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We have a lot of new readers this month. Happy to have you here!

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For as long as I can remember, when a company rebranded, it meant one thing: Take the fun logo and make it flat.

Pringles. Warner Bros. Subway. Cracker Barrel. Google. Mastercard. Animal Planet. Microsoft. eBay. GoDaddy. Jaguar. Twitter. Gap.

I think you get the point, but lately, something has changed.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a resurgence of retro branding, especially in food. Burger King brought back its 1970s style. Jell-O got fun again. Pizza Hut and Pepsi also returned to their old logos. These logos brought personality back.

And now, we’re seeing the next layer: depth, texture, glass, motion, 3D, skeuomorphism.

Apple is pushing Liquid Glass across iOS. Microsoft has been playing with Liquid Glass icons. And one of my favorite rebrands is Reddit, which now has this cool 3D character mascot.

Even X, the company infamous for killing the Twitter bird, just released a bubbly 3D logo for X Chat. Outside of tech, the same thing is happening: Lay’s introduced a more detailed brand identity, Lacoste moved toward a serif font, and Xbox just released a old/new 3D logo.

And the clearest proof may not be the rebrands themselves, It may be the reaction when brands refuse to move on. Pentagram recently shared a minimalistic identity for Washington Square Park and the comments were brutal:

This is not just a new visual trend. It feels like an active rejection of the last decade of design. Minimalism had its moment because screens were small and interfaces were confusing. Simple made sense.

But design trends move in circles. Art Nouveau gave way to Bauhaus. Bauhaus gave way to Art Deco. Art Deco gave way to Swiss Design. We repeat this cycle as a species like clockwork.

To me, it’s clear that we’re exiting the flat corporate era and entering a world with more texture, more depth, more character, and more Instrument Serif. I’m looking forward to it.

What do you think? Hit reply and let me know.

Apple officially announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of the board, and John Ternus will become Apple’s next CEO on September 1, 2026.

Steve Jobs is remembered as Apple’s visionary. He brought the product taste, the storytelling, and set the standard for what technology should feel like.

Tim Cook was different. Cook was not trying to be Jobs. Under his leadership, “Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase” (Apple Newsroom). Tim Cook transformed Apple into one of the largest companies in the world.

John Ternus enters from a different lane. He has led Apple’s hardware engineering team and has been involved in some of the company’s most important modern products. Ternus has spent 25 years at the company, previously worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, and holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

For years, the criticism of Apple has been that the company is too safe and too iterative. The products are excellent, but the sense of surprise has faded.

Many are hopeful that Ternus represents a possible return to product-first Apple. Not necessarily the old Jobs era, but something more focused on physical computing, new form factors, and the next interface.

As always, a lot happened this month in the creative software world. And by “a lot,” I mean every company on earth appears to be trying to constantly one-up each other on a daily basis.

Canva continues to move way beyond “the simple design tool.”

ChatGPT released Images 2.0, and it has gotten extremely impressive.

I tested it with logo design, infographics, thumbnails, and it’s exceeded my expectations. In fact, all of the images you’ve seen in this month’s issue were created with ChatGPT.

The biggest shift is that AI image tools are no longer only good at making dreamy fantasy landscapes and weird hands. They are getting better at actual communication design, and can accurately read and display text.

Adobe has renamed Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro, bundled it with expanded AI features, and existing customers will see the updated Creative Cloud Pro pricing at renewal unless they switch to Creative Cloud Standard.

Everyone is fighting hard for Adobe’s consumer base, and this month made that more obvious than ever. I made a full video covering this topic in more detail, and I expect we’ll see even more movement in the creative software world this month.

Last month, I asked you to share your work, and got a lot of awesome submissions and this month I want to feature Ritika Sharma.

Ritika is a brand designer based in Jaipur, India. She has developed over 250 templates for Adobe Express and was featured by Adobe Live just this week.

You can check out Ritika’s work here. Thank you to everyone who submitted. I’m planning to keep featuring more artists in future issues, so keep sending your work. Click here to submit!

Google recently shared DESIGN.md, a new format designed to help AI understand brand guidelines. I explored the topic in my latest video and tested DESIGN.md for myself. Watch the video here:

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