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Something happens when you move around enough. The new stops landing. The first few times a new city is genuinely a new city, and then at some point you're somewhere you've never been before, and it's nice, and you notice you're not feeling much at all. Novelty has a rate limit and I went past mine years before I'd admit it.

What kept landing was smaller. The walk I end up doing wherever I'm staying, knowing which place has run out of bread by ten. A proper routine needs you to stay still, so what I've got instead is a few things that hold wherever I am and everything else arranged behind them.

Everyone's feed has hit the same wall from the other side. Fifteen years of villas and hauls and unboxings until the polish stopped registering, and now what pulls numbers is a nearly empty moisturiser, trainers worn for six years, a woman going at a label with a hairdryer to get it off a bottle she paid full price for. Aspiration hasn't gone anywhere. It's turned around and pointed at what you've had for ages and what you decided not to buy.

Which is an opening for brand work, and a cheap one. The material it wants is already inside the product — the ingredient list, the offcut, the unlock beep nobody has ever been asked to design. Owned outright, costs nothing, no competitor can borrow it. It goes unused because nobody wants to be the one in the meeting proposing that the idea is the beep.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Chessie Domrongchai used to be a beauty influencer, showing people which blushes and body lotions to buy and then arranging them round her house with the labels facing the camera. Now she films herself taking the labels off, soaking them or going at the adhesive with a hairdryer until the bottle underneath is just a bottle. One before-and-after has done 2.9 million views. Somebody paid full price for a product, took it home, and removed the part a studio was hired to make.

Brands clocked the mood and reached for the nearest template. Kinda chic took off in April when Maria Castellanos started laying pale yellow text over photographs, declaring it chic to eat pizza, to be overdressed, to do something alone and scared. By summer, Boots had decided it was kinda chic to reapply your SPF, Aldi was using it to sell a foldable sock hanger, and Virgin Atlantic had attached it to booking a flight with no annual leave left. Brenda Weischer's name for what that produces is template slop.

The version that works costs less and almost nobody does it. A tourist complained on Reddit that Puerto Rico's coquí frog was too loud, so BBDO went into Hyundai's rental fleet and replaced the factory lock-and-unlock beep with the frog's song, and it took the Audio Grand Prix at Cannes. That two-note default had been sitting in the car for decades, owned outright, heard several times a day by every driver and noticed by none of them. Material like that isn't hard to find. It goes unused because nobody wants to be the person in the meeting proposing that the idea is the beep.

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She was a child in Matsumoto, looking down at the family tablecloth, when the pattern lifted off the cloth and spread across the backs of her own hands. She drew it, over and over, because drawing it was the only way to get out in front of it. Seventy years later she was still doing it. She died on the fourteenth of August in a hospital in Tokyo at ninety-seven, and her studio said she had gone on painting to the end, never putting the brush down.

The dot arrived as a symptom long before it was a style, which is the part most tributes flatten. What she did with it was multiply. Fifteen hundred mirrored spheres installed uninvited on the lawn at the 1966 Venice Biennale and sold to passers-by for the price of a coffee until the organisers stopped her. The orange wig, standing in front of her own paintings for the photographers, wearing the work. She had already watched the men around her in New York take her ideas and collect the credit, and protection was never the answer she reached for.

By January 2023 there was a life-size animatronic of her in the Louis Vuitton window on Fifth Avenue, cameras in its pupils, tracking pedestrians and smiling at them, lifting a brush to paint dots on the glass for as long as the store stayed open. She was ninety-three, in a hospital bed in Tokyo, and the machine worked that window every day of the launch.

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The brief lands and it's a milk sachet for a supermarket. Four square centimetres of laminated polyester that has to survive a fridge shelf, a price gun and a person who decides in under two seconds while holding a toddler. You're a good designer, you have taste, you have opinions about grid systems, and somewhere at the back of your head a voice says this is not the work.

The projects that voice is thinking of — the independent bookshop, the specialty coffee, the twelve-piece skincare line in a very particular warm white — share an advantage that rarely gets mentioned. The person walking in already chose to be there. They're predisposed to find it beautiful, to read the typography carefully, to take the restraint as sophistication. Under those conditions even mediocre design looks intentional.

Rubén Fontana's studio redrew YPF's identity in 2007, and the work was mostly subtraction: keep the three letters everyone already recognised, throw out the secondary elements nobody had registered, rebuild the letterforms so they hold together at distance. On a motorway sign, a forecourt pump, a uniform, a building visible from a kilometre out across the pampas. And on a one-colour paper napkin from a petrol station dispenser, slightly misregistered, because the production tolerances are what they are and nobody is going to check

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There are Spotify posters up at the moment with a perforated edge running down them, and if you get a nail into it and pull, a section comes away clean in your hand. The pictures are of fans rather than artists, so what you walk off with is a Geese obsessive in a crocheted goose beanie, or A$AP Rocky devotees in pink hair rollers, or Sailorr fans who've blacked out their teeth and put baby bows in their hair. A handful of the sections have been signed by the artist. You don't find that out until you're already holding one.

The idea came out of a throwaway line in Spotify's own write-up of the last Fan Life run, which mentioned that a few people hadn't been able to resist taking a piece of the work home. Most brands file that under damage — torn sites, repapering, a note to the media agency. Spotify printed the next round with a tear line down it instead, so taking a piece doesn't wreck the ad, it finishes it. The better the campaign does, the more of it comes off the walls.

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