Heinz just won the logo-less advert trend (2 minute read)
Heinz's new “Looks Familiar” campaign uses a minimalist, playful approach to highlight how perfectly its ketchup pairs with French fries. The ads replace the Heinz logo with a French fry box, relying only on silhouette and typography to trigger instant brand recognition. This bold move reflects Heinz's confidence in its iconic design and taps into a growing advertising trend of dropping logos to create an interactive “guess-who” experience. By keeping things simple yet clever, Heinz reinforces its branding while refreshing how consumers engage with familiar products.
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Adobe's First AI Agents are Ready to Rock and Roll (4 minute read)
Adobe launched its first family of AI agents for the Adobe Experience Platform. Designed to automate marketing tasks like audience building, customer journey creation, and website optimization, the agents work alongside the new AEP Agent Orchestrator, which manages both Adobe's native agents and third-party solutions through natural language prompts while keeping humans involved in the process. Adobe plans to expand capabilities with the upcoming Experience Platform Agent Composer, allowing companies to customize agents according to their specific brand guidelines and policies.
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Amid this terrifying climate crisis, designers need to step up (4 minute read)
At the World Design Congress in London, architect Indy Johar warned that climate change will radically reshape society, from infrastructure to inequality, and urged designers to confront this reality with radical new ideas. Speakers, including Johar, Leland Maschmeyer, Sarah McCullough, and others, argued that design must move beyond aesthetics to rewire society's desires, create joy in sustainability, and embrace responsibility for shaping a livable future, because, as Tori Tsui reminded, the world is at the mercy of designers' imagination.
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Picasso's Bull: The Art of Earning Simplicity (3 minute read)
Picasso's "Le Taureau" lithograph series demonstrates how creative mastery requires earning simplicity through iterative complexity, starting with detailed, realistic drawings and systematically reducing them to essential flowing lines. The eleven drawings from 1945 to 1946 reveal that elegant final abstractions are only possible after working through the full complexity of earlier iterations. Modern AI tools can disrupt this essential creative process by either making creators skip the raw material stage or overwhelming them with generated content before thoughtful reduction occurs.
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What Can You Do If Your Boss Starts Generating AI Designs? (4 minute read)
Design teams face challenges when colleagues use AI tools to bypass UX processes, creating appealing but functionally flawed designs that may seem faster initially. Designers must shift from emphasizing speed advantages to communicating broader business value, translating design problems into terms stakeholders understand, like engineering rework costs and security risks. Building trust requires understanding what motivates teams to use AI shortcuts and demonstrating how proper UX prevents costly mistakes that damage user experience and business objectives.
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Auditing your Design system for accessibility (9 minute read)
Accessibility must be built into Design Systems from the start, since flaws at the system level ripple across every product and compound over time. A structured audit of tokens, components, and patterns that prioritizes fixes by severity and effort would ensure a stable, inclusive foundation that reduces downstream issues and supports accessible, consistent design.
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How to Harness Skills that AI Can't Automate (11 minute read)
AI tools can quickly generate functional prototypes, but exceptional products require distinctly human skills like curiosity, intuition, taste, and intention that AI cannot replicate. While AI accelerates exploration and iteration, humans provide the emotional intelligence to sense what resonates with users and the discernment to refine ideas into meaningful experiences. Design systems become crucial frameworks that help teams maintain quality and consistency when leveraging AI, ensuring outputs align with brand identity and user needs.
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‘I Don't Take Myself Too Seriously': Gustaf Westman on Designing for Joy with Ikea (4 minute read)
Ikea launched a collaboration with Swedish designer Gustaf Westman in Seoul that features a 12-piece collection of whimsical, brightly colored tabletop accessories, including meatball trays, bouncy vases, and donut-shaped lamps. Westman's approach prioritizes fun over seriousness, creating what Ikea calls "humorous objects" that serve joy in an industry often focused on rigour and restraint.
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Jae Lee, Matej Latin & Ralph Brinker
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