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So there I was in Europe on a lazy Sunday morning, watching Bieber headline Coachella from bed. Getting closer to 40, this is getting more comfortable every single year.

The Beliebers, the Carpenters, the EYEKONs, every artist fandom with a cleverly branded name reported to Indio, and the brands came with them like they always do. And every year I hear the same thing — Coachella is dead, the brands and influencers killed it. I've said it myself plenty of times. But watching Bieber sit on a stool scrolling his own 2008 YouTube videos, it hit me that the audience has aged with him. The creators have aged with him. Coachella isn't a coming-of-age moment for 19 year olds in flower crowns anymore. It's a legacy event now, and Brandchella is what's keeping it alive — the annual Creators Olympics, a testing ground for every in-person brand moment of the year.

Which brings me to the Biebers. While everyone online was losing it over Justin on that stool, his wife was running a completely different play outside the gates. Rhode pulled $10 million in earned media over a single weekend — more than any official beauty sponsor at the festival. Who would have thought, a pimple patch brand outselling the headliner.

Never say never.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

I watched Justin headline Coachella from my bed on a Sunday night, next to my husband, and it turned out that was roughly how he was performing too. He sat on a stool, opened a laptop, scrolled through his own YouTube highlights for what felt like a third of the set, and livestreamed from the biggest festival stage in the world while looking like a guy killing time on a weeknight.

Half the internet called it the worst headlining performance in Coachella history. The other half, possibly softened by having grown up with him and carrying residual feelings about seeing him happy again, called it the most honest thing they'd seen on a festival stage in years.

I was somewhere in the middle of that split, which is probably the most accurate place to watch it from. It felt warm and strange and slightly sad in a way I couldn't quite place, and it made me think of being in someone's living room rather than at a festival.But this isn't a review of the set. It's about what was happening in parallel, because while everyone was arguing online about whether a stool and a laptop was a disgrace or a comeback, his wife was running a completely different stage. And somewhere in the middle of Weekend One, Rhode dropped Spotwear with both Biebers inside the product, while the festival was still running.

That's the thing I keep thinking about.

👉 Read the full piece

The brief arrives on a Monday, as it often does.

Someone spent the weekend scrolling—an awards show, a competitor's campaign, something that racked up numbers. By the time they walk into the conference room, they haven't decided what to do. They've decided what to look like. This distinction matters more than anyone in that meeting will admit.

"We need a Liquid Death moment." "Something that feels like Spotify Wrapped." "That Duolingo energy—can we do that?"

Within hours, a studio somewhere is reverse-engineering the aesthetics of a canned water company to sell indemnity insurance, supply-chain logistics, or whatever category has no business wearing a punk-rock sneer but will wear one anyway. The tuxedo never fits. It wasn't made for those shoulders. But the brief is signed, the mood board is full of screenshots from someone else's best year, and the room nods.

Brands have always copied each other. That's not new. But there's a difference between copying and stealing, and most marketing departments have quietly forgotten which one actually works.

This isn't a new distinction. Painters, writers, and musicians have argued about it for the better part of a century—the difference between the artist who takes a surface and the one who takes an idea and transforms it until it's unrecognizable. The good ones always steal. The bad ones copy and call it homage. What's new is that marketing has started pretending the distinction doesn't exist. That every lift is research. That every reference deck is a strategy. It isn't, and it never was.

Stealing is slower because it requires you to go past the thing you admired and find the reason it worked—the human observation underneath that the brand was brave enough to build on.

👉 Read the full piece

This month started with a client brief: "something with weight but not a slab." Three hours of foundry browsing later, I had seventeen tabs open and the same problem — everything looked like it was designed to offend no one. Technically competent. Spiritually absent.

The four picks here came out of that frustration. Two from Swiss foundries doing very different things with historical reference. One from Montreal solving a problem that's been quietly annoying designers for thirty years. One from Fontshare that keeps showing up in premium work despite being free.

These aren't the most talked-about releases of the month. They're the ones I kept coming back to — which is a different filter.

👉 Check out our best fonts for April

A young girl's voice asks the question over footage of kids playing outdoors in the 1970s, laughing without looking at cameras. "How did they do it?" Old home movies. A rope swing over a creek. A backyard birthday party where no one's documenting it. The 60-second spot closes with a single line on screen: "The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline."

The nostalgia is thick. The message is simple enough to tattoo on your wrist. And Pinterest made this ad and is now running it across TV, cinema, out-of-home, and digital—spending money on advertising to tell you that advertising is spiritually corrosive. That contradiction is the whole story.

Why it matters: Most brands that want to position against an enemy pick a manageable target—one competitor, one product decision, one news cycle. Pinterest went after the entire logic of how social media is built. Engagement-maximization as design philosophy. The infinite scroll as a feature, not a bug. That's a harder thing to land, because it requires the audience to believe you're actually different, not just saying you are

👉 Watch the campaign