relevant ways for Heinz fans to engage that go beyond the ketchup itself.

Heinz’s parent company, Kraft Heinz, previously planned to split into two companies, but it paused the split earlier this year and announced it would instead invest in marketing, sales, and product development. As the maker of national brands like Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese, the company has faced pressure as consumers increasingly turn to generic brands seeking value and affordability at the grocery store.

But Heinz isn’t running from its brand name. Instead, it’s using clever packaging to elevate and highlight its brand into a tactile experience engineered for fans to love.

The jeans, Levi’s 1942 501s, document a short-lived period of the brand’s history around America’s entry into WWII, when rationing would fundamentally change the construction of its jeans. Levi’s recreation was spearheaded by Levi’s Vintage Clothing (LVC), the brand’s heritage-focused arm, and encompasses an exact replica of the jeans—from the weight of the denim down to the stitching and rivets. Just 800 pairs of the $295 limited-edition pants were made, and they’ve already sold out online after debuting on August 13.

To reproduce the 1942 501s, the LVC team consulted Levi’s archives, sourced a genuine pair of the jeans from Tokyo, and analyzed every detail of the design to capture a snapshot of apparel history in jean form. 

Wearing a piece of history

LVC started as a concept in 1996, when Levi’s decided to reproduce and reissue several pieces from its archives. In 1999, LVC became a collection, and today, it’s an entire team dedicated to converting the brand’s history into wearable artifacts. 

Paul O’Neill, the design director, says that every LVC piece—from its 1922 “Japan” 501s to its 1970s 517 Bootcut Jeans—starts with a visit to Levi’s physical archives. The archives, located at Levi’s San Francisco headquarters, houses thousands of original garments and pieces of ephemera dating back to 1873, when Levi Strauss & Co. patented the original riveted blue jean. 

“We study the original garment in detail and work to recreate every element, stitch for stitch,” O’Neill says. “That can mean analyzing everything from the slub pattern, yarn count, and depth of shade of the denim to the quality and tanning process of the leather patch, the copper rivets, and everything in between.”

In the case of the 1942 501s, the team studied several garments from that year, including a number from the archives and one sourced from the vintage store BerBer Jin in Tokyo, a longtime friend of the brand. O’Neill says that, given that each garment was nearly 100 years old and they varied in condition, it was crucial to examine several pairs in order to confirm that the fit, construction, and details of the reproduction were as accurate as possible. 

“The 1942 501 is a transitional model that was produced for a relatively short period of time,” O’Neill explains. “It retained details from the 1930s models, including the cinch-back and crotch rivet, while introducing the heavier-weight denim that would become standard in the 1940s and beyond. Shortly after this model was produced, World War II rationing would dramatically change the 501, making this particular version especially rare and historically significant.”

The reproduction is faithful to that duality. Like earlier ’30s models, it has a cinch back, complete with its distinctive buckle, a single-sided Big E Red Tab, and a Two Horse leather patch; while the denim is a 12 oz. shrink-to-fit selvedge denim, which represents the new, heavier denim coming into vogue in the ’40s. 

Each pair of the reconstructed 1942 501s also comes with the paper ephemera that accompanied the original jeans, carefully modeled after the archival versions. These include a guarantee ticket, also known as the “dollar bill,” that assured customers they were buying an authentic pair of Levi’s, as well as a pocket flasher, which emerged as a way to communicate the rivets were still present when the back-pocket rivets changed from exposed to hidden, and later evolved into a way to communicate information about the product.

For LVC collectors, owning these reproductions isn’t just about buying a new pair of jeans, but rather experiencing a design moment that, until now, has been tucked away in the archives.

“Our aim is to recreate each piece so that when you buy it, you feel like you are getting a piece of history,” O’Neill says.

The 22-piece collection is defined by works that are minimalist, geometric, and graphic. It’s available to shop now on the company’s U.S. website.

The collection includes work by artist Lisa Reiser, who designed a lacquered black sculpture as well as a green one that looks like candy, and Emanuele Stamuli, who designed a black-and-white statement rug and matching vases.

Akanksha Deo, an in-house Ikea designer, constructed a stack of blocks that resembles a guardian angel figurine. Designers Ingrid Leander and Igor Holtermann created patterns for throw pillows inspired by caution banners and zebra crossings.

Furniture designer Andu Masebo wrapped a tubular chrome frame around a square glass top to form a side table offered in both metallic and bright blue finishes.

The collection is presented like a high-end art gallery, and the limited-run availability gives it a sense of scarcity that more mass-produced pieces couldn’t achieve. At the same time, this being Ikea, it’s accessibly priced.

“Art should be available for all to enjoy, not a luxury reserved for galleries,” Karin Gustavsson, creative leader for the Konstrunda collection, said in a statement. “Art evokes emotion, sparks conversation, and helps transform a house into a home.”

The model of providing a curated collection of limited-edition work from artists and designers is becoming more commonplace. In 2022, Swedish design brand Hem launched Hem X, a partnership with creative collaborators to release art objects with limited runs of 100 pieces or fewer. Ikea has its own history of limited collections, like with the late Virgil Abloh, homeware designer Gustaf Westman, and one that was all about surrealism.

Gustavsson says Ikea has “extensive knowledge and experience in designing and developing products,” and through the collection, it provides “a platform for artists to create and an opportunity for people to collect art that is affordable and reflects who they are in the home.”

In the past, Ikea has mined its archives to bring back fun, bright pieces to break up the beige of contemporary interior design. With Konstrunda, it’s looking to contemporary artists and designers for those splashes of color and whimsy.

For retailers, this model of limited-edition, curated collections designed by outside creators is an opportunity to elevate talent while highlighting the retailer’s own taste and eye for the avant-garde. Since collections like this aren’t released as widely, artists and designers can afford to be more experimental, and the retailer gets short-run products that feel more upscale and couture.

A startup called Wtrlss, now beginning to work with major brands, developed a patented biochemistry dye that’s added directly to rolls of fabric using its industrial-scale inkjet printers.

Digital printing isn’t new, but typically it involves printing only on the surface of the fabric. Instead, this new technology fully bonds to the fiber without additional steps, resulting in a fabric that the startup says looks indistinguishable from traditionally dyed denim.

“We built the first indigo replacement color set that works with digital,” says CEO Dustin White. “This is really a groundbreaking technology in the sense that it’s the first time we have indigo blue that can be deployed onto the fabric without indigo.” Wtrlss cofounder Mickaël Mheidle, a Switzerland-based scientist, developed the technology.

A new way to dye denim

Traditionally, dyeing denim requires a long series of steps. Cotton yarn goes into dye baths, where indigo (or, more often, synthetic indigo) is chemically altered to help it bind to the fibers. The next step usually involves removing some of the color.

“You’re using bleaches and lasers and all these different techniques to remove the color to get that washed-down look that we see on the shelves,” White explains. Blue yarns are woven with white yarns to make the final fabric, which typically goes through additional finishing steps.

The digital process at Wtrlss happens in a single step. Instead of starting with dark fabric and removing the color, the color and finish are applied directly onto undyed fabric. The biochemistry is designed to help the color bind into the fiber, and can be tweaked to match a specific look. “The designer controls how deep . . . to penetrate that fiber,” White says.

The color can go all the way through to be uniformly blue, or partway, mimicking, for example, the way dye ends up on the outer layer of cotton fiber in the traditional dyeing process. Even the amount that the color bleeds is controllable: A designer can choose to make a vintage-looking pair of jeans that won’t fade further, or to let the denim fade as it normally would when people wear it.

Final finishing, including creating the “hand feel” of the fabric, also happens in the machine. “Quite literally, you put the fabric in one side, it comes out the other side, and you cut and sew it,” White says.

Less water, faster production

The traditional process uses so much water—and creates so much polluted wastewater—that it often happens in places with looser environmental regulations. But the new process, which cuts water use by 99.99% because the only water left is in the dye itself, makes it possible to do the dyeing more easily in a place like New York or California.

“We unlock creativity with designers,” White says. “We unlock a tremendous amount of development that can happen in the studio or close to home, versus designing something overseas, waiting for it to be flown to you, going back and forth, and all of the other stuff that comes along with producing in other countries.”

For brands, a faster production process makes it easier to respond to trends and avoid overproducing the wrong styles. (Right now, companies often start production 18 months before a product comes out.) They can also produce in smaller quantities and test styles. The whole process is cheaper than the traditional option, as it uses less labor, 90% less energy, and avoids the cost of treating wastewater.

In tests, jeans made with the Wtrlss material have also lasted longer. The same chemicals and processes that are normally used to dye and finish denim also break down fibers; the new process provides the same look without the damage. According to White, in blind tests people can’t see a difference in appearance.

“If we couldn’t get it identical, we wouldn’t be shipping the equipment and putting products in the market because the brands wouldn’t do it,” he says.

The company is now in pilot testing with Ha-Meem Group, one of the world’s largest denim manufacturers, which works with brands like Levi’s and Gap. Though the startup couldn’t yet name the brands that are beginning to use its technology, it says the first products will begin to roll out this fall.

The same approach can be used for other types of dyeing, though the company is starting with denim because it’s especially water-intensive. Because the new process is more affordable and has other advantages beyond sustainability, it has the potential to scale up quickly. The company believes the technology could help shift the denim industry.

“The traditional indigo dyeing process of yarn dyeing is an art form that I think will always exist in specific categories, as it should,” White says. “But for the mass production of denim, it’s unreasonable to continue down the road that the industry is going down. It’s not sustainable.”

The rainbow dresses and unicorn prints she’d happily worn from brands like Hanna Andersson and Tea Collection suddenly felt too childish. But when we went shopping for something more grown-up, we found ourselves at brands like Abercrombie and Zara, buying the smallest adult sizes. The clothes weren’t designed for her body, and many of the trends—spaghetti straps, skintight dresses, short-shorts—felt more mature than she wanted.

Then one day a small brand called Pleat popped up on my Instagram feed with exactly what we were looking for. It designs pieces for girls ages 7 to 14, with silhouettes that are feminine without being too tight-fitting, made in fabrics with sophisticated prints. We stocked up.

There was a thriving market for tweens in the 1990s and 2000s, with labels like Delia’s and Limited Too carefully designing clothes for the bodies and tastes of middle schoolers. These mall brands shuttered as e-commerce took off, leaving a glaring hole in the market. But we’re on the cusp of change.

Today, Maisonette—the curated online marketplace that has become a favorite among millennial parents for children’s clothing, toys, and home goods—is betting that tweens represent one of retail’s biggest opportunities. The company is launching Neon Rebels, a dedicated destination for the 7-to-14-year-old demographic that features more than 100 brands across apparel, accessories, beauty, home, and lifestyle, including Pleat, Roller Rabbit, LoveShackFancy, and Pipa skincare.

“We wanted to create a really distinct brand and feel for that older kid,” says AJ Nicholas, Maisonette’s president. “What’s so interesting about this segment is there are two shoppers. There’s the parent who’s ultimately buying, but there’s the kid who’s driving a ton of that influence.”

Millennials now have tweens

For Maisonette, the move is a response to customer demand and a natural evolution of the business. It launched in 2017, curating stylish children’s products for millennial parents. But as those original customers have watched their children grow up, they’ve begun asking for something else.

And the business opportunity is significant: Nicholas points to a global children’s apparel market worth roughly $225 billion, with kids 10 and older representing the fastest-growing segment.

“Millennials’ kids are now entering their tween years,” says Maisonette cofounder Sylvana Ward Durrett. “The real problem is you need to make sure they think it’s cool. They don’t want to be infantilized. They don’t want Peter Pan collars. They don’t want ‘cute.’ They want to feel older.”

But Durrett points out that many brands that tweens gravitate to, like Brandy Melville, often feel too sexy for a middle schooler. “There isn’t really a market for the intersection between what they want to wear and what parents feel good about them wearing,” she says.

That intersection is precisely where Neon Rebels sits. Rather than creating its own clothing line, Maisonette is building a tween marketplace like it did for younger kids. The new section of the site brings together more than 100 brands under one digital roof.

The assortment extends beyond apparel into beauty, accessories, room decor, and wellness, reflecting the many ways tweens begin expressing their identities. For instance, there’s denim from DL1961, accessories from Jewelry Made by Me, and room decor from Yellowpop and Mustard Made. There are even collectible editions of book series like Percy Jackson from Juniper Books.

“What we found in this process was that there’s just a bunch of brands popping up now,” Durrett says. “There’s a global awareness of this market. Moms are not comfortable with what’s out there, kids obviously want it, and because of the demand, there’s now the supply.”

The beauty category illustrates the challenge particularly well. Tweens increasingly emulate skincare routines they see online, but many products are designed for adults rather than young skin. So Maisonette is offering options from Yes Day, JB Skrub, and Erly. “We have a ton of beauty brands that are safer for kids and tweens and teens,” Durrett says.

The Tween Comeback

That tension—between wanting to grow up and not wanting to grow up too fast—is at the heart of tween culture. When millennials were growing up, there was still a culture that catered to them, from magazines like Tiger Beat to brands like Delia’s. But as malls declined and fast fashion surged, those entities struggled to survive.

Durrett believes the market is now swinging back in the other direction, with more retailers considering the tween market. Walmart now has a tween line called Weekend Academy, and Target recently launched a tween-focused collaboration with LoveShackFancy. Claire’s is gunning for a comeback, and even Away has launched a tween travel line.

Retailers increasingly recognize the tween years not as an awkward in-between stage but as representing consumers with distinct tastes and growing influence over family purchasing decisions.

Maisonette believes its marketplace approach gives it an advantage because it can quickly adapt as tastes change instead of betting everything on one in-house collection.

“I think it’s pretty trend-driven,” Nicholas says. “We’ll have hundreds of brands that launch for Neon Rebels, so we can adjust our strategy based on what’s popular, which is one of the exciting pieces of doing this with the marketplace angle.”

For parents like me, however, the appeal is simpler. My daughter doesn’t want rainbow unicorn dresses anymore. She also doesn’t want to dress like a college student headed to a music festival. Over the next few years, it looks like we’ll have more options.

Once a Princess, Always a Princess, created by Disney and ad agency Fallon, debuted on August 17 for World Princess Week. It’s a four-minute-long tale about the joy of childhood friendship and play, set both in a modern city and the fantastical imaginations of its two protagonists.

Aside from the touching story at its heart, the film shines because of its sets: Every single effect was made almost entirely practically (meaning no CGI was used), including its “bigature” castles, underwater scenes, and hand-painted backgrounds. Just a day after the video’s launch, it’s already amassed nearly 7 million views. 

In a press release, director Alex Prager explained: “I brought the idea of using practical filmmaking techniques to Disney from our very first conversations because of their history, I wanted to go back to their roots.”

Prager’s instinct to spotlight old-school practical effects for this project is one that’s recently been reverberating across advertising and Hollywood. As AI and CGI make smooth, optimized visuals increasingly accessible, audiences are craving the unique touch that only human-made effects can provide—and studios are catching on.

A physical wonderland

Disney and Fallon pulled out all possible stops to make Once a Princess, Always a Princess a practical wonderland. 

In the shots where the two protagonists’ apartment buildings are transformed into castles, for example, those turreted structures are real “bigature” models. Built to stand as tall as an adult, the castles were designed by blending architecture from Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid. On set, the young actresses were able to stand directly alongside them, creating real depth and forced perspective on camera without green screens. 

In an underwater sequence, the team used “dry-for-wet” stagecraft, shooting on a blue-lit soundstage with oversize physical kelp, coral, and drifting fabrics to allow the performers to “float like true swimmers.” Another scene, which shows the two girls traipsing through a ballroom, required extensive puppeteer work to bring characters like Sebastian from A Little Mermaid and Lumière from Beauty and the Beast to life.

Fallon CCO Leslie Shaffer recalls that the choreography and camera work had to come together perfectly in one moment to make the ballroom believable: “20 puppeteers in green suits standing on a table making the arms, legs, and even eyes of beloved characters move in the most charming ways; a man in a tiger suit . . . at the head of the table; the girls climbing atop the table—all while the camera descends and spins on an enormous crane inside of a real-life ballroom in a historic castle. It took a full day to shoot that one scene, but the magic of that transition, and the immersion in their imaginary world, is so worth it in the final film.”

For the whimsical backgrounds, artists pulled directly from matte painting techniques used in classic Disney films, and hand-painted storybook-quality images onto real backdrops. The music was provided by a 56-piece live orchestra. Even the costumes were made from scratch, led by costume designer Vin Burnham. 

Shaffer says no AI was used in the making of the film. Digital effects were used as sparingly as possible, like to help merge the girls with the castle sets, or to blend the hand-painted backgrounds into a digital space. That light touch was an intentional storytelling choice. 

“This is a film that explores extraordinary worlds. But more than that, it’s a delicate, emotional film about how relationships stay with us as life changes,” says Jeff Benjenk, Disney’s VP of brand marketing. “Giving the actors real, tangible sets to play off of brings an incredible authenticity to their performances . . . which directly shapes how the viewer connects with the story. Many of the practical effects we used were pioneered by Disney. Leaning into those classic techniques gave the short a genuine warmth and charm that feels deeply natural for the brand.”

Why Disney and Apple are investing in practical effects

Disney’s latest project reflects a broader trend for brands of its type: AI filmmaking is undoubtedly on the rise, but it seems to be simultaneously ushering in a renewed interest in practical effects. 

As Fast Company observed back in December, with the saturation of AI-generated slop online, it “stands to reason that the gritty, hands-on, behind-the-scenes details of creation” will become more valuable to viewers. Practical effects have popped up in projects such as James Gunn’s Superman film (the ice fortress was a real prop); 2024’s The Substance, which relied almost entirely on practical effects; and this year’s Project Hail Mary, which used a combination of digital effects and old-school puppeteering for the main character Rocky.

Even companies that are full steam ahead on AI in other categories are recognizing the shift in their visual departments. Apple, which has a whole suite of AI tools, has recently invested in multiple practical-effects-led projects, including its 2025 holiday ad “A Critter Carol” and the new Apple TV branding.

Disney, for its part, announced a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI in December, as well as agreeing to become the first major content licensing partner on the tech giant’s Sora app, to no small measure of public outcry. Earlier this year, the company shared that its Imagineers are using AI to reimagine its theme parks. 

AI might have a myriad of uses, including in filmmaking, but one thing is clear: When it comes to storytelling, audiences want human craft.

Over the past month or so, I’ve been having some pretty gnarly conversations about the state of the design industry, especially when it comes to hiring and firing. Spend just a short amount of time online and you’ll find stories of rising unemployment, teams being culled, and junior designers struggling to find their first job.

It’s savage.

I recently heard a crazy statistic from a trusted friend that less than 5% of the design industry is made up of people aged between 20 and 25 . . . a frighteningly accurate reflection of the state of panic we currently find ourselves in.

And anyone with a bit of foresight can see the knock-on effect. If we stop giving young designers the opportunity to enter our industry, who becomes the future custodians of it?

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

While we are rightly incredibly worried about the people struggling to get into the design industry, I think we’ve been so busy looking at the bottom of the ladder that we haven’t noticed what’s beginning to happen closer to the top of it.

The people we assumed were safe might not be as safe as we thought.

I’m talking about the designers with 15-plus years of experience behind them. The people who did everything they were told to do and, for many years, reaped the rewards. They put in the time, mastered their craft, built their experience, and worked their way up into more senior positions.

I predict they could be facing a very different kind of problem.

How things used to work

For most of our careers, experience has been an advantage you could hang your hat on. Not just in design or the creative industries, but pretty much everywhere. The more you knew about a particular subject, the more valuable you became. This value would then be rewarded by an increasing salary or more notable position within a company’s hierarchy.

The old promise of experience was simple . . . the longer you did something, the more valuable you became to the world.

But … I’m beginning to wonder whether that equation is changing because access has changed.

The knowledge that was once locked away in ivory towers and hidden within the agency walls,  knowledge that took years and years to accumulate, is now becoming easier to access. The right processes, information and best practices can be found and implemented almost immediately. You barely need to be a proficient designer anymore to competently pass ‘good enough’ work over.

Many of us will remember the painstaking Photoshop processes needed to remove blemishes, people and other background noise from an image. Now? Push a button and it’s done. My mum can do that.

If that kind of “push a button” power is now available to almost everyone, it starts to create a new set of questions. And the one that keeps rolling around my brain is…

What if the very thing that made us valuable is no longer enough to keep us that way?

When experience becomes the problem

Now, let’s be honest here . . . having experience isn’t the issue. I think the real problem is what that experience can do to a human over time.

If you’ve spent 15 or 20 years doing something a particular way, and that way has rewarded you with better jobs and bigger clients, then why the hell would you change it?

You’ve got evidence that your way works, and has done for years. So you stick to your guns. You trust the process and you continue doing things the way you always have. You rely on your network to keep feeding you work and you keep building evidence around the things you’re already competent in, developing the same skills and beavering away.

After all, you’re now in your mid-40s and changing the habits of a lifetime sounds fookin’ exhausting. The idea of having to market yourself in a completely different way feels absurd when, for most of your career, you’ve never really needed to.

Great.

Until the world changes, and by golly… how it’s changed.

I think we are now going to see experienced designers really feel the squeeze. And from many of the conversations I’ve had, I think that’s exactly where a lot of creatives are finding themselves right now . . . being squished.

Experience doesn’t just teach us what works. It teaches us to keep doing what we’ve always done because we know it works. It’s a double-edged sword. You become so attached to a version of yourself that has worked for over a decade that you forget to notice the version of the industry it worked in is disappearing.

Now for the science bit

It’s always been important for me that ideas are backed up somewhat by science otherwise I’m just another Internet twit with an opinion.

So I believe there are two things at play here: 1) Sunk cost fallacy and 2) Status quo bias.

So let’s chinwag on these for a bit.

Sunk cost fallacy is our tendency as human folk to continue investing in something because of everything we have already “sunk” into it. And as a designer with circa 20 years of experience, you can imagine that investment is astronomical.

This doesn’t just mean skills and processes. It can also mean habits, software, and ways of thinking. You probably notice this in the creative software you still use today, even when better and cheaper options are available. The idea of having to relearn something or change to something new feels like more effort than simply sticking with what you know.

So you just don’t bother.

Even when the alternative might actually be better. That is the sunk cost fallacy at play.

Status quo bias, on the other hand, is very much like a good old comfort zone. It’s our naturally inclined preference to favour what we already know rather than changing course, because the familiar feels much safer. The way we’ve always done things feels like it has less risk attached to it than the thing we haven’t tried before.

If we put these two behemoths together, you get a pretty dangerous cocktail for the more experienced creatives out there working in a space that is going through enormous, speedy change.

The more invested you become in the old way of doing things, the harder it becomes to see that the old way might no longer be enough. And at some point . . . you become the problem.

I think this is what we’re beginning to see, and what we’re going to see a lot more of over the next couple of years. Old ways, deeply embedded in an incredibly experienced generation, getting in the way of their future success.

But there is hope

Experience is still a super duper power.

Many of the humans that have built this industry over the past 15 to 20 years into what it is today have years of the good stuff. Judgment, taste, relationships, success, and a healthy dose of failures that people can not absorb overnight. The battle scars are a wonderful currency.

But I think what we need to do is stop treating all of that experience as a plan for what’s to come next. We can no longer assume the things that used to work will continue working in the same way. Yes, there will be some anomalies, human relationships will never go out of fashion, but the rest . . . I would not bet on it.

Every generation eventually has its “back in my day” moment. We didn’t have to market ourselves like this, we didn’t need to learn that, clients used to come through referrals, we didn’t need to build an audience, we didn’t need all these tools, we didn’t have to work this way.

And maybe all of that is true. But we’re not back in your day anymore, sunny Jim.

Look, you don’t need to become a new person, use every new tool and jump on every new marketing trend to evolve to the new world’s way. But you might need to challenge the old assumptions you have spent the last couple of decades accumulating with your experiences.

You might look at the young gun influencer type and think, “What a bunch of twaddle.” But what if you looked past that old version of you and see what you can learn?

For years, the relationship was pretty simple. Young designers entered the industry, sat alongside more experienced designers and learnt how things were done. Knowledge travelled down the old ladder. But if that statistic I mentioned at the beginning is anywhere close to accurate, the youngsters aren’t getting onto the ladder.

But they’re not getting the junior roles, they’re not sitting next to the creative director with 20 years of experience, they’re not getting the opportunity to learn the industry in the way many of us did before.

So, they are getting off their butts and having to figure it out for themselves.

They’re building communities, starting small businesses. They are making their own products and experimenting with entirely new ways of making a living from their creativity.

They haven’t cracked some secret code; they just don’t have any other bloody choice. I think there’s something incredibly important for experienced designers in that. For decades, we assumed the younger generation would learn from us.

Maybe now we need to learn from them.

And maybe, just maybe, the key to the future success of the experienced designer lies in learning from the less experienced.

Imagine what happens when you combine 20 years of judgement, taste, relationships, failures, and experience with the curiosity and adaptability of someone who has been forced to figure out a completely new way of doing things in the industry.

That’s when your experience becomes your advantage again, my friend.

A chart from the European Correspondent tracks the color of every sofa found in Ikea’s catalogs between 1960 and 2021. The finding? Color washed out of Ikea’s seating in 2011, and didn’t come back.

The data visualization condenses 61 years’ worth of sofas—3,500 to be exact—into a rainbow of lines that get progressively more neutral as the years wear on. By 2013, until the catalog ended in 2021, the most common couch color was either gray or beige.

It wasn’t always that way, though. The chart shows green and blue were the most common colors in the 1960s before tan and beige took off in the 1970s and into the 1980s. The 1990s saw the popularity of patterned sofas and colors like black, red, and green. In the 2000s, blue, black, and white were popular. Then the great furniture blanding happened.

Though Ikea discontinued its catalog in 2021, its website today shows that not much has changed. There are 131 gray couches, more than any color, followed by the runner-up, beige, at 120. Blue, with 93 couches, is the third-most popular, though it ranges widely from dark gray-blue to a light pale turquoise blue. That’s followed by brown (93), white (72), black (69), green (67), turquoise (31), yellow (27), red (12), pink (11), and orange (1).

“Our sofa color choices have always been guided by customer preferences and by what people want to bring into their homes,” an Ikea of Sweden spokesperson tells Fast Company. “For several years, muted and neutral tones have been the most popular choice. Today, however, we’re seeing growing interest in more colorful interiors, which is reflected in our range. That’s why we offer bolder options such as blues, greens, yellows, and pinks/reds in some of our most popular sofas like Kivik, Jättebo, Uppåkra, Uppland, and Saltsjöbaden.”

Millennial gray and “influencer beige” have been popularized online thanks to the homes of social media influencers like Kim Kardashian and others. But more broadly, the shift was also in keeping with larger millennial visual movements of the 2010s like blanding, which favored reduced, minimalist, and monochromatic color palettes. Luckily for the life of a couch, such neutral pieces also had a simplicity in keeping with the quiet luxury trend of the early 2020s, which became more prevalent following the HBO series Succession. But beyond aesthetics, they’re also highly functional choices, because neutrals can be a great base for any color.

Even so, there are signs that color could be coming back to couches. Some designers are already over it. Architectural Digest showed sofas in colors like dark green and red on a pair of fall 2025 magazine covers, while Pinterest’s 2026 spring trend report found the “all-white everything” era is coming to an end with an uptick in searches for colors like “moody blue” and “vintage pink.” The trend “grandma core,” for vintage-inspired interiors, is also up, which could signal old trends on their way back.

Despite having more neutral sofas than any other color, Ikea is reviving vintage designs and colors on its own, like its Nytillverkad collection that includes a bright yellow textured sofa and colorful patterned pillows. And a Pinterest-style design inspiration feed on the Ikea homepage under “living rooms” mixes in occasional green, yellow, and blue sofas among its popular neutral models.

“I have a feeling that colors have been on the rise ever since [Ikea ended its catalog],” says the European Correspondent’s Toon Vos, who counted all the Ikea catalog couches.

“Looking at earlier fluctuations in the data, all is not lost, I think,” Vos tells Fast Company. “The ’80s may be remembered for a neon overload, but as far as sofas go, it was beige and tan all the way. Yet the ’90s became the era of the most colorful and outrageous patterns. Color will find its way back into our living rooms over time.”

While the broader economy can’t shake inflation, deflation is hitting the world of Trump merch.

The Trump Superstore’s closing will be at least the third independent Trump-themed store closure this year, following shutterings in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, and Vernon, Connecticut. The story of the closures is the same: The demand just isn’t there anymore.

A great merch sell-off

At the Trump Organization-owned online shop, the Trump Store, visitors are greeted with a pop-up offering 10% off. And it’s slashing prices on hats in bulk: A bundle of 25 MAGA hats in colorways including red, black, pink, and camo that was previously priced at $1,365 is now $990, a more than 27% price cut. The price for a six-hat Gulf of America bundle was slashed 10%, to $270, while a four-hat neon MAGA bundle was cut 20%, to $200.

This merch sell-off makes sense, politically speaking. Trump’s merch sales have acted as a sort of material barometer of his popularity, rising when his supporters feel a sense of vindication or pride—or when he’s on the ballot. Without another election on the horizon, the term-limited, lame-duck president doesn’t have another campaign to rally his supporters behind.

There’s also a matter of saturation. More than a decade into Trump’s political career, it stands to reason that anyone in America inclined to purchase a MAGA hat has probably done so by now. On top of that, Trump is now 80 years old and has held fewer public events than he did at the same point in his first term. As the pace of his public schedule has slowed, there are fewer physical events Trump supporters need to get dressed up for.

Then there’s the glaring matter of Trump’s falling approval rating. He’s now more unpopular than ever, including among Republicans, the demographic group most likely to buy his merch. The president’s job approval fell to a new low of 33% in an Economist-YouGov poll released on August 11.

A lucrative presidency

Trump has turned branded merchandise into an unprecedented personal revenue stream for a U.S. president. His family business launched nearly 1,500 branded products after his first year back in office. This, in addition to other audacious moneymaking ventures by the president, like cryptocurrency and selling early access to his market-moving social media posts, has raised ethics concerns over Trump profiting off the presidency.

Trump made about $17 million from publishing and merchandising in 2025, according to a New York Times review. It’s a category that includes sales of items like branded Trump shoes, watches, and Bibles.

Though Trump’s publishing and merchandising revenue is just a fraction of the total $2.24 billion he brought in last year—a figure with no equivalent in U.S. presidential history—it’s a number that’s grown since 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, when such sales generated $950,000.

Even so, the decline of the roadside Trump store signals a larger trend. As the president’s approval erodes, these shuttered stores serve as a real-world signal of changing opinion in places where he once had strong support.

“I remember going to the sea at night and when we stepped in the little puddles they glowed beneath us, and then as the waves were coming in, there was also this sort of glow,” Giron says. “That always stuck with me just as a sort of like memory, one of those moments where you are kind of in awe of a natural phenomena.”

Giron didn’t know it at the time, but the source of the bioluminescence was a specific bacteria in the water. Her beachfront observation sparked a fascination with how design (which she was studying at the time) interacted with biology. It inspired one of her most recent projects, an algae-powered battery that provides a greener alternative to conventional alkaline batteries.

The battery seems like straight out of a sci-fi movie: A transparent acrylic chamber holds aquatic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, and it’s encased within a metal frame. It’s compact enough to fit within the palm of your hand. Its form allows in light for the organisms to undergo photosynthesis, as well as providing way for users to see the process itself. It’s strong enough to power a digital clock and a temperature sensor.

The algae battery began as a project of Cambridge researcher Dr. Paolo Bombelli who, alongside professor Chris Howe, was conducting research on biophotovoltaics, a green technology that extracts energy from photosynthesis.

Bombelli and Howe—who hope to use the technology to possibly replace less sustainable forms of energy—already had a working prototype of the battery. It looked more like test tubes at the time, so they brought in Giron and the electrical engineer Lifu Tan to help turn the tech into a covetable consumer product. The latest iteration comes after two prior prototypes.

The battery harnesses excess electrons released during the algae’s photosynthesis process, capturing them using conductive substances. Since the tech uses a naturally occurring process from an organism but does not extract all of the energy produced, it allows the algae to endure.

“The organism can continue to thrive in its environment and photosynthesize while we’re still extracting small amounts of electricity,” Giron explains.

If the concept works, it could mean infinitely rechargeable batteries free of toxic chemicals.

It’s a difficult design challenge. Giron and the team are not only designing a working battery, but an environment where an organism can survive and thrive, which posed its own significant hurdles. There’s a delicate balance involved in harvesting energy from plants. Contrary to photovoltaics, which crave immense amounts of sunlight, too much sun exposure could harm the living organism.

“You could actually unintentionally kill it by putting it in complete direct sun the way you would a solar panel,” Giron says.

Additionally, the team had to find materials for the prototype that allowed the algae to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen back out, but not evaporation.

“I think it’s quite nice to be able to like see the system that you’re interacting with and to be able to see where this electricity is coming from,” Giron says.

Aesthetics were important, too. The metal frame around the transparent acrylic chamber features a leaf pattern, giving the battery a distinct look that nods to its biological elements.

So far, the experiment has been successful: one of the earlier prototypes has been working for over five years.

The team continues to develop the battery’s technology into a real product by researching ways to increase the voltage output, the current, and the power density so it can reliably fuel larger electronics.

The potential of this tech seems to outweigh its limitations. Not only may the batteries work well in environments lacking other power sources—like indoors with diffuse light, or even underwater—but their proliferation could pave the path toward a greener future.

“Our technology could replace millions of small disposable batteries with a much cleaner source of energy,” Howe said in a University of Cambridge blog. “That’s a huge environmental benefit and a really exciting prospect.”

That’s because everything in this space is made from felt. All 20,000 objects. The faux supermarket is the work of Lucy Sparrow, a British artist who specializes in handmade felted objects. For her newly opened show at the Momentary, she recreated a retro supermarket that channels the ’80s and ’90s, VHS video section and all.

Titled “The Beginning of Convenience,” the exhibition explores American retail during the years 1975 to 1995—a time when the rise of dual-income households led to a boom in convenience culture, prepared foods, and new retail experiences.

Across three separate galleries, The Beginning of Convenience spans 400 square feet and features more than 20,000 pieces of handmade felted artwork. The full-scale supermarket replica is meant to feel familiar and nostalgic but slightly unsettling.

“My art is always focused on re-creating everyday community spaces that we all share and turning them into theatrical artistic spaces,” says Sparrow. “Supermarket is the perfect location for this and gives a huge canvas of possibilities for my work.”

Sparrow grew up making her own toys. Eventually she began creating objects with felt, which has been her predominant medium. She’s best known for her immersive installations recreating retail environments in handmade detail. She transforms empty spaces into nostalgic worlds, including supermarkets, corner shops, fast-food, and pharmacies.

“The Beginning of Convenience” took over two years of research from Sparrow, who jokes that the “creative process is anything but convenient.” She even learned to create her own neon signs for the project.

Along with the supermarket recreation, the exhibition will also include a 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, alongside a collection of vintage ads, all produced by Sparrow. Developing this process and learning new skills, Sparrow shares, was the most rewarding. The third gallery will feature a recreation of Sparrow’s studio.

“I really just want people to enjoy their time within the exhibition,” said Sparrow. “My intention is to inspire complete joy and nostalgia when people walk in—some visitors will recognize every product on the shelves, while others won’t be familiar with many of them, but I hope the exhibition will start a conversation between the generations.”

The exhibition will run from July 18, 2026 to July 11, 2027.

The use of this kind of “handmade” aesthetic has been debated in the design community for a long time. But, I’d argue that it’s only recently that the trend has drifted into something that feels . . . forced. Panera Bread’s recent incorporation of highly polished swash typography to no doubt recall the hand-painted signage of your favorite local grocer feels at odds with its reputation for mass-produced “quality ingredients.” St. Regis has recently announced a collection of ultra-high-luxury hospitality brands, many of which use hand-drawn elements perhaps at odds with its highly polished luxury properties. Most telling is Claude’s branding, incorporating hand-drawn illustrations and details that attempt to tell the world, “Hey, we’re the more human AI.”

Blame technology. Designers have a tendency to lead with their passions, and with AI feeling both threatening and exploitative to many in the community, there’s a natural impulse to push away from anything digital. But, as with the skeuomorphism of the aughts or the grunge-ification of the ’90s before it, our industry has pushed too far, sparking a trendy style that reflects designers’ uneasy relationship with technology more than it serves a real need.

Hand-drawn, hand-crafted elements have a place in design, to be sure—for the right brand or the right concept. And true craftsmanship is never out of style. But when this hand-rendered patina is used over and over again, it begins to fall flat, and offer neither enough resonance nor substance for a brand to truly stand out. This is creating a real problem for brands in the age of AI, looking to express that their values, offering, or services are more human-centered.

Old problems, new solutions

This isn’t the first time a trend like this has taken hold. Skeuomorphic design follows a similar mindset in design thinking—if we need to push a trajectory in a specific direction, go literal. And it worked pretty well in the early days of the iPhone and Blackberry to help bridge the gap between the traditional office environment of the desk and this new glass brick you tap. But it also went too far, and seeped into other applications where it really didn’t make any sense.  Same with the “grunge” movement of design in the late 90s, with photocopied type samples and photoshop brushes that aimed to capture the energy and zeitgeist of the Zine movement—but under false pretenses.

This latest fake craft and hand-drawn era is more of the same. And it will take designers being especially mindful to avoid falling into traps. Here’s how:

• Root your ideas in the context
  Whenever you’re running to social media and trying to imitate patina or “style,” that’s when the trouble starts. Instead, if you can root your ideas in the context of the project itself, that’s when it really sings. For example, one of my favorite branding projects of last year was for a bakery called Rose by Super Studio, which took the bread itself and “printed” with it, creating a hand-expressed marble texture that was literally the product. They used hand-drawn textures with real meaning, making the designs an expression of the quality of the bread.
  
• Ask yourself what it means to be “human”
  The rise of AI has challenged a lot of previous conventions about how we define “being human,” whether that’s making mistakes, being delightfully irrational, thinking nonlinearly, or using a variety of voices, tones, and outfits to define who we are in any given moment. If the end goal is to make an organization or message feel more human, then perhaps finding ways to make the identity system act human instead of just grabbing a pencil and making marks could lead to more authentically human expressions while simultaneously moving the art of design forward, too.
  
• Collaborate with the machine . . . just like other designers
  The biggest myth of working with AI agents is thinking they give you the right answer on the first prompt. That barely ever happens in practice. You need to go back and forth with it, iterating over content, code, and expressions, teaching it what you want and exploring mistakes and potential unexpected discoveries. The most meaningful work I’ve made with agents has been through dialogue with them, as if I’m directing them. The more specific you can be, and the more iterations you have, the more human and intentional the work becomes.
  
• Embrace depth and variation in your brands
  Human beings are messy, dynamic, and constantly changing. Strong brand identities are considered rigid, rigorous, and standardized. One way bring more humanity into these identity systems is to introduce variation—different logos, different voices and tones for different scenarios, or color palettes that shift based on mood, seasonality, experience. When the one-size-fits-all approach is feeling too stiff and cold, adding depth and variation to a brand can make it feel more like us. Yes, that adds complexity, but I’d argue the demands on a brand identity are more complex than they were during Paul Rand’s or Saul Bass’s era. And our audiences are dramatically more sophisticated  at brand recognition than they were 50 years ago. Perhaps we need to rethink the shackles of the “brand police” as the only tool for enforcement, and begin to design flexibility into our design systems.

As with most trends, the fake “handmade” aesthetic has become about blending in rather than standing apart. And that’s not what design is being called to do. The task, especially in terms of brand, is to create distinction and separation in the marketplace. And AI isn’t the only force that’s leading to creative homogeneity. Sometimes, when we react reflexively without considering the consequences, we can do it to ourselves, too.

A NASA visualization tracks how wildfire smoke traveled from hundreds of fires in North America from mid-July to early August, showing the sprawling size of the impact.

In a wildfire, it’s not uncommon for the intense heat to push smoke 2 or 3 miles up into the atmosphere. That can help make the local air quality better, but it also means the smoke goes farther.

“At these higher elevations, winds are much faster and the smoke can move long distances,” says Dan Jaffe, a professor of atmospheric and climate science at the University of Washington. Unlike larger dust particles, the tiny smoke particles can stay suspended for days. “A typical smoke particle might last in the atmosphere for a week or more,” Jaffe says.

In some cases, the pollution might travel to a city but stay high in the atmosphere. But certain weather conditions can make the air quality plummet quickly. Detroit, for example, temporarily became the most polluted city in the world in July when a temperature inversion and weak winds trapped wildfire smoke near the ground. (In that case, the smoke was coming both from Canada and from fires in northern Minnesota.)

The smoke has immediate health impacts, and the risks can increase as it travels to cities. As it stays in the atmosphere and some particles oxidize, the smoke can get more dangerous to breathe over time. It also can mix with urban pollution to create more ground-level ozone, worsening asthma and other health conditions.

The NASA map makes it obvious that smoke doesn’t respect borders. President Donald Trump has said that he wants to “punish” Canada for the air pollution from fires, though there’s no existing legal theory for liability. The science also makes the question of responsibility much more complicated.

It’s not clear that the Canadian government could have prevented many of the fires, which are often started by lightning in remote regions far from firefighting crews. In some cases, thinning out trees in forests can make the problem worse. (It’s worth noting that smoke from American wildfires also pollutes Canadian cities.)

There is a clearer culprit: climate change. Hotter, drier weather is making it easier for fires to spread. A recent study estimates that climate change made this year’s fires in Canada twice as likely to occur. Another report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 37% of fires that burned in western North America over the past four decades can be linked to emissions from the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.

California and other state and local governments have already sued fossil fuel companies over climate damages, including wildfires. It’s not clear if they’ll succeed. In October, the Supreme Court will consider a case in which oil and gas companies argue that they shouldn’t be sued for climate pollution, and the court’s conservative majority could agree.

The updated branding will appear across all of Jif’s products starting this fall, and includes a new wordmark, logo, fonts, and photography. On August 10, Jif dropped a new campaign called “Every Jif’ing Thing,” which highlights the spread’s many use cases—think smoothies, yogurt bowls, and peanut noodles. Together, these efforts are part of a broader repositioning plan from Jif. 

The brand told Marketing Dive that while 85% of consumers could recognize the Jif logo by its red, blue, and green stripes, they mostly associated it with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As Jif works on expanding its product portfolio into new innovations like squeezable tubes and peanut butter and chocolate spread, the brand’s new look is meant to convey that it’s not just a component of your kids’ favorite sandwich—it’s also, per a press release, “a natural complement to an apple slice, rice cake, cracker, or even simply enjoyed from a spoon” (we’ve all been there). 

In an era when brand refreshes are in vogue, what stands out about Jif’s evolution isn’t what’s changed, but what’s stayed the same. The brand has smartly taken an ultra-subtle approach with its wordmark, and, by staying true to its funky lettering, it manages to look more modern without losing recognizability. 

Jif gets a beyond-PB&J glow-up

In 2023, Fast Company declared it the era of the “big rebrand.” In 2024, the rebrand was dead, replaced with the “refresh”—ostensibly the same concept, with a lighter, less all-encompassing touch. Today, companies are still much quicker to update their branding in a bid to stay modern than they are to hold off to maintain brand recognizability. 

When it comes to logos, that can mean sacrificing established brand equity (as in the case of Eddie Bauer, Saint Laurent, and Johnson & Johnson) for the sake of modernity or legibility. Jif—which is one of the brands owned by massive $14 billion food and beverage conglomerate J.M. Smucker—had the built-in advantage that its 30-year-old logo was already in a bold, easy-to-read font (no pesky scripts here). Still, the previous look had plenty of quirks that the brand could easily have smoothed out in service of a sleeker identity.

The jot above the “i” was comically oversized and squished; the stems of the “J” and “f” were so chunky that only a sliver of space poked in between; and the crossbar of the “f” was disproportionately thin and short. 

Rather than removing these traits to perfect the logo, the team at Jif opted instead for less-invasive tweaks. The new version looks largely the same, just without a drop shadow or serifs. 

“For all of our brands, we focus on representing them in a manner that is authentic to the brand, their history, and what they mean to consumers,” says Kara Buckler, senior director of creative and design at J.M. Smucker. “With the Jif refresh, we honored the iconic elements people know and love while also invigorating the brand with a cleaner, bolder look.”

To signal its repositioning, Jif is relying on the packaging’s new photography to do most of the heavy lifting. Across various SKUs, images of spreads on rice crackers, apples, celery, and pretzels help cue customers in on Jif’s beyond-PB&J glow-up. Its tricolor logo has also been reduced in size so that each SKU is defined by its own distinct label color. 

The new Jif winks at the brand’s broadening ambitions without alienating its cross-generational fans. It’s a reminder that oftentimes the best rebrands are about restraint.

For the umpteenth time, Musk will try to overexcite fans and Tesla bulls with yet another epic announcement, demoing this fantastic car this month, sources tell The Information. Three people with knowledge of the car claim that the upcoming show-and-tell will have “the vehicle racing onto a magnetized roller-coaster–like ramp and driving upside down before righting itself and hovering in the air.” The demo and the new Roadster, if it works—remember the Cybertruck bulletproof windows?—want to restore Tesla’s initial design allure, which has been gone for years now.

The reality is that, even if it wows the world with some amazing design, the alleged flying car already comes with a load of problems, starting with the fact that its flying nature—only available in a limited-edition model, if it really happens—doesn’t bring any real useful innovation to the industry. Meanwhile, Tesla’s uber-nemesis, BYD, has—since February 25, 2024—been shipping a real “flying car” designed to jump 20 feet over obstacles like an 8.2-foot-wide pothole.

And Musk needs to steal back the thunder from the Chinese cars that have been consistently destroying his company’s market share worldwide, especially the Shenzhen-based automaker. Tesla has been struggling with poor sales for years now, caused mainly by stale design, technology, and a poor image after its CEO’s DOGE handiwork in the second Trump administration.

Design crisis

Things are getting so bad that, earlier this year, Tesla killed the Model S after 14 years without ever designing its replacement, and the Model X died right alongside it, leaving the Model Y—a stretched Model 3—as the company’s only SUV. The 3 and Y got refreshes, but new bumpers and ambient lighting don’t change what they are: the same car, photocopied and airbrushed. Back in 2012, Tesla’s “blandly handsome” design was a feature—the conservative silhouette that reassured buyers nervous about unproven battery tech. The market caught up years ago, and that doesn’t cut it anymore.

Musk tried to correct course with the Cybertruck, going from bland to brutal—a garish design that has managed to become more broken than its critics predicted. It’s been recalled nearly a dozen times for issues ranging from stainless trim panels peeling off at highway speed to stuck accelerator pedals and, this past spring, even wheels that could literally detach.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a . . . Roadster?

Which brings us to his latest occurrence: a flying car!

According to The Information‘s sources, the propulsive lift comes from cold gas thrusters engineered jointly with SpaceX’s Starship propulsion team, including Starship engineering VP Bill Riley. Beneath the thrusters sits a clean-sheet carbon fiber tub hypercar, internally code-named A-71. Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen evaluated design themes inspired by the Lamborghini Countach and the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane—themes that gave the program its code name. In late 2025, Tesla reportedly completed a functional prototype with two seats and butterfly doors.

The demonstration is planned for SpaceX’s rocket-testing complex in McGregor, Texas. Three sources told The Information‘s Grace Kay that Tesla is preparing an unveiling—either live or recorded—to showcase the flight capabilities of a limited-edition Roadster developed in collaboration with SpaceX. Tesla already postponed the demonstration after previewing it to Musk, and subsequently reduced the scope of several stunt elements.

Even if Musk and his team pull the demo off, we really don’t know if the car will ever materialize as a real commercial product. There’s the issue of the cold gas thrusters, which release high-pressure gas that creates extreme acoustic noise and severe vibrations, Jae Wook Kim, a professor of aerodynamics and aeroacoustics at the University of Southampton, told Kay. Extreme enough that spectators at McGregor will be positioned several hundred yards away to prevent damage to their eardrums. Extreme enough that the demonstration vehicle will be remotely operated with an empty cabin. No human passengers in Tesla’s flying car. The limited-edition flying vehicle will not be street-legal, and it’s estimated to cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Tesla has evaluated selling the SpaceX-branded demonstration variant to select superfans under a supervised, closed-circuit track format modeled after Ferrari’s XX Programme: You’d own a car you can’t drive on the street—only on a closed circuit, under supervision, Kay’s sources claim. It may end up being just a costly publicity stunt to get some innovator aura and sell some regular new Roadsters—cars that may look the same but without the flying. Tesla took deposits for a next-generation Roadster back in November 2017, with an initial 2020 target delivery date: $50,000 for standard allocations and $250,000 for the Founder’s Series tier. The 2017 design was abandoned entirely and replaced with an unrevealed architecture, and the program has experienced at least eight schedule delays since then.

The real flying car

Compare all this theater to BYD’s Yangwang U9. The approximately $233,000 all-electric supercar from BYD’s ultra-luxury division is a street-legal production hypercar, and its version of flight comes from the DiSus-X Intelligent Body Control System integrated into BYD’s quad-motor e4 powertrain platform. No rocket propellant. No compressed thrusters. No aerodynamic wings. Just high-speed closed-loop hydraulic actuators, active air suspension, and variable damping. The hardware generates an instant vertical lifting force exceeding one ton per corner, allowing all four wheels to break ground contact simultaneously.

During performance testing, an unoccupied U9 traveling autonomously at 74.5 mph detected an 8.2-foot-wide water-filled pothole and launched itself 20 feet forward through the air to clear the gap. The chassis compresses downward, rapidly extends the front axle actuators, then extends the rear axle actuators, and fully opens the dampers upon descent to absorb the landing force. Peak vertical elevation during the high-speed leap is only about 1.4 inches above the ground. It has also leaped across a 13-foot span of 1.38-inch metal spike strips without tire puncture, as well as over distinct colored pavement markings. Sensor suites comprising stereoscopic cameras, accelerometers, and gyroscopes process road surface data 1,000 times per second to trigger launch timing and damping rates without driver intervention.

Those are all extreme demonstrations, but in the end, this jumping suspension is designed to allow the car to drive under extreme road conditions while keeping passengers safe and comfortable. You can basically drive this car over any bumpy road with a glass of water filled to the brim on the dashboard, and not a single drop would spill.

When BYD showed the U9 at CES 2025, the internet nicknamed it the “flying car.” BYD simply calls it “jumping suspension.” But then again, the company’s CEO is not a hyperbolic trillionaire, and the company is shipping a car you can buy, sit in, and drive on public roads today for a fraction of what Tesla’s flying edition is estimated to cost—if Tesla’s flying edition ever sells.

The drone targets stretch from the Pacific to the Black Sea. At the Rybachiy facility on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the nets cover Borei and Borei-A class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the core of Moscow’s nuclear triad. At Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, metal cages cover parts of Kilo-class attack submarines.

Russia knows that Ukraine—the first country in the world with a dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces branch—has already proven it can hit everything else. Take the unprecedented Operation Spider’s Web: On June 1, 2025, Kiev’s special commandos launched short-range strikes using 117 drones against multiple Russian Aerospace Forces’ bombers (the second component of Putin’s atomic triad) from inside Russia’s own borders.

Following that, on June 3, 2026, Ukrainian drones flew roughly 620 miles to hit the Kronstadt naval facility near St. Petersburg, striking the corvette Boikiy in dry dock and setting it on fire, while secondary groups hit the 15th Arsenal munitions warehouses in Lebyazhye.

“Last night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometers to the St. Petersburg region—to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in Kronstadt,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the time. And the Black Sea campaign never stopped: Missiles and air and sea drones have torn into multiple Russian Navy ships in repeated attacks on its bases there, the latest attack happening on August 12.

Knowing it can’t down waves of multiple incoming targets, Moscow has resorted again to hanging netting to defend its most precious nuclear assets. It’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem: The nets will catch the drones before they can hit the subs.

Earlier in August, imagery from satellite survey company Vantor showed personnel at the Kamchatka Peninsula facility suspending mesh over the moored nuclear ballistic missile submarines. In addition to that, floating booms ring the docks to intercept explosive uncrewed surface vessels. Large crane ships spent May through August positioning the overhead defenses.

The practice began with what Russia’s own soldiers call the “roads of death,” supply routes where Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) drones, piloted with game controllers and headsets, left hundreds of ruined trucks and armor. Russian troops were forced to improvise a 2-kilometer tunnel of plastic mesh strung on makeshift posts. The tactic mimics the barrage balloons Allied forces floated during World War II to obstruct dive bombers.

Some sections were fully enclosed; others were just overhead banners meant to physically block diving drones. “Our group maintains more than 2 kilometers of anti-drone nets. We constantly improve the technology,” a Russian soldier said in a state TV broadcast at the time. “The nets are placed in the most exposed sections of the road to ensure the safe movement of our equipment. We strive to continuously expand the coverage area, enhancing the installation technology to set them up more quickly.”

Cheap, sloppy, and ineffective

Russia first leaned on electronic warfare to jam the drones. Ukraine adapted using artificial intelligence, fiber-optic cables, and changing control frequencies. Putin’s forces, undersupplied and overwhelmed by the constant needling of FPV drones and swarms, couldn’t do anything but try to add a weak layer of defense.

But Ukrainian drone operators say the netting won’t hold: They just have to destroy it using other drones. Air-detonated fragmentation warheads (effectively airborne Claymore mines) can punch shrapnel through the mesh, clearing a path for follow-up drones to hit convoys packed tight inside, unable to scatter. From there, they can just keep using FPV suicide drones, bomber drones, or incendiary “dragon drones” built to slip inside the netted corridors and douse them in thermite, a chemical compound that burns at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt through armor and kill anyone inside.

While soldiers tried to survive, the Russian Navy has been improvising defenses for two years. In 2024, the Delta-IV nuclear submarine Tula appeared at Gadzhiyevo, Barents Sea fjords, wearing early anti-drone protection. At Novorossiysk, crews painted a flat submarine outline on the pier and erected a dummy conning tower to fool weapons with autonomous visual targeting.

Then came the cages. “The Russian Black Sea Fleet has equipped three of its four Kilo-class submarines with counter-UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] cages covering the vessels’ conning towers. This was applied as a preventive measure in response to Ukraine’s increased ability to strike targets further from the front line,” British authorities reported. “Analysis of commercial satellite imagery dated 13 June 2026 identified that three of the submarines had loosened their moorings and had submerged within the basin. Whilst the majority of the hull was below the surface, their conning towers remained above the waterline, explaining the need for the counter-UAS cage.”

Nobody knows how long it will be before a nuclear submarine loaded with nuclear ballistic missiles gets hit by Kiev’s unmanned machines. The Ukrainians are pounding Russia’s Black Sea and Sea of Azov targets again and again, merging sea and air platforms into uncrewed surface vessels launching aerial kamikaze drones, and adding compact satellite communications capable of finding, targeting, and hitting moving targets in the Sea of Azov (90 vessels just in July).

Rybachiy, however, sits some 4,500 miles from Ukraine—far beyond any drone Kiev has ever flown. But Operation Spider’s Web proved that drones don’t have to fly from Ukraine. So it seems logical to assume that the question is not if it will happen, but when.

“The wordmark at the top of the app hasn’t changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh,” head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced in an Instagram post. “Cleaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.”

The new design lets go of Instagram’s iconic cursive font. However, it retains hints of script, like a connected “n” and “s” as well as an “r” and a “g” with playful swooshes.

The change also moves Instagram closer to the visual identity of its sibling Meta apps thanks to the introduction of sans-serif lettering, which is also found in the wordmarks of Facebook and Threads.

In fact, Threads rolled out an updated visual identity in May this year. As Fast Company reported at the time, the Threads redesign came as a way to evolve Threads as more than just an offshoot of Instagram, but a platform of its own.

While more details on the redesign are still to come, users on social media have already taken notice of Mosseri’s announcement.

Some are not entirely welcoming of the new design, with one user on X saying, “The new Instagram logo is funky in the worst way possible. It’s leaning both into the classic script and also trying to drop in a standard “a” and “m” sans serif. Also the “I” is a totally different weight.”

Many are noting that the approach of keeping just some cursive elements and letting go of others makes the wordmark confusing to read, with many commenting on Mosseri’s post that the new wordmark looks like it reads, “Instagzam.”

And while others are welcoming the change, like one user who commented “Modernized we love it,” others are already mourning the old design. One user added, “the end of an era.”

Go To Green is a new emergency evacuation system that’s designed to automatically direct people to go, or stay, in the safest place during an emergency. Designed primarily as a response to active shooter situations in schools, the system uses a simple system of colored lights to direct people to the safest evacuation route, and away from danger.

“Most children in the United States play red light, green light. So it just makes sense to use lights that we’re all preconditioned to pretty much from birth,” says Ernie Williams, founder of Go To Green.

The system consists of thin ceiling-mounted LED light arrays and various audio and motion sensors that activate at the sound of gunshots or during fires. Located in school hallways and inside and outside classroom doors, the lights turn green to show people where to move and red to show them where to avoid. Red and blue lights flash at the point nearest the emergency source, be it a fire or a shooter. It essentially turns buildings themselves into real-time evacuation tools, showing in a very visual way where to go during an emergency, and where not to.

Williams, a former Marine, spent 25 years in the military and says the idea for a more intuitive active-shooter security system and evacuation guide came from direct experience. “I spent a little bit of time getting shot at and understood the problem with indoor systems,” he says. “They can’t pick up an active shooter in real time.”

Williams says Go To Green’s sensors act independently to be able to pinpoint where a threat exists, even if it’s moving. “Let’s say a guy’s walking down the hallway and he shoots, the sensors change and the pathways may change,” he says.

The system is currently installed in 20 schools, mostly in Texas, where the company is based. None have been called into action for active shooter situations, but they have been activated during tornadoes, alerting students and staff to get indoors and avoid dangerous places within buildings. The company is backed by O’Leary Ventures, the investment arm of Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary.

Primarily focused on active shooters, the security system is also designed to assist first responders, with exterior lights that flash blue and red to indicate the location of the threat, be it a fire or a person with a gun. “We can direct them using visual signals. We don’t have to get on the radios, we don’t have to get on the phone with them. They look up and see a visual and this automatically takes them to the threat,” Williams says.

Go To Green is one of many school security systems and tools that have come to market in recent years. Amanda Klinger, director of operations at the nonprofit security training organization The Educator’s School Safety Network, says products on the market vary widely in their efficacy. “We’ve really seen the industry explode in growth,” Klinger says. “There’s a lot of money to be made.”

After reviewing material on the Go To Green active-shooter security system, Klinger says it has the potential to be a valuable part of a school’s security system, but that security systems alone can only go so far. Training and threat prevention are also necessary to reduce the chances of very rare and extreme emergency events like active shooter situations. “The part that’s a little bit tough to swallow is, in a district where they opt for something like this, have they done appropriate training for their folks and for their students?” Klinger says. “Is this the icing on the cake, or is this the only thing that they’ve done?”

Klinger worries that school districts may dedicate limited resources to products and systems as seemingly simple solutions, without putting the same effort and resources into training and prevention. “The concern that we have with stuff like this, that does seem like a pretty good idea, that does seem to have a good amount of efficacy and utility, is does the school district then also have the political will to do some things on the other side of the coin?” Klinger says. “Because this is something that is only response. There is not a deterrent effect.”

Williams sees the Go To Green system as a way to reduce the harm that can come from shootings or other kinds of emergencies by making it easier for people to avoid threats, and for first responders to react more efficiently. “We’re trying to change the paradigm of what we focus on during a shooting,” he says. “We need to focus on the potential victims, and let the professionals focus on the shooter.”