Log in to Instagram on any given day, and there’s a good chance you’ll learn about a new, highly specific holiday: Science Fiction Day, Trivia Day, National Pancake Day—Pickles get an entire week. Brands are scrambling to participate in these social promotions, but is the marketing trend all leading to one big holiday hangover? Short answer: Not with the right marketing strategy. If digital agencies want to reach engaged followers and turn them into consumers, they’ll need to cut through the noise (or pancake, or pickle…). “Special day-themed promotions seem to have quite a bit of promise, as long as they’re both original and brand appropriate,” says Daniel Zane, PhD, assistant professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Lehigh University, who has conducted research on the topic. Of course, “original and appropriate” is the crucial detail for agencies. Learn how to identify the best holidays for your clients (or maybe even create your own), then craft compelling content that resonates, without longing for World Sleep Day—a real thing. How internet holidays got their start Let’s back up a bit. Cyber Monday is the OG internet holiday, and the National Retail Federation (NRF) formalized it in 2005. In a sense, Cyber Monday walked so National Pi Day could run, because it solidified the consumer’s desire to shop online on an exclusive day. Cyber Monday sales have well surpassed the online sales of Black Friday, earning $11.3 billion in 2022, according to Adobe Analytics. But it’s hard to compete on America’s biggest online shopping holiday, so brands got creative with other festive social media promotions year-round. “Traditional dates, like Black Friday and Valentine’s Day, are still important, but brands are trying to find their opportunity to compete in a saturated market,” says Gina Gulberti, vice president of marketing at Launchmetrics, an international data and marketing company for luxury brands. “This is especially true for small brands. It’s hard to compete on Black Friday, but a special-day promotion can give them more space to get customers’ attention.” (Related: These legacy retail brands modernized their marketing strategies, and now they're thriving) That, and they’re highly engaging: Over 700K Instagram users posted pics celebrating National Donut Day and over 360K shared their love of running on Global Running Day. So, does that mean these special-day promotions actually drive sales? Signs point to yes. Zane and his fellow researchers found that consumers carry a large appetite for these promotions when executed well. For Zane’s study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, consumers were given either a coupon for “National Picnic Day” or a retailer’s “Annual One Day Sale.” Shoppers given the Picnic Day promo were more likely to make a purchase, Zane says, because the specificity created more intrigue than the generic sale. “In another study, we found that consumers who received a 25% discount via email to celebrate the day that a company adopted their dog, were almost twice as likely to click to shop on the company’s website, compared to those who received an equivalent discount with no mention of the adoption day,” he says. Again, the specificity got people’s attention. (And who doesn’t like dogs?) 6 ways to create a successful internet holiday for your clients Zane and his colleagues identified two key attributes of successful special-day promotions, based on the picnic and dog experiments: creativity and authenticity. This means the promotion needs to stand out in a sea of social media posts and make sense for both the brand and the holiday. Here are some ways to do this for your clients. 01. Align on your client’s goals, audience and story Before drumming up quippy social copy, be sure that all players working on the campaign have the client’s brand book at the ready. Understanding the consumers and audiences of various social platforms, their shopping abilities and demographics can—and should—play an integral role in cultivating how your client participates in a social shopping holiday. It’s also key to understand the client’s overall vision and goals not only for this campaign, but the business as a whole. Participating in an internet holiday should be one play out of an entire football game’s worth of strategy. 02. Don’t be so literal “I see lots of smaller, local companies leverage special day-themed promotions nicely,” Zane says. Think: pizza shops and bakeries tapping into Pi Day. “These companies get the added benefit of having more of a community feel, and consumers might want to reward their creativity.” Zane also points to Lego as an example of how to optimize special-day promotions that feel unexpected, but not off-base. “Lego’s uses Star Wars Day, ‘May the Fourth Be With You,’ to offer promotions on their Star Wars-themed Lego items.” You should also lean into your brand’s story. “Storytelling is really important in these special-day promotions,” Gulberti says. “And it has to align with the values of the brand or company.” For example, a car company that emphasizes off-road-adventure in the rest of its marketing might partake in National Get Outdoors Day, because it makes sense for the story they’re trying to tell. 03. Reduce friction to purchase Most people think of these events purely as a brand awareness play, but Zane’s research shows that they could drive sales. So, don’t just post a pic; include a promotion and send people to the client’s website to make a purchase with a link in bio. See this example from Williams Sonoma on National Pi Day, which has a simple, on-brand CTA to shop. (Here’s how to set up your link in bio page with Wix.) 04. Consider creating your own holiday Marketers need to consider if they want to join an existing holiday, or create their own, like the dog mascot approach in Zane’s study. Each can garner strong results, while offering different flavors of the same dish. Though joining existing special shopping days can do considerable boons for business, companies with rich history can branch out on their own to create special-day promotions, Zane says. Take, for example, National Swimsuit Day, which Lands’ End launched in 2017 and has continued since. Depending on the maturity of your holiday strategy, it’s possible to register the day and make it *official* — but remember, it’s best to kick the tires on the success rate before going down that route. Ready to register? Cool. For one, you can file an application with National Day Calendar or National Day Archives, both of which provide higher visibility for your strategy by adding to their respective calendars. You should also search their catalogs to check out the competition. And to ensure no one comes for your holiday, you can also trademark the name. Keep in mind this can be a double-edged sword for big brands. While they may have the reach and resources to create their own special-day promotion, appearing inauthentic can create adverse responses from shoppers. “The thing brands need to be careful with here is whether consumers see the created special day simply as a tactic to increase sales and not so much a creative way to celebrate a worthwhile event,” Zane says. 05. Know when to sit one out Creativity is key, but don’t let imagination muddle any brand messaging or motivate any far-reaching campaigns. Zane says brands will best succeed when special-day promotions feel authentic to the company, otherwise consumers are likely to be turned off. A tween retailer shouldn’t try to participate on National Independent Bookstore Day, or another day that’s entirely unrelated to the core business. There’s also an issue of saturation. For promotions that are reaching peak popularity, like National Running Day, brands in their infancy might be wise to sit one out, no matter how endemic it is to the brand. “Our research shows that a company’s efforts to create a special day-themed promotion might not pay out if the product category is saturated with similar promotions,” Zane says. “It might simply behoove companies to pass on that event and target a future one that won’t see so much action from competitors.” If your client still wants to join in on the posting, be sure to dedicate more resources behind paid social and manage expectations (and KPIs) accordingly. 06. Play the long-game Brands who nurture their relationships with followers at all times of year stand to succeed the most when joining the internet holiday frenzy. This way, social posts dedicated to these social holidays won’t feel like a random post that’s clearly transactional. While it’s easy to keep client KPIs top of mind, it’s crucial to be sure the consumer remains at the core of the strategy. And that’s the whole point of tapping into these promotions in the first place: connecting with consumers in a fun, natural way. Do this for your clients, and these holidays can be a powerful way to drive both brand awareness and sales. Next up: These unconventional holiday cards have 3 year-round design lessons

Can you feel it? 2024 is on the horizon, but there’s no need to wait until January 1st to sprint toward the goals you have for your agency, even if you’ve experienced setbacks in the last year. Wise agencies are ready to put the past behind them starting now, in the final quarter. Plus, the end of the year is a great time to encourage your team to experiment. While many agencies use Q4 as a time to reflect on their goals, it’s also an opportunity to try something new. So, as we near the end of the final Q, don’t run to the finish line, run through it. That means closing out 2023 strong, armed with these insights from industry leaders. 01. Refocus your energy It’s common to get sidetracked over the course of the year. Unexpected events surface, teams change and strategic bets don’t always pan out. But Kyle Prinsloo, agency owner and leader of the Freelance Fam community at Wix, says Q4 is a good time to refocus on one of the most important aspects of business growth: new clients. (By the way, here's how to charge more for your services.) “You can spend hours making your logo look pretty when you should be focusing on getting clients,” he says. “If your priorities are wrong, then you're busy but not efficient.” The solution: “Whether you’re just starting out as a freelancer or running an enterprise agency, the universal truth is you need to focus on the right things,” he says. To do that, work on your ‘why?’ “Ask yourself ‘what do I really want?’ then set goals and milestones against it,” Prinsloo says. “Do you want to increase your developer velocity? Do you want to expand your marketing presence? Do you want to polish your design capabilities? Good things come when you identify your north star and work tirelessly to get there while blocking out the noise.” 02. Prioritize growth-oriented tasks When you start growing, you need to formalize a process for how you handle new challenges so they don’t shock your business and create bottlenecks that interfere with scale. Brad Hussey, web designer and founder of the Creative Crew community shares the process he uses when coaching his clients. “I call it ‘EDAM,’” he says, which stands for: eliminate, delegate, automate, me. Ask yourself this series of questions when a task comes your way, whether it’s administrative or creative. Is this necessary for my success? If not, eliminate it. If yes, does this need to be done by a human? If not, automate it. If yes, does it need to be me? If not, delegate it. If yes, that's mine. 03. Seek novelty Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine and author of Build for Tomorrow, says agency leaders should ask themselves two fundamental questions when experimenting: Are you studying and researching new tech? Are you participating in the creation of some new service or tool? “If you answered ‘yes,’ to the first question, don’t just pull up chatGPT and play around with it,” he says. “Talk to interesting new startups who are developing AI driven solutions and have conversations with people who know more about the space than you do.” (Related reading: Leading an agency in the age of AI, with Ogilvy Paris’ David Raichman and Mathieu Plassard) And if your agency is large enough to answer ‘yes’ to the second question, empower somebody on your team to own the initiative, including research, project management and bringing on the right partners. “Give them free license to experiment,” says Feifer. “Even if they come back and say ‘I tried this and it didn’t work,’ you’ll still foster collective learning,” a solid business goal in its own right. 04. Expand your own scope One of Don Draper’s most iconic pieces of advertising advice from Mad Men is “if you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” That’s easily adaptable to the internet design world, too—if you feel your scope is limited, expand it. Clients want holistic strategies that compel the business forward, says Kevin Bethune, founder and chief creative officer of dreams • design + life (DDL) and co-host of Design Observer’s The Design of Business | Business of Design podcast. “When you provide evidence that you can do this, that’s when the relationship changes from doing a conventional design sprint to long-term problem-solving.” So, say your team is brought on to redesign a client’s site. Will a simple site revamp actually help the client meet their end goal? If not, there's an opportunity to change the conversation and grow the client relationship, Don Draper-style. Bethune has leveraged this strategy firsthand during his time as vice president of strategic design at Boston Consulting Group, and more recently, with his own smaller practice with DDL. “We no longer sell sprints,” says Bethune. “We’re invited into client partner-relationships, where we demonstrate value very quickly and most of our client partners never want that value to stop.” 05. Become your client’s thought partner “Position yourself as a thought partner, not just a vendor,” says Terry Rice, business development consultant. “Clients will get rid of vendors quickly, but thought partners have lasting power.” This means giving clients helpful advice on changes you're seeing in the industry, plus things their competitors are doing. “Every client I’ve ever worked with wants competitive intelligence,” Rice says. “Like, ‘what are they doing that I should be doing?’ And if you just pass over a quick email, ‘Hey, I noticed your competitors are doing these three things, just want to suggest that as an option,’ it builds rapport by communicating that you have their back.” 06. Step out of your domain This was likely a hectic year as many agencies faced team shortages (and subsequent workload management challenges) and shifting business strategies. As we inch closer to 2024, network with employees across your agency to bring additional value to your team in the new year. “It's critical to interface regularly with other roles,” says Emmy Cao, developer advocate at Wix. “For example, if you’re a developer who works with designers whose assets change regularly, you need to consider how to make a certain component flexible, so that you don't need to worry about messing anything up if an image is changed later.” There are so many nuances of working with others that you’ll only truly learn what’s best for each team when you openly welcome opportunities to collaborate. 07. Bring humanity back into leadership We’re all subconsciously looking for that human touch at work. “The greatest leaders are the ones who are the most human,” says Shaundai Person, senior software engineer at Netflix. “They empathize with their team and look out for them.” That means people are more than their work. Look beyond your team’s job titles in order to tap into each individual’s strengths. That requires you to really get to know everyone on a deeper level, which you can do by allotting time in weekly 1:1s, going on corporate outings, hosting fun virtual events and assigning small projects that push your team’s creativity. “To be a humane leader is to be empathetic, sensitive to your team’s boundaries and protective of their time and efforts,” says Person. “You have to view each individual as a holistic human being, and approach them in that manner.” 08. Let go of the (social media) past The social media landscape is highly volatile right now, says Sophie Miller, founder of Pretty Little Marketer. LinkedIn is having a moment partly due to last year’s waves of layoffs, Twitter is now X, and Meta launched Threads last October (brands are still scratching their heads about that one). “I like to set my business and social goals quarterly rather than yearly because it feels easier for me to keep my agency light on its feet,” Miller says. “Whenever I test a new tactical strategy for social media, I like to do so for four to six weeks, which is enough of a runway to try ideas to their fullest and then reassess performance.” Miller recommends ‘troubleshooting for shiny object syndrome,’ meaning identifying and cutting back on ideas you’ve implemented that seemed effective but aren’t actually serving you. That could look like trimming the number of social channels your agency uses to hone in on the ones driving the most traffic, or identifying outdated marketing strategies you can cut out of your marketing funnel altogether. 09. Build systems to support caring at scale Scott Lachut, professor of branding and communications at the City College of New York, references the idea of caring at scale, which he read in a famous short piece by entrepreneur Seth Godin. “The central tension of the piece is that as your business grows, it becomes harder to pay attention to individual clients with the same level of depth.” Think about social listening (that is, analyzing conversations happening on social media related to your brand), polls, speaking directly with clients for feedback and hosting events and webinars to stay connected. 10. Automate your eComm efforts There’s a structured, methodical approach to scaling your client’s eComm business, and with a few tweaks, you can make Q4 their strongest sales quarter yet, says Oren Inditzky, VP eCommerce at Wix. Once you’ve done all the work to bring traffic in over the course of the year, you want to make sure that your store is enticing at the product-level. “At Wix, we recently brought in a third-party AI solution that tweaks your store to display products in the best order to increase sales,” he says. “It features strong recommendation algorithms as well, plus we have an AI product description generator that can write genuinely amazing copy.” (More: Wix Studio’s AI capabilities will change the way you work) Inditzky also recommends automating abandoned cart recovery efforts. “With 70% abandonment rate still the industry standard, small tweaks go a long way,” he says. “Set up a chain of emails about a week apart that reach back out to customers reminding them of their incomplete purchase.” Last but not least, consider your post-purchase process. What can you do to continue your relationship with the customer and build long-time success? Things like newsletters, loyalty discounts and exclusive first picks go a long way in demonstrating gratitude and honoring long-term relationships. 11. Get your team’s wholehearted buy-in Let's assume you're not hitting targets for a moment. Chris Simmance, founder of OMG Center, a digital agency accelerator in London, says you should communicate this with your team in a clear, concise and honest fashion—not just because it’s the respectful thing to do, but because clear communication will get you more buy-in when you need to make changes to the agency. “If you want to hit your targets at the end of the year and you're behind, you’ll need to make quick changes, and quick changes without buy-in are dictatorial,” he says. Big or small, clue your employees into the reason behind any strategic changes. “For example, you can tell employees, ‘we know that the economy in X target country isn't doing so well, so we're putting more effort into said country, which would mean a slight budget cut here.’ Or, ‘we know that AI is a big factor in building sites and creating content, so we’re going to make that the focus of next year, which will change how we structure our content creation efforts.’” It’s important people don't go into the end of the year worrying about their jobs, so a little explanation goes a long way. The sooner you articulate next steps, the higher your team spirit will be.

Back in May, HBO Max and Discovery+ officially merged into Max, a streaming supergroup with a huge catalog of content. Of course, this quantity and range of programming poses a messaging challenge: how can you be everything to everyone while also building a cohesive brand? To signal the change, the platform adopted a new tagline, “the one to watch,” and new, bright blue visuals—a big switch from HBO Max’s previously moody royal purple—by London creative studio DixonBaxi. Max isn’t the only streamer in its blue period. Take a look at your dock and you’ll notice that aside from Netflix and Hulu, all the major streaming platforms have gone blue: Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount+, Warner Bros. Discovery, and finally, its subsidiaries HBO and Discovery+’s 2023 merger and rebrand as Max. More and more streaming companies are taking color theory cues from corporate industries that have vied for mass appeal in the past—namely, aughts-era tech companies, and the auto and banking industries before them—and buying into blue as their brand color of choice. This comes at a time when the business of streaming is scaling up: streamers are getting larger, acquiring each other, merging with broadcast conglomerates and legacy mega-studios, and becoming increasingly like other corporate behemoths. In order to compete for market space, streaming services need mass appeal and mass buy-in. Images courtesy DixonBaxi. Blue’s not niche, and that’s why it’s the right choice for big streamers Blue provides this mass appeal, says Sagi Haviv, a Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv (CGH) partner, who led the rebrand for Warner Bros. Discovery’s family of brands following parent company WarnerMedia’s 2022 merger with Discovery. And CGH knows a thing or two about corporate and entertainment branding: the famed agency crafted the logos and identity systems for NBC, National Geographic, Animal Planet, Discovery+, PBS, Hearst and Univision, among many others. “Blue has properties that can work for many different brands and many different audiences, and fulfill many different personality traits,” Haviv says. “From our conversations over the years, if you ask people their favorite color, blue is mentioned the most. The person that doesn’t like blue is an unusual voice.” That’s important for a streamer like Max that’s vying to appeal to lots of different user personas. It seems then, that streaming services could be defaulting to blue because of its relative inoffensiveness: it’s friendly but not brash, serious but not maudlin. It’s the safe option for brands that want to be seen to be authoritative, trustworthy—ultimately, inoffensive. Few potential users would see a brand with blue at its core and assume it’s not for them. “Blue can be perceived as a neutral—it doesn’t have a point of view on things,” says Italian graphic designer Riccardo Falcinelli, author of the best-selling book about all things color, Chromorama. He points out that blue jeans aren't really seen as blue at all—you can happily pair them with anything. “Blue isn't linked to particular feelings: it’s used as a mark of seriousness and authority.” Blue has the capacity to be both bright and subdued; corporate and optimistic; striking but subtle enough to let other brand elements stand out. Images courtesy Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. For legacy companies, blue signals brand cohesion When it comes to Warner Bros.’ rebrand specifically, color choice was all about “the tradition of the brand,” according to Haviv. (Though they modernized it by making the logo adaptable so it could take on different colors depending on the context.) When you think WB, you think of the WB shield. That’s not brand equity you want to give up. It seems a secondary use of blue branding in modern streaming is simply due to the fact that many of the legacy studios and TV networks (like Warner Bros. Studios, Paramount and Discovery) have historically used the color as a core component of their brand, and when they acquire other, smaller platforms and bring them into their fold, they also bring them into their brand world. Super-streamers are carrying over elements of the original visual brand, like color, to create a sense of cohesion across formats on the part of the user. The hue was also already part of the Amazon parent company’s brand world, according to Pentagram partner Emily Oberman, and it was ultimately the client that pushed Pentagram to use the color for Prime Video. “When we started leaning into the blue, our approach was to go at it really hard: we let that blue tell the story and be really vibrant—as recognizable as it could be,” she says. “It’s meant to be the voice of the brand—to speak to the audience and say ‘we’re in this with you, we’re fans too, we’re charmingly nerdy, we’re here to be your guide and your friend.’” The color also seeps into the platform itself in a more subdued way than in the marketing assets, she says. Video courtesy Pentagram. Functionally, it streamlines streaming According to Oberman, whose portfolio includes a long list of entertainment clients (30 Rock, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live, Bupkis, and Wonka, among others) blue’s popularity in the streaming world could also be attributed to the fact that the color is “sort of optimistic,” she says. “It feels cool and calm. Maybe people just want something simple, clean and easy to grasp.” On a functional level, that sense of simplicity is vital for streaming branding, which ultimately needs to let the individual programs, rather than the branding, do the talking. “Blue doesn’t get in the way of the content—it doesn't feel overpowering. It’s safe, but it's bright,” says Oberman. Images courtesy Pentagram. Haviv draws a comparison between color use in the early days of social media and color use now, in what he calls the early days of streaming. Both, in an effort to build a wide, appeal-to-everyone user base, went for blue. “It’s almost like nobody wants to make a bold move—nobody wants to be the tall daisy,” he says of the current era. But eventually, someone will. It all depends on the context of the work and the goal of the client. “We’ve created entertainment brands of all colors and shapes: NBC is a total multicolor thing,” says Haviv, referring to then-CGH partner and current design legend Steff Geissbühler’s 1986 rebrand of the broadcast network’s iconic Peacock logo. “For us, it’s about what’s appropriate. It’s really trying to appeal to as many people as possible, and everybody is under pressure to get the most viewers and the most subscriptions.” With that, he points to the biggest outlier in the market: “Netflix is red: over time, you’ll start seeing more services break that blue streak—so expect that, because it’s going to happen.” [Related: The White Lotus design team on why the opening credits went viral]

An old-school food with a modern convenience, tinned fish isn’t just gathering pace with foodies. The pantry staple now has design-devotees. That’s because a crop of new brands are offering a fresh take on its packaging. Some display folksy hand-drawn 1930s illustrations in cerulean blue and sun-flower yellow. Others adopt mid-century geometric forms in muted palettes. Brands such as Nuri, Tricana and Tenorio are crafted in aesthetically-pleasing, vintage-inspired designs, styled like a Wes Anderson movie flat-lay, and photographed in carefully curated pantries. All in all, the industry’s distinctive graphics are popping off on social media. At 72.4M views, the taste for sardines and vintage, brightly-hued packaging on Tiktok isn't slowing. U.S. canned seafood sales soared by 9.7% to $2.7 billion in 2022, in part thanks to highly visual social media marketing. A crop of new design-forward brands, such as Scout Seafood and British Sea Sisters, have joined the fray. Subscription boxes have launched and experts like The Sardinfluencer are now a thing. But successful DTC start-up Fishwife, with its elaborate, folksy hand-drawn logo and Recoleta typeface, printed in azure blue and bubble-gum pink, has seen its doodled maximalism become its biggest differentiator, able to slice through the visual noise of social media. At time of publication, the brand has 63.6k Instagram followers and 13.7k followers on Tiktok, where the fishwife hashtag has a whopping 6.4 million views, including both brand and user generated content (UGC). Fishwife product imagery courtesy Danbo. Bringing new life to old traditions Fishwife founders Becca Millstein and Caroline Goldfarb were partly inspired after a trip to Europe, during which Millstein was introduced to conservas, or Portuguese tinned goods, according to the brand’s illustrator Daniel Miller. In Portugal, conservas are a part of the national identity, revolving around maritime history and politics. By continuing elements of that design heritage, but with a unique twist through Miller’s sea symbolism, simple line work, and reduced RGB color palette, the brand has introduced a timeless Portuguese tradition to a modern American audience. Danbo, as Miller is known professionally in design circles, began working with founder Becca Millstein just before the pandemic, when she approached him to rebrand what was once the “corniest thing imaginable,” he says. He began by plumbing the depths of Pinterest and came across visual depictions of the hardy fishwife: a historically rough figure in European folk history, whose vulgar language and balanced baskets of fish made her a perfect logo for the female-led, sustainable brand. Historical depictions of the varina, or fishwife. A 1912 article; a postcard that reads "Costumes de Portugal - OVARINA." Courtesy Conservas de Portugal. Tinned fish’s long (and lesser-known) Portuguese past The fishwife figure has a long history. It dates back to the 16th century, and originally referred to the daughters or wives of fishermen who sold catch at the market. In Portugal, she is famously known as O Varina, and is usually painted balancing large baskets of catch upon her head. The way she is depicted has evolved over the years, from seemingly realistic photo documentation in 1912, to illustrations of the figure as a folk icon on tourist postcards, to a pin-up brand representative for companies like Lucas’s Sardines later in the century, as cataloged in the digital archive of CAN THE CAN, a Lisbon-based restaurant and museum that advocates for Portugal’s national canning industry. (The organization's digital heritage project, Conservas de Portugal, has grown over the past decade to include 3000 tinned fish brands, dating from 1854.) Ca. 1950s Lucas sardine brand imagery. Courtesy Conservas de Portugal. “In the beginning, designs were imported from France,” says director of special projects at CAN THE CAN Victor Vicente of the earliest Portuguese tins. “But as Spanish, Italians and some Greeks started companies in Portugal, a national style quickly developed.” That style was laden with symbolism. In addition to the Fishwife, the Greco-Roman goddess Minerva and the fisherman of Matosinhos, a Northern Portugese city known for its seafaring and industrial heritage, quickly became household staples. Heroes and famous figures, like Baron de Rothschild, were worked into designs. “It's a very emotional business full of histories and memories,” says Vicente. Portugal’s dictatorial Estado Novo regime found its national symbolism valuable, too. Starting in 1933, it threw its weight behind the country’s booming canned goods industry and its more traditional branding styles as part of its interest in the “preservation of traditional customs and practices,” according to Luis Mendonça, graphic designer and owner of cannery Ati Manel, which his grandfather founded in 1922. This visual culture, which showcased folk heritage and the Portuguese idyll, was propped up and mostly preserved until the Estado Novo was overthrown in the ‘70s. But the ongoing strength of this visual tradition is also because many of today’s canneries are family-owned, according to Patricia Sousa of Conservas Pinhais, one of the oldest canneries in Portugal (which produces the brightly packaged tinned fish brand Nuri). Images 1-3: Vintage sardine tins. 4: Current packaging. Courtesy Conservas Pinhais. “Generations passed on their knowledge to their children through the experienced hands of fishermen and ladies who packed fishtins,” says Sousa. This makes them more immune to external influence and corporatization, allowing them to stay true to a visual identity over decades, should they choose to. Today, this visual history, both good and bad, lives on in the branding detail of the conservas that continue to serve as oily, saturated bite-sized tokens of Portugal’s past. Pragmatic eating with modern, aspirational positioning Mendonça, who has a background in graphic design, has stayed close to the original Ati Matel packaging designs through the alphabet typography and bright color palette, but modernized other elements, like the marine icons, which seem to leap out from the packaging thanks to their flat, geometric shapes reminiscent of Saul Bass. In combination, these rather bespoke design elements make each tin an object’d art; a miniature canvas depicting sentimental icons found in Portuguese life. “Eating involves life stories, emotional, family, political, economic and educational relationships,” Mendonça says. “It is a cultural attitude and a symbolic act.” Modern tinned fish packaging designs. Images 1-13 courtesy Ati Matel. Images 14-15 courtesy ABC+. It’s also a shareable one. “People want to embody that European ideal of minimalist, simple, casual elegance,” Fishwife’s founder Rebecca Millstein recently told Nylon. “What is sexier than sitting on your veranda with a glass of wine and a toasty baguette and a glug of olive oil?” She describes a romanticized ideal of European summers that has taken root on social media recently, adopted by American Gen-Z consumers with a desire to travel across the Atlantic but with limited financial means. The magazine went on to dub this vacation-ready aesthetic as “Europecore,” citing it as “as a state of mind rather than a continent.” It’s easy to see why. The continent is ranked high on the quality of living scale, and scores have headed to Portugal for what the New York Times calls “the good life.” [Related: What's next for the bookstagram aesthetic?] Modern tinned fish packaging designs. Courtesy Jose Gourmet. As such, tinned fish, traditionally a humble food, isn’t just pragmatic; it’s become part of an aspirational lifestyle in the eyes of international audiences. It’s why Fishwife can form DTC partnerships with trendy clothing brands like Lisa Says Gah, while pairing with cult-favorite foodstuffs Fly By Jing. Next, the Fishwife team is working on a cookbook. In the world of online micro-trends, “Europecore” has since evolved further to what is now “tomato girl summer,” which Slate describes as “a way of performing a sort of effortless-looking elegance without being a member of the leisure class,” and Forbes claims is “fueling Mediterranean travel obsessions.” (Same idea as Europecore; different packaging.) On Tiktok, tinned fish packaging (and related UGC) is part of broader lifestyle content and micro-trends within online culture: "girl dinners," "Europecore," and "tomato girls." Highly-detailed, exquisite packaging also signals rarity value. Mendonça regularly sends tins to friends abroad as if they’re postcards. Danbo describes customers’ inability to throw away Fishwife packaging. Online, it’s the chicest way to share your “girl dinner,” or a simple, filling, somewhat chaotic snack plate for one (a 28-year old showrunner’s assistant first coined the term on Tiktok in May). The attention to every tiny detail in Fishwife’s branding elevates the consumer experience into a small luxury. We’re swimming in choices when shopping online—and this is the latest example of a resurgence of bold CPG in the name of stopping scrolls. It’s like a gift to be opened, and the internet and its many influencers are ready to unwrap it and take a bite.

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones,” Jack Dorsey tweeted earlier this month, quoting a side-by-side comparison of the Twitter app with four other Twitter-inspired social networks—including Meta’s new Threads, which shortly before had surpassed 30 million users. Dorsey wasn’t exaggerating. Since Elon Musk’s messy takeover, scores of startups have raced to build and offer a less glitchy and more responsibly run Twitter replacement. There are close to a dozen Twitter-like social media platforms now, many of which are no more than a few months old, and founded by Twitter alumni. Each new rival caters to varying audiences. But you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart just by looking, as there’s one trait common among them all: their user interface designs are practically indistinguishable from Twitter itself. Some, like Meta’s Threads, are so similar that Twitter has even threatened to sue. Blood in the water “There’s blood in the water,” Chris Messina, a tech evangelist who first came up with the idea to use hashtags to group tweets, told FWD. “There’s now an opening to create a new, fresher space that serves the job-to-be-done that Twitter once held that reverses many of Elon’s mistakes.” Nearly every competitor, including Threads and the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social platform, Bluesky, appears to have cloned the same, familiar Twitter-inspired template for its UI: a left-aligned home feed populated with posts, each of which has reply, repost, and like buttons underneath the text; a floating “plus” button to compose a new post; and a tabbed app layout with sections dedicated to search, trends, notifications, and profile—often in that exact order. If these companies weren’t actively fishing for Twitter’s market share, you’d think they were its design’s biggest fans. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Take the web app of T2, a new social media service from former Twitter and Facebook execs, for instance. Like Twitter, it too has a menu on the left side for “Home,” “Notifications,” and “Profile” with near-identical icons, the home feed in the middle, a text box atop it, and a search bar at the top right corner. It even enforces the same 280-character limit as Twitter does on non-paying users. T2 isn’t alone. The rest of Twitter’s rivals seem to have made no bones about capitalizing on Twitter’s struggle by ripping off its layout, either. As Mark Zuckerberg recently said on Threads, for instance: “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.” Easy to copy, harder to prove All of which begs the question: how close can designers get to an existing design before becoming a target for copyright and IP lawsuits? First, you need to know the difference between trademark, copyright, and patent. Trademarks protect brand identities. It can cover a word, slogan, design, or a combination of all that identifies a brand's goods and services, such as Coca-Cola. Patents are reserved for technical inventions, like the machinery behind a 3D printer or the navigation system that makes GPS work. Copyright secures an original intellectual or artistic creation like a song or a painting. (In Elle Woods’ voice: What, like it’s hard?) For functional designs like software user interfaces (as opposed to non-functional aspects like logos), the bar is quite high, says James Grimmelmann, a digital and information law professor at Cornell Law School. Most of Twitter’s UI features are too simple to be patentable as inventions and can’t be protected by copyright or trademark laws. Unless a new app has the exact same branding, art assets, and icons as Twitter, they are in the clear, he says. “I have yet to see a Twitter clone that is close enough in all of its details to Twitter to strike me as a serious IP risk,” Grimmelmann added. A court will likely consider Twitter’s underlying visual elements like UI as its idea, and ideas can’t be protected by IP law, said Pamela Samuelson, a law professor and co-director of the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology. What is protected, however, is Twitter’s technical aspects like how a pull-to-refresh system works, which it patented over a decade ago, and nomenclature for certain functions like tweets, which it trademarked in 2011 and that rivals haven’t ripped off yet. Mastodon, for example, calls posts the unfortunate “toots” instead. Now that Twitter has rebranded as X, Elon Musk seems to have thrown that baby out with the bathwater. Musk tweeted earlier this week that tweets should now be referred to as “X’s”. (Guess we’ll wait and see.) It's competitive common practice Besides, over the years, knocking off a competitor’s idea has become a common practice in tech, more so in social media. Twitter Spaces was a reincarnation of Clubhouse, Instagram Reels and Stories were borrowed from Snapchat and TikTok, and the list goes on. In the US, Samuelson adds, such reuse of unprotected features is not considered stealing; it’s competition, and beneficial for a capitalist economy. Of course, Twitter can still argue in court that when put together, the seemingly generic features are evidence enough that a competitor is forging its brand, but it’s unlikely to work. In 1988, Apple tried to prevent Microsoft from deploying dozens of fundamental GUI elements like rectangular windows and menu commands, claiming on the whole, it infringes the “look and feel” of the Macintosh operating system. The judge ruled in Microsoft’s favor, concluding those elements were not copyrightable either because they were unoriginal or the only possible way of expressing a particular idea. “Most software and other technical designs lack the kind of expressiveness that copyright protects,” Samuelson told FWD, who in a 1989 research paper argued since the sequence of software is generally reflective of the functions performed, it should be protected through patent law rather than copyright. Besides, Twitter vowed to use its patents, such as the one on the pull-to-refresh action, for defensive purposes a decade ago, which means it won't litigate against the companies that adopt it. Although that may change under Musk’s leadership as so much else has. For designers, copycats are a natural course for any new, successful UI pattern once it’s out in the wild. “The best patterns will be copied, adopted, tweaked, and improved on until it is an accepted pattern that everyone uses,” says Josh Brewer, a design advisor who worked as a principal designer at Twitter in the early 2010s. “If you want to snag Twitter’s audience,” Cennydd Bowles, an ex-Twitter ethics-focused designer, “you need to make a product the Twitter diaspora easily understands.”

This summer, the news artists and designers had long feared became clear: Instagram is no longer a social-first photo-sharing app. Despite its decade-long dominance as the platform where creatives of all kinds could showcase their work, engage with a professional, creative community, and even monetize their profiles, the social media giant has been long plotting a pivot to video to compete with TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video app. But what does the algorithm’s spotlight on bite-sized Reels and Shopping mean for creatives who relied on the app as a portfolio? They’re seeing fewer followers, engagement rates for in-feed posts dropping more than 44% since 2019, and a growing dissatisfaction as many are either forced to tweak their work into TikTok-style entertainment content or shift to different platforms. And this has designers looking for alternatives. “What if all of this Instagram strategy shifting is just them coercing us all to finally update our portfolio websites,” tweeted lettering artist Jessica Hische, calling out many designers’ most dreaded task. Creatives: Instagram might not be the same anymore, but we’ve rounded up some platforms that you can use to get your work out there (and yes, updating your portfolio website is one of them). 1. Vero “I was initially attracted to Vero because of its promise to be an advertising, algorithm, and data mining free platform,” says photographer and lecturer Anthony Prothero. “The direction Meta is taking Instagram is no longer aimed at, nor works for, the artist working with still images.” Imagine Instagram as its best possible self: that’s Vero, a social media platform that encourages users to post more images—not videos—and engage more deeply with their network. But while it is currently free, Vero has a much smaller user base than Instagram, so it may not be the best platform for artists looking to sell their work on it. 2. X (formerly known as Twitter) Not just a soapbox for the Silicon Valley elite and messy public discourse anymore, X (formerly known as Twitter) has quickly gained favor amongst artists—especially the NFT and digital art community—who find its engagement more genuine than other platforms. “Twitter allows for a better global reach,” said Rushil Bhatnagar, a graphic designer and motion artist. “I usually share work-in-progress artwork and I get feedback and reciprocation of love from underground artists in places like India, Australia, and Europe, which has been really authentic and helpful.” 3. Portfolio websites Art Director Mehek Malhotra always had a personal portfolio website, but it took the heartbreak of feeling left behind by Instagram for her to realize that it could become a unique method of expression. “It felt like a task to be part of a platform that wanted to push people to dance to their beats, literally,” she says. “The idea of moving away from Instagram was to scatter breadcrumbs of my personality all over the internet. I didn't want to exist only on a single URL when I could make art, write poetry, or even curate my favorite music on various minisites without the idea of a finite or countable audience.” Make a professional portfolio website that shines a spotlight on your personal brand using one of our many customizable, designer-made Wix Studio templates. 4. Discord Fun, uninhibited, and decidedly Gen Z: Discord is a great place for artists to connect with people about shared, niche interests via voice calls, video calls, and text messaging. “The main difference between sharing my work on Discord vs Instagram or Twitter is that it feels more like a conversation,” said Grace Ling, digital product designer and founder of the Design Buddies Discord server that has over 40,000 members. “I also felt intimidated by other design communities. I wanted to make my Discord server a place where everyone could be themselves.” 5. LinkedIn “Visual artists don’t usually think of using LinkedIn to their advantage, but it is a great way to get noticed and get jobs,” says animator Deborah Anderson. By actively engaging with people through comments and personal messages, and by sharing posts and articles, creatives can tap into a large professional network on a platform that isn’t just for corporates anymore. According to Anderson, LinkedIn “allows artists to display a more detailed resume along with samples of their work and establish their expertise.”

Picture an animation of a 3D-modeled cocktail getting poured into a sparkling coupe. The glistening, pinkish-purple glass is garnished with three maraschino cherries. Its lighting and color editing aren't identifiable to a specific era. Instead, it offers a vaguely aspirational feeling: It’s alluring, stylish, and romantic. It has a kind of illustrative style that creates an inviting ambient mood to lure a person into a brand’s world. (And stay for a second round.) Brooklyn-based CG artist and creative director Haruko Hayakawa crafted this particular CG cocktail, and a catalog of other 3D product visualizations that are quickly gaining the attention of the fellow designers who follow her R&D posts on Instagram, as well as the attention of brands. Hayakawa’s digital trompe l'oeils offer a new counterpoint to hyperrealistic brand photography. If you’re building a brand world, why limit yourself to reality? Though Hayakawa has now carved out a distinct niche for herself, that hasn’t always been the case. “I’ve had anything but a linear career,” she says. Hayakawa has worked as a graphic designer, photographer, food stylist, and creative director, creating imagery for brands like Fly By Jing and Casa Malka tequila, and editorial for Bon Appétit, the New York Times, and Telegraph. Here, Hayakawa shares her top tools, advice to create a style that stands out, and how she delivers client work that makes everybody happy. Video courtesy Haruko Hayakawa. Your work has such a distinct style. What are your biggest influences? HH: When it comes to the CG work, I'm really influenced by art direction, photography, and illustration. A lot of my work has this nostalgic, retro feeling to it, and a lot of that comes from things I saw in my childhood. My parents are from Japan. So when we came here, we had all of these Japanese albums and magazines. There's just such a look to [these things] from Japan in the ‘80s. It's kind of airbrushed, kind of hazy. There are a lot of skewed products. A lot of the work that I do now has come full circle. I'm really inspired by things that feel familiar to me in some way. We're in a place in the creative industry where this idea of nostalgia is very much the thing. So it fits the work I enjoy doing. One of my favorites is your Tom Ford lipstick rendering, which is covered in bubbles, and appears to be lit by a strong spotlight. It feels nostalgic in a different way. HH: Yeah, totally. That was really inspired by cosmetics advertising. The way I cut and composed those images, and even used those bubbles, is actually nothing new, but I try to see things from a different lens because I'm using CG. If you're gonna do something photo-real, you might as well hire photographers. When it came to this imagery I was thinking, how do I make this look like it came from a different era?, or that it's current in a way, but not in some ways? I always look for that edge to the work because that’s what makes something interesting. My work tends to live in the space of being slightly surreal, with an illustrative hyperrealism to it. Personal test work inspired by the beauty sector. Images courtesy Haruko Hayakawa. Which tools or programs do you use the most, and what are they best for, respectively? HH: My number one tool is Cinema 4D. That's the 3D program that I use, and it's for modeling, texturing, and visualizing products and rendering them. I use Redshift as my GPU render engine. And then a ton of Photoshop. That's for creating the textures that go onto the models [as well as] doing work in post: bringing up the contrast; color saturation; and editing in the image. The other program that I use quite a bit is a sculpting program called ZBrush. That helps me if I'm modeling a product or building a set or scene for my clients. It allows me to go in and mold models like clay if I need to create something organic. I sketch a lot, so I use Procreate on my iPad a lot. I work half-renders, half-sketches in the beginning of a project, so I might render out a general scene with the product, and then use Procreate and sketch on top of it. And I'll explain to the client, “this is what it’ll look like if we have a splash coming through,” or “if there's plants growing around it,” or “there are clouds here.” Things like that. WIP sketches and final images for Hayakawa's clients the Telegraph and Casa Malka. Images courtesy Haruko Hayakawa. What are your tips for securing clients? HH: I don't necessarily reach out to brands to get work. I create work that could become work with those brands. That's what's driven my entire career. The Tom Ford [rendering] was actually personal test work. I was trying to get some beauty work at the time, so I needed beauty work in my portfolio. There are different ways to move in your career. I was a creative director for a while at a brand agency. When I left that job and decided to go independent, I wanted to get hired for my own point of view. So creating personal work is extremely important, because it builds a body of work to showcase to clients and art directors that I have a perspective, and this is what it looks like across a wide range of industries. You can really drive your career if you start making the things you want more of. What's on your website? What's in your portfolio? That's what you're getting hired for. So, who do you want to work with? What kinds of brands do you want to be aligned with? Start making that work and over time you'll see that you'll move towards that place. Describe your creative decision-making process. Once you accept a project from a new client, what happens next? HH: The one thing I've really focused on throughout my career is how I set myself up for success. When a client approaches me for work, I always have a beginning sketching phase. Clients will typically come to me with some inspo imagery, and I'll model their product, and then start setting up this sketchy work-in-progress scene for them. I'll then render that out, and show the composition. I always show a range of things to my clients. That's the way my brain works, and how I like to work. I work very iteratively. Let's say the final deliverables are three illustrations. In this beginning phase, I tend to do way more, like maybe nine or ten. I'm not belaboring each of these nine images. It's moving very rapidly. So set it up to change the angle, move things around, render it out, sketch it, and then have a lot of options for the client. Various product compositions for Everology. Images courtesy Haruko Hayakawa. And what’s the benefit of providing a lot of options? I find that when I do that, we're able to align faster—because sometimes a client might say, “Oh, what if you did this?” or “What if we move this around?” or “What if we saw it from this perspective?” When you come in with options to show that you've explored the range of where a project could be pushed, I find that projects run smoother. It can be overwhelming to clients sometimes, depending on how they like to work. So, if I'm delivering a lot of options, I'll say what I think is ideal. A lot of the time, art directors want to hear my perspective on what’s working. Time lapse video of Hayakawa's process from sketch to final layout for her client Bon Appétit. Courtesy Haruko Hayakawa. Why would a creative director go for CG-rendered product images rather than photographs? HH: There's a multitude of reasons. One reason why a creative director might want to bring on a CG artist is if they don't have the product on hand, like if they are going to put these images on VC fundraising decks. This is really great for that. Another reason is if a creative director wants to work a bit faster. You don't have to wait until you get the product to photograph it. Plus, with CG, you can do things that are highly imaginative. I can play around with the material of a product. I did this for one of my clients recently. I'm working with a water bottle brand, and the packaging is cardboard. A lot of consumers don't make the immediate connection that there's water inside. So we took the box and made the material clear so you can see the water inside the product, and you know exactly what's inside the pack. You can't do that in real life. That's what makes CG really strong. Did you design your own portfolio site? If so, what was your design strategy? HH: Yes, I did design my portfolio. I wanted to have a website where the image thumbnails were able to be really large and showcased. I wanted to work with a serif typeface because I wanted a portfolio that was a bit feminine in some ways; like a little bit romantic. For the past couple years minimalism has been really desired in a portfolio. You know, playing with scale, and it's quiet, and it just didn't quite feel like me. My strategy was to make something that feels like me. There’s an element of myself as a person, and of my work, that’s “more is more.” More fun. I wanted that to come through in my website, and in a subtle way that doesn't overtake the work itself. What’s one of your favorite projects? HH: I really love the Blueland work that I did. I had the worst creative burnout when that project came in. The project timeline was very healthy, but it wasn't until three days before the first creative presentation that I figured out what I was doing. I was literally, for a whole week and a half, just moving things around and tinkering. And I just thought, this is all crap. Like, everything I'm making is garbage; none of this is good. I was banging my head against the wall for that project. And then I finally did something really super surreal and weird. It unlocked what that entire campaign was going to look like. I enjoyed that because, in a way, even though it looks like a lot of other things that I've done, it unlocked something for me when it came to composition because the florals have this weird flow, and the product holds the space in a way that is different from the way I typically do things. I really think fondly about that project because it's always nice when you push through your creative boundaries in order to tap into something. What's your advice to designers who want to create distinctive work that stands out? HH: One of the things that makes my work look like my work, even if the subject matter changes, is composition. I try to build something that's interesting, and that came through exploration. Try and create a creative practice throughout your week. That looks different for everybody. I have a daily routine. Every day I will do an hour or two, sometimes, like five hours of personal creative work, and that's my time to do some R&D and play around and experiment. The other part is to take a look at all sorts of creative. Take a look at photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, and other CG artists. When you see something that you think is interesting, you can implement it into your work. It's not about ripping someone off. But if there's color usage or some technique you find interesting, try and play with it. What makes really strong creative work is bringing something unexpected. Over time you'll build something that really feels like you.

Log into a 1960s computer and all you’d have to control it would be an interface made up of a blank screen and a flashing text cursor. Back then, people punched in what they wanted the computer to do and the machine would write back the response—no menus, buttons, or flashy animations to be found. Half a century later, the fastest-growing piece of tech somehow looks no different. Over the last few months, it seems OpenAI’s viral generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, is all anyone is talking about. More than 100 million people have used it to accomplish all sorts of tasks, like doing their homework and writing computer code. Its influence has been seismic as tech firms scramble to offer a ChatGPT-like virtual assistant in their products. GitHub added an AI chatbot where programmers can ask technical questions and fix their code. Google and Microsoft will soon let people sift through their search engine from a chat window instead of scrolling a list of links. Similarly, on Instacart, you’ll be able to text a robot to plan your meals and shop for groceries. Wix launched an AI text creator in its editor that allows designers to create website copy without leaving the platform, and Wix Studio now has an AI assistant that helps users design more efficiently. Yet, I can’t help but notice that this sudden wave of AI tools live inside a UI that would take a designer minutes to put together. If the rest of the supposedly future-forward technologies like the metaverse or mixed reality are so graphic-heavy, why is the AI revolution kicking off from a humble text box? To start, it gives new users a familiar point of entry into otherwise unfamiliar tech. The simple conversational interface makes it easier for companies to educate people about new, unfamiliar tech like the one powering ChatGPT, says Kyle Li, an assistant professor at the Parsons School of Design, much like how the command line made computers more approachable over half a century ago. Think about it: When someone logs into ChatGPT, there’s no learning curve. They’re already comfortable with its UI elements, like the text box, and they know how to interact with it. They don’t have to go through an onboarding screen either, unlike when they install an app with its own unique sets of design quirks. More importantly, this latest breed of natural language chatbots is capable of performing a variety of jobs, and a dialogue interface affords users free rein on how to use it. One user may want to code their personal website inside ChatGPT, while another may be looking to build text-based adventure games. That’s because generative text tools work by making predictions based on similar examples in their source pool. How do sentences similar to the one you entered end? What does the code for websites similar to the one you requested look like? ChatGPT answers your input by making a prediction based on similar content patterns elsewhere on the web. But your input could be anything. Meanwhile, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are deliberate and specific—tap on an icon, scroll on the web, click a button—and their rules vary from app to app. No one GUI can accommodate limitless possibilities like a chatbot. These seemingly primitive chat windows can be seen as a versatile universal interface for a wide range of tasks at tech companies—inching them closer to manifesting the “everything app,” says Dr. Hamed Zamani, PhD, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which tech leaders like Elon Musk have been lusting over for some time now. “You don't need to have one app for translation, one app for writing assistant, one app for learning a new language,” adds Zamani. “It's all in one interface.” Silicon Valley’s quest to build text-based conversational interfaces that feel as natural as speaking to a human has been a long time in the making, from one of the earliest chatbots, Eliza, in the 1960s to the virtual assistants on our phones today. Most recently, in 2016, Meta (then Facebook) famously bet on chatbots to replace apps and envisioned people would soon do everything from a chat interface, like making a restaurant reservation and sending someone flowers. Later that same year, Google released a dedicated messaging app that allowed people to include an AI assistant in their conversations, and ask it questions to, say, plan a trip in a group chat. “Chatbots will have as profound an impact as previous shifts [GUIs, touchscreens] we’ve had,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in March 2016. The reason the conversational interface keeps cropping up every few years is that it’s only the form of computing interaction that speaks the same language as we do, and that immediacy feels “magical” and “humane,” says Matt Webb, a longtime designer, and co-founder of the now-shut pioneering studio, BERG. For centuries, language has been a tool of communication, and the chat interface, with its powerful simplicity, is an extension of that, transcending platforms and generations, Christiane Paul, curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art told Shaping Design. We’re still seeing a lot of sameness, as tech companies look to rip off ChatGPT and acquire an AI “innovation badge,” believes Dan Grover, a product manager who has worked on WeChat and Facebook Messenger chatbot teams. Over time, though, designers will develop a stronger point of view, he says. As designers acquire more literacy in this developing domain, they’ll move on from simple textboxes and iterate on the actual performance, mechanics, and usability of AI-based features. For designers today, conversation design and designing the bot’s characteristics—like its voice, tone, and flow of the interaction—will prove vital to building a successful chatbot and ensuring users have productive conversations, says Mike Myer, CEO and founder of the AI platform, Quiq. “Conversation design is to conversations [and chatbots] what website design is to websites,” Myer added. One simply can’t exist without the other.

In 1986, thousands of typesetters took to the streets of London as the English capital’s leading publisher was set to replace 90% of them with a computer. While before, designers worked in tandem with analog typesetters and typographers—who assembled and turned newspapers’ copies, layouts, and designs into printed matter—new publishing software allowed them to feed their work directly into printers. Typesetters lost to automation in the end and were soon obsolete, paving the way for the modern graphic designer. “A Robot Is After Your Job,” read a 1980 New York Times headline. Decades later, those very graphic designers face a similar crisis as generative AI threatens their future. Over the last few months, tech firms have released tools that can auto-generate design copies, visuals, slide decks, wireframes, and “bring a creative vision to life” with a click of a button. Punch in a few words about your brand on Canva, such as a “bike shop,” and its new AI tools will instantly produce sales decks, logos, and social media posts for you to use. Adobe, similarly, will soon roll out updates to its creative suite that will not only let anyone outsource their graphic design duties to an AI but also allow them to professionally tweak their photos, and videos without ever learning Photoshop. Wix Studio has launched AI text creators in its editor, allowing designers to generate website copy without leaving the platform. Why so much concern around seemingly helpful tools? OpenAI, the research firm behind ChatGPT, conducted a study on the impact AI will have on jobs and found web, graphic, and design interface designers were potentially some of the most vulnerable professions. So yeah, the concern isn’t coming from nowhere. How agencies are using AI now Although Jessica Walsh, a designer and founder of the New York-based agency, &Walsh, believes creatives won’t have to worry about AI taking over their jobs anytime soon, she says their focus will shift more towards what today’s art directors do. The difference will be that “instead of directing humans, we’ll be directing AI to shape our vision,” and as AI becomes capable of automating designers’ workflows like end-to-end branding, more and more jobs “will be focused on AI prompt engineering and manipulating the output of AI.” Walsh and her team are already experimenting with AI technologies in brand campaigns. On one recent project to rebrand a platform promoting nuclear energy as a tool against climate change, &Walsh used Dall-E, OpenAI’s text-to-image generator, to brainstorm ideas and generate thousands of images for the project’s backgrounds, case study themes, and typography. The agency’s designers then curated a few from this pool and further tweaked them to match their intentions. Agencies like Ogilvy Paris have used AI tools similarly. Similarly, Jeff Turkelson, a strategy director at design firm Artefact, agrees AI taking over tedious tasks will augment designers at agencies, not replace them outright in the near term—and enable them to focus on higher-level decision-making and directing the design process. Turkelson, who used to spend hours online hunting down visuals and metaphors, now often turns to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot to quickly sift through the internet’s vast resources, and Notion AI, a writing assistant, to clean up his copy. While designers are divided on how far-reaching this new wave of AI products will be, many agree that it will cut down the time to test and prototype a new idea. With generative AI tools like Midjourney, another text-to-image generator, and Uizard, which lets designers instantly create UI mockups with AI, “we can quickly create multiple product iterations, compare the results, and return to the drawing board,” says Romina Kavcic, an Austria-based design lead. “This saves us weeks and even months of work.” One Discord designer, for example, built a ChatGPT-powered Figma plugin that automatically generates the chats based on the number of people and messages and the topic, rather than manually populating his mockups with dummy conversations. What the future of design might look like In a research paper published in March 2020, researchers at the Harvard Business School argued that AI won’t undermine the principles of design thinking—which is both people-centered and abductive—but will overcome limitations in scale and scope, enabling designers to be more creative and personalize their work to an extreme level of granularity. However, the paper added, AI will profoundly change the practice of design, and as designers automate their workflows, the human side of the design will increasingly become an activity of sense-making, and inch closer to management and leadership. “As machines will do the tasks and propose solutions, designers will be left with the key question: ‘Does it make sense?,’ one of the paper’s authors, Roberto Verganti, a design theory professor at the Harvard Business School, told Shaping Design. “No machine can address this.” Indeed, the only aspect of a designer’s job that AI hasn’t yet encroached on at all is the human one, from understanding the client’s needs to capturing the audience’s emotions. “Emotional empathy is a fundamental aspect of design,” says Tim Smith, a design director at NewTerritory, “perhaps even exclusive and unique to a human.” But the industry will need to tread carefully At the same time, the transition to AI software may not be as smooth as some hope. Researchers fear that the lack of engagement by graphic designers in training AI models, which is largely spearheaded by computer scientists, could overwhelm the field of design with overly functional, anodyne approaches. One June 2022 research paper published in the Design Research Society on graphic design and AI warned that this threatens to de-skill the profession and spawn a second tier of ‘non-professional’ designers, “particularly within less creative work that emphasizes fast turnover and functional artifact production.” In such a scenario, Dr. Yaron Meron, the research’s author, and a design lecturer at the University of Sydney, expects professional design roles to adapt rather than go extinct, and possibly become more skillful in different ways, such as being better and more creative at prompting the most out of AI technologies. Designers I spoke to agree if everyone drew inspiration and materials from the same set of models, it may lead to a rise in repetitive designs, but at the same time, they’re optimistic this would mean clients will come to expect more original thinking and unique content from studios, helping both further crystalize their role, and drive the intellectual skill forward—just like how Mac, Adobe, and Macromedia software did when it automated several manual processes in the computer revolution. Besides, for now, AI-generated content has proved to be an ethical minefield for design agencies. Since these technologies are trained on existing human work without acquiring copyrights, there’s a chance brands that are using them may be indirectly infringing on an artist's or a designer’s rights. (Turkelson cites this as a major concern, and is hopeful that the steps taken by Adobe Firefly could be the path forward.) Pau Garcia, the founder of a data-focused design and research studio, Domestic Data Streamers, has another concern: tech companies aren’t transparent with the material used to train these algorithms. That makes it harder for clients to feel confident that agencies created AI work with images that are fair use. Ultimately, Dr. Meron adds, AI is just another tool and technological step for designers. Graphic design is first and foremost about communication—so a deep knowledge of the audience, brief, and context a designer is working within is far more important than the tools. “If we look at what Neville Brody and David Carson were doing with [desktop publishing] software back in the 1980s, in what way was that different from what Milton Glaser or Paul Rand were doing a generation earlier? And how do they differ from those designers that produced all those marvelous 1920s art deco posters, or from even earlier, say, William Morris?” posits Dr. Meron. “I would argue not a lot.” The work isn’t different, even as the technology changes.

Over the years we’ve grown our platform’s capabilities to meet the rapidly changing needs of you and your clients, with advanced design features, tailored eCommerce, SEO tools, marketing solutions, dev tools and complex functionalities. We are continually testing and optimizing our platform to learn exactly what you and your clients need, including rolling out powerful new advancements like Advanced Developer Platform and Wix Enterprise, announced earlier this year. To reflect the evolution of our platform, we restructured all Wix Premium plans and launched them in the U.S. on June 5, 2023. They will be rolled out gradually to the rest of the world. Our new plans represent the growing complexity of sites that Partners are building and a diverse range of client needs. Please note: In the United States, the new Premium plans are available to Partners and all Wix users in English (EN) only. In Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, the plans are currently available to all EN Wix users. Partners and their clients in these countries don’t have access yet. We will update this article as soon as the new Premium plans open to Partners in more languages and locations. For now, existing legacy plans won’t be affected, as long as auto-renewal is turned on. Here’s what’s changing We’ve restructured our offering into 5 segmented Premium plans: Light, Core, Business, Business Elite and Enterprise. Each new plan has been rebuilt with clearly defined capabilities, making it easier for you and your clients to view and compare plans at a glance. All plans now include access to marketing tools that were previously part of the Ascend Premium plans, such as: lead-capture forms, social media marketing and automations. Send up to 200 emails a month for free, or increase your clients’ quota by purchasing a standalone email marketing package. For clients needing custom web solutions or tailored eCommerce we’ve created Business Elite, an entirely new plan built around a powerful new offering: Advanced Developer Platform. This set of products and capabilities is designed to enhance the resources and computing power of any site. An overview of our new plans Finally, it’s important to note that Partners of all levels are eligible to earn 50% revenue share on purchases of Business Elite and Enterprise plans in 2023, including their renewals, as long as they meet the requirements for qualifying for revenue share. To upgrade your site to one of the Premium plans, click here. Until these updates go live outside of the U.S., you can view the new Premium plans in our downloadable PDFs for the following locations: Canada, Australia, U.K. If you have any further questions, please get in touch with our Customer Care team. FAQs How will these new plans affect my clients’ current plans? For now, existing plans won’t be affected, as long as auto-renewal is turned on. What is a site collaborator? Are my teammates counted as separate collaborators? A site collaborator or contributor is someone that the Account Owner has invited to work on a site. For Partners, all team members under the same Partner’s account are counted as one collaborator. Partners who are Account Owners can add teammates to their account, and assign them different roles, permissions and access levels. What is the Advanced Developer Platform included in the new Business Elite plan? Advanced Developer Platform is a set of new products and capabilities tailored to better cater the needs of complex data-heavy and backend-heavy sites. This solution gives sites on Business Elite and Enterprise plans substantially more computing power, enhancing the experience for both developers and end users alike. Are Velo by Wix and the Content Manager available on all plans? Yes, you can use Velo and the Content Manager in all plans. Moreover, you can use them without purchasing a Premium plan. The difference is in the amount of computing resources and data processing power you get on each plan. You can view a complete breakdown of capabilities in the downloadable PDF. Will any of these new plans be eligible for Revenue Share? Partners of all levels are eligible to earn 50% revenue share on purchases of Business Elite and Enterprise plans in 2023, including their renewals, as long as they meet the requirements for qualifying for revenue share. Legend level Partners will continue to earn 20% revenue share on all other Premium plans.

Worldbuilding is a process that’s typically used in science-fiction and fantasy. But in the two-dimensional, flat color world of direct-to-consumer marketing? Not so much. That’s changing with a new generation of DTC beauty brands that are adopting a holistic design approach that builds niche, immersive brand worlds across their websites, social channels, and packaging. It’s about more than just selling a product; it’s about inviting individuals to become a part of a rich story, and creating a community that feels playful, imaginative, and authentic—wherever a potential customer encounters the brand. Brands have been moving away from moodboards and toward extensive brand “worlds” for a little while now (see design-savvy sunscreen brand Vacation, for instance), but two relative newcomers—the celeb-adored pimple patch brand Starface and skincare brand Futurewise—best exemplify the most online, contemporary version of this approach embraced by teens and younger millennials. Co-founded by Julie Schott, former Elle.com beauty director, both brands stand out for their story-driven maximalist aesthetics and their rejection of the flat pastel minimalism that has become synonymous with an earlier generation of DTC skincare brands like Glossier. Consider this scroll-stopping short clip for Futurewise’s recent product launch. The Instagram post is less of an ad and more of a psychedelic dreamscape, populated by dewy-skinned models shrunk down to the size of bugs, relaxing among a sea of gooey plants and mushrooms. The caption beckons you to “enter the world of Futurewise with SLUG BALM.✨” DTC brands took a major financial hit in 2022 due to inflation, market volatility, skyrocketing digital ad prices, and increased shipping costs. But Starface and Futurewise have successfully weathered the storm by cultivating a loyal customer base via TikTok and Instagram, and diversifying their income streams through strategic retail partnerships. (Lots of DTC brands have started to do this, including Glossier, which has expanded its brick and mortar operations and partnered with Sephora last year.) Schott also recently launched two other DTC personal care brands: Julie, an emergency contraceptive that’s currently available at CVS; and Plus Products, a line of waterless body wash sheets that will likely follow a similar retail trajectory. The Futurewise slug. Images 1-2 courtesy Mortis Studio; 3-4 via Instagram. Should a user enter the Futurewise brand world, they’ll have a guide, of sorts. Design agency Mortis Studio, which collaborated with Futurewise creative director Sarah DeCou (a co-creator of the virtual influencer Lil Miquela) and 3D artist Freddie Guthrie to develop the brand, wanted to go beyond creating a standard logomark and create a character based on the descriptive nature of the term “slugging” to differentiate the brand online. (“Slugging” refers to a skincare practice in which you apply an occlusive layer to your face to prevent dehydration and retain your skin's natural moisture. It went viral on TikTok last year.) “There really aren’t a lot of products in the skincare or beauty space that are using characters or personification to enhance their brand,” says Andrew Reyes, senior designer at Mortis. Done well, brand world-building is both fantastical and grounded in a realism that allows consumers to see themselves in it (there’s still product to move, after all). First, the fantasy. Futurewise plays with scale to shrink the models down until the plants and mushrooms tower over them, and applies surrealist, narrative-driven images and video (like the slug character or this video of disembodied patent-leather gloves using the product) to create an overall Alice in Wonderland effect. Video courtesy Mortis Studio. As for realism, the styling is closer to editorial ready-to-wear rather than costume. One model is in a shiny black latex trench coat; another in a fuzzy sweater, bell bottoms and rubber rain boots; and a third in a Y2K-esque silver tube top, bright orange cigarette capris, and matching platform heels (don’t forget the futuristic alien/bug-inspired sunglasses!). Product photography is hyper-realistic, showcasing natural and imperfect skin textures. Visuals across platforms have a similarly surreal quality, but they’re not constrained to one particular aesthetic, which establishes a hard-to-pigeonhole brand mood with easy-to-ID brand equity. “Brands nowadays don't have to be so strict in adhering to a rigid style guide, and Futurewise understands that,” says Taylor Johnson, owner and art director of Mortis. “They know that a brand has to have room to grow and evolve, especially across its social channels. So combining different aesthetics keeps things fresh and exciting.” In fact, many visuals forego the product completely, making worldbuilding the epitome of approachable soft marketing. Buying in isn’t just about buying the product—it’s about buying into the brand. Starface uses the Big Smiley character as a brand persona for memes, and virtually never sells the product offering explicitly. Courtesy Someone & Others. Starface (also co-founded by Schott) also takes a worldbuilding approach to brand development, and it’s become wildly popular among teens for its colorful star-shaped acne patches. Someone & Others, which developed the brand’s identity (as well as for other notable beauty brands, like Kosas and Good Weird), grounded the Starface branding with a bright yellow color palette, Y2K design elements, and an adorable, starry-eyed, smiley face character called Big Yellow that, like the Futurewise slug, serves as the main persona for brand storytelling. [Related: The "Love is Blind" dating approach is coming for your apps] Big Yellow anthropomorphizes the brand’s packaging: riding roller coasters, running a book club, buying a bouncy house on TikTok (to which one of the brand’s two million followers commented, “this is so random I’m obsessed”), and commenting on brand posts from its own account. (All things one hypothetically might do with the loud confidence provided by a Starface pimple patch.) Recently, the brand posted a video on Instagram and TikTok featuring a fictional Starface highschool. The overlaid music says: “you’re such a star, girl // entering your world // I’m getting used to– // I’ll never get over– // your glow.” “When I was in high school, if I got a pimple, I wouldn’t even want to leave my room,” says Daniel Lowe, Someone & Others founder and creative director. “But we’ve seen a change in the mindset of Gen Z. They're not interested in hiding what we've always thought of as imperfections, because no one is perfect. The ethos of Starface is really about standing out and showing off who you are as an individual.” This is where both Starface and its sibling Futurewise shine: By building a fantasy world around an everyday product, the user experience is no longer just about functionality; it's an aspirational community. Want to take up residence? Simply add to cart.

If you’re hiring your marketing team based on industry experience alone, you’re probably overlooking some serious talent. “I think resumes are absolute BS,” says Kate Gunning, CEO of Crush, a marketing agency ‘that makes brands you can’t stop thinking about,’ and host of the CMO Show podcast. “I’ve come to realize that people's life experiences are more important than their actual marketing experiences.” So, what should you look for when expanding your marketing team? “How one thinks, solves problems, creates and imagines new possibilities,” she says. “Those are the things that are more important in marketing than a resume.” These qualities are even more relevant in a rapidly changing digital world. How many people have years of experience working with AI, for example? Not many. So the key is looking beyond the resume. Here’s what to look for when expanding your marketing team. Start with your vision “What kind of agency do you want to be? What vibe do you want to set for yourself? That's the person you should hire,” says Gunning. “Maybe you're an experiential, creative shop that makes mesmerizing experiences in retail. Or maybe you are a tech agency that provides scalable turnkey ways for brands of all shapes and sizes to build websites. Start with the insight about your audience that differentiates you - that real whitespace you’re filling - then hire around that.” For her own agency, Crush, Gunning envisioned building a company that produces unforgettable brands for launch. She knew that in order to create experiences people couldn’t stop thinking about (much like a crush), she’d need to bring on people who understand how to stand out from a crowd and invite clients who really want to push the envelope. You might be looking for something different for your agency, “but the ultimate hiring decision always needs to be based on the questions: Who are we? And who should we be?’” Then, you can tailor your interview questions accordingly. Think of hiring like casting for a film “I view marketing teams and CMO/CEO matches like directors and producers view casting for a show or movie,” says Gunning. “Casting is the most important part of building an effective and inspired organization, and it's especially imperative in marketing.” Much like a film producer picks the director - a single decision that majorly shapes the entire project - the CEO must also act as a steward for the business by bringing on a CMO with the right vision, technical skills and style. If Steven Spielberg or Guillermo Del Toro direct the same script, you’ll get two very different outcomes, even though both have experience and talent. Test for corporate compatibility “Another important factor for hiring marketing leadership is the CEO/CMO compatibility,” Gunning says. “It’s often understated, but it can make or break a project.” That’s not to say that subject matter expertise isn’t critical, only that it’s the start of your hiring considerations, rather than the end all be all. To that effect, Gunning recommends avoiding interviews and going for work dates instead. Conversational walks, coffee and lunch are fun ways to engage in fluid and organic conversations and gauge a candidates’ personality. “Create the interview environment that’s indicative of the person you want to cast,” she says. But don’t fall into the trap of hiring your friends. You want people who can challenge your point of view and introduce a new skill set to the team. That’s all to say, compatibility is one of the most important aspects when it comes to scouting a team for the C-Suite, but it’s not the only factor to consider. Be your own client With the demanding speed of agency life, it’s often easy to forget to treat your own brand with the same love and care you’d provide your clients. At its core, Gunning believes that agency development is largely the same as brand building. “You need to be clear about why you exist,” she says. “Why do you do what you do, and how is it different? You’ll find the best talent in that definition.” If you’re unclear about who to hire as your next CMO or marketing leader, turn inwards and assess not just where your agency is compared to where it needs to be, but also who your agency is and who it will become with your new hire.