Featured image for Dieline’s Friday Wrap-Up: Florida, the Project Runway of Packaging Shows, and More AI Bummers

Dieline’s Friday Wrap-Up: Florida, the Project Runway of Packaging Shows, and More AI Bummers

by Bill McCool on 09/23/2022 | 4 Minute Read

There are countless reality shows dedicated to the craftier corners of the world. Even beyond cooking shows like The Great British Bake Off or Masterchef, we have Making It, The Great Pottery Throwdown, Blown Away, and Craftopia, a plethora of programming that explores all things handmade.

But we haven’t seen a show dedicated to packaging—until now.

Last August, the Paper & Packaging Board launched a digital web series called Pack It! The Packaging Recycling Design Challenge, where contestants have to create sustainable, paper-based packaging solutions for brands that rely primarily on plastic substrates. In the two episodes available, they tackle beauty subscription kits and meal delivery boxes, two categories rife with single-use plastics and could stand a significant makeover.

Anywho, check it out. Now, on to the links.

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Salvation Army Band

I cannot begin to tell you how many pairs of jeans I’ve bought over the past few years that have quickly torn or ripped. Our consumer culture demands that we get what we want now, and we want it fast and cheap, and this comes at the expense of quality-made goods built to last. If we want a more sustainable future, durable goods that one can easily repair will be a top priority for climate and waste-conscious brands.

So kudos to Elizabeth Segran at Fast Company for this piece detailing an exhibit, “R for Repair,” at the London Design Festival that first kicked off in Singapore last year. Curated by Hans Tan Studio and Jane Withers Studio, they held an open submission for folks to send in their favorite broken objects that they wanted to get repaired by a collective of designers. What was notable about the items sent in was that they were not particularly valuable but beloved tokens that remained a constant in their lives. The restored objects take on new meaning in their second life and offer a little repair culture inspiration.

Anarchist Sewing Circles

Shout out to Charlotte Beach at PrintMag (I know her!) for this little diddy on A Stitch Out of Time, a new coffee table adjacent book featuring embroidered endangered flowers stitched into plastic bags.

According to Tara Books, “The book plays with two powerful themes: environmental degradation symbolized by the ubiquitous take-over of our surroundings by plastic, and the slow time of creation, whether it is a tree or a piece of embroidery.”

So, yeah. Sad but beautiful. Totally my wheelhouse of cursed objects decay. I'm a fun guy, really!

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Font Friday

We’ve heard “Helvetica is a fuckboi” many times in these here parts of the design world, so maybe you’d like another pleasantly fine alternative to the iron workhorse. Here are ten from Creative Boom’s Tom May.

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Cozy Corner

Nice bit of branding courtesy of Herman Scheerfor the new couch brand Homebody, the makers of what they call a “squishlicious cake for your butt.” 

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Ace copy there, guys. I’m more than happy to lend my extremely professional voice and review one of these couches so long as the sample you mail out can take up replace the free and used pottery barn couch I got from my aunt that I’m calling “cat scratch fever.”

Because my cats destroyed it.

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Florida Man Illustrated

Speaking of my aunt, I have zero desire to ever travel to Florida, where she is currently retired and taking cooking tips from Steve Doocy and his wife Kathy that don’t involve a chicken breast and Nyquil.

However, I long to experience Florida through the eyes of illustrator Gabriel Alcala and the new book he designed from A24 for the exclamation-intended Florida! Edited by Gabrielle Calise, the gorgeous book features plenty of essays on everything from the Flora-Bama Mullet Toss and coleslaw wrestling to nudist colonies and instructions on how to kick a shark’s ass. It’s the kind of tome that would make the Florida Man proud.

This Ain't Our Last AI Story, Is It?

Another week, another AI story.

This time, we get to meet Diffusion Bee, and according to Darrel Etherington at TechCrunch, this Mac app makes it darn near stupid-proof to create AI-generated images. Developed by AI research engineer Divam Gupta, the app is simple to download and only requires that you have an M1 or M2 Mac with a minimum of macOS 15.2, which automatically disqualifies me. I can already hear my poor moneymaker groaning under the strain of the 16GB of RAM required to fake my way as an artist, er, process images. The good news is that this one is free (I don't know anyone with access to a Dall-E account, and Midjourney’s standard plan will set you back $30 per month).

Fast Company says “it will change everything,” and I tend to agree. Some folks think it’s another feather in your design cap or that it will help you save time when working on a project. Maybe. But I’m still unsure whether it will put illustrators or designers out of work.


Got a news tip for us? Questions? How about some high praise or mean-spirited criticism? Or maybe an odd fact or statistic? I want to hear from you! You can reach me at bill@dielinemedia.com