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Last week I cancelled a $4,000-a-year subscription and replaced it with a proofing platform I built for the agency, which does more and fits how we actually work.

Which is the thing I keep noticing. A year ago that wasn’t an option — you paid the invoice because building it yourself was never on the radar, and the cost of trying would have been worse.

Now it takes a weekend, and a lot of platforms aren’t under threat from their competitors anymore. They’re under threat from their customers. Brandon Thomas is the extreme version: Adobe charged him an early termination fee when he tried to cancel, so he rebuilt Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat with AI and gave all seven away free.

Software companies should be bending over backwards to keep people. Good service, real relationships, and customers who are glad they pay you.

Weglot is the example of that. They’ve spent years investing in the product and in the relationship, and this year they’ve backed it with the positioning — from translation tool to AI-powered international growth partner. We’ve used them on a complex implementation across several languages and it was a pleasure to work with, which is the bit you can’t manufacture.

Product and positioning. If there are two things to place your entire importance on in 2026, it’s these.

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Anyone who has worked on a website knows the meeting. Someone has to decide how the site will speak to the world in other languages, and every person in the room has a different answer. One side wants to pay a professional translator to do it properly. The other wants to run everything through AI and ship by Friday. Weglot’s new campaign drops you straight into that meeting, lets the argument run, and then answers it with three words: “You mean Weglot?”

It’s a smart piece of positioning, because it gives both camps what they were fighting for: AI speed alongside the craft and control a professional expects. It’s also a brand we know well at Lento. A friend recommended it to us three years ago, and it has been the tool we use to translate sites for every client whose audience needs more than one language ever since. Seeing it come back as the star of a campaign that understands exactly how these decisions get made was a pleasure to write about.

👉 Deep dive into the campaign

Nearly three years after it went up, a video essay called “Plagiarism and You(Tube)” is still being found. It runs for three hours and fifty-one minutes, and its creator, the British essayist hbomberguy, doesn’t name the man the whole thing is about until one hour, forty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds in. Before publishing, he promised the ad revenue to the writers and creators whose work had been copied, an easy promise to make when you assume a four-hour essay will earn very little. It passed 39 million views, and the payout came in far higher than anyone had planned for.

That is a lot of attention on a platform that has spent the past five years teaching its audience to swipe. Across close to 800,000 videos, Metricool found that views on long-form rose 76% in a year, while the average viewer stayed for just 2.51 minutes, down from 3.98. The average Short is now watched for about sixteen seconds. People are pressing play more often than ever and leaving sooner, and YouTube has quietly started letting users set their daily Shorts limit to zero.

And yet Red Bull still broadcasts every minute of Rampage, Joe Rogan’s conversations still run past three hours, and Yeti has made more than 75 films, most of them with barely a cooler in frame.

👉 Read the full piece

In 1994, a type designer at Letters from Sweden started drawing a typeface on a Power Macintosh 7100. Thirty years and countless redraws later, Exemplar is finally finished, now covering 370 languages across Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic. To mark the release, the foundry carved its history into three street signs, one for each address and decade where it took shape.

It leads this month’s picks alongside three very different faces. One is a warm humanist from Latinotype built for the classic “professional, but friendly” brief. Another is Dinamo’s latest variable experiment. The third is GRX, a display serif that makes no apology for being hard to read at small sizes.

👉 Get inspired

There’s probably a tab on your laptop you haven’t clicked in a month. It’s a project board, and the top card says “Kick-off call — Tuesday.” That Tuesday was in March. Further down, a project that shipped weeks ago is still marked In Progress, and everyone has gone back to asking each other on Slack.

The usual fix is a new tool. Asana, which sells one, found that chasing updates and hunting for files still takes up 58% of the average working day. If new software solved the problem, that number would have moved by now. At Lento, keeping our board useful is one person’s job and half an hour every Monday, and none of the habits behind it cost anything.

The most surprising one comes from a Harvard study at one of the world’s largest phone factories, where hanging a curtain around a production line made its output go up.

👉 Read the full piece