Kindred Studio - Monthly Roundup

September 2026

A round-up of what I made, watched, read, listened to and noticed this month. (Edit this intro in Mailchimp before sending.)

From the studio

I no longer wish to rent my Rubber Duck

LLMs can serve me the information (along with robust citations, don’t take outputs for facts, kids!) to help me shape my thinking, but it won’t solve it for me. AI-generated posters are the perfect example of...

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Watching

Gamers Nexus Said LG TVs Spy on You. I Tapped One to Find Out.

The Homeboy Workshop

Why Hagoromo Chalk Is So Expensive | So Expensive | Business Insider

Business Insider

You Can See Everything | Official Trailer HD | A24

A24

No tent, No sleeping bag - Extreme Winter Survival Camping (0F/-18C)

Outdoor Boys

Mastodon - Toe to Toes [In-Studio Performance]

Mastodon

Yann LeCun's $1B Bet Against LLMs [Part 1]

Welch Labs

Reading

The most disruptive thing a brand can do is be human

Design Observer · Kim Devall

Bindery ECD Kim Devall on why audiences can smell a formula — they can tell when a story has been calculated rather than crafted. Her case is that people don't crave perfection,...

No shortcuts: why AI threatens creative instinct

It's Nice That · Andrew Shea

Andrew Shea keeps a California job case in his studio — the wooden tray of metal type that gave us the words uppercase and lowercase, now a novelty you find at estate...

Innovation needs a darker imagination

Design Observer · Ashleigh Axios

Ashleigh Axios — former creative director in the Obama White House, former AIGA president — on why innovation culture keeps asking for more optimism when the thing actually missing is a darker,...

Studio Thonik's typographic orchestra identity mimics the movement of a conductor's baton

It's Nice That · Marigold Warner

Phion Symphony Orchestra tours — no permanent home, no recognisable building — so Studio Thonik had nothing architectural to hang an identity on and made the music the foundation instead. The whole...

I bumped into my ex (boss): Harriet Richardson on life after design

It's Nice That · Harriet Richardson

Five years at Pentagram under John Rushworth, a man who could squint at a logo you'd nudged for hours and say "make it green and move it left," and be right. Then...

Why speed can be a creative liability

Creative Review · Tanya Livesey

Tanya Livesey opens on the Red Queen — run as fast as you can just to stay in place — and then makes the argument most agencies are too busy to have....

This clever design trick by Guinness means it can modernise without needing a new logo

Creative Boom · Tom May

Guinness didn't advertise at all for its first 170 years — the beer was meant to do the talking — and when a post-war slump finally forced the family's hand, they set...

Good isn't good enough: beware the design middle ground

It's Nice That · Aporva Baxi

DixonBaxi co-founder Aporva Baxi on the gravity of the middle: scroll any feed and most of the work is good — well made, confident, occasionally fresh — and that is exactly the...

Roberta's Pizza carefully crafts a 'type collision' at the core of its brand system

The Dieline · Charlotte Beach

Charlotte Beach's Tour de Type column doubles back on Roberta's after the Bushwick pizzeria's "Famous Original" frozen boxes caught her eye in the August edition — a character-filled script wordmark butted up...

Stephen Mai on ADHD and the creative process

Creative Review · Stephen Mai

Stephen Mai — former CMO of Goalhanger, LadBible and Boiler Room — got his ADHD diagnosis recently, and the second feeling after relief was embarrassment: he'd spent three years building Woo, a...

Asking which typeface DeafCity Hub used for its logo is entirely the wrong question

Creative Boom · Tom May

Templo built DeafCity Hub's letterforms by motion-tracking real hands signing in BSL, then deliberately left the wobble in — the whole process run in reverse, starting with something expressive and resisting the...

Decision paralysis, lost conviction and no juniors: what brand creative leaders say AI is exposing

Creative Boom · Katy Cowan

MikeTeevee's Brand Perspectives 2026 report gathers in-house leaders from Wayfair, DoorDash, Intuit, O2, Verizon, Canva and Rivian, and the conclusion is that none of this is AI's fault — samey work, vanishing...

The mascots, design and visual history of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that puts functionality above aesthetics

It's Nice That · Paul Moore

A brand that has spent 25 years refusing to be trendy, and is trusted precisely because of it. Wikimedia UX designer Justin Scherer puts it plainly — consistency goes a long way...

Marina Willer crafts letters with light and projection for BFI London Film Festival's new identity

It's Nice That · Olivia Hingley

Pentagram's Marina Willer — also a filmmaker, her documentary Red Trees premiered at Cannes — asked how you celebrate the slow craft of cinema in an age of streaming, and answered it...

The afterlife of souvenirs: what survives between culture and commerce?

Design Observer · Louisa Eunice

Louisa Eunice takes the carved airport giraffe seriously and finds a $94bn industry that the World Bank calls the one creative sector where developing countries lead the global market. Maria Lopez, who...

Maps and a compass

Seth's Blog · Seth Godin

Godin's distinction is the useful one: maps are easy to sell because they tell you the steps, but a compass only gives you clarity and leaves the next move to you. His...

Why don't design museums show brand design?

Creative Review · Alex Blyth

Alex Blyth wanders into Copenhagen's Design Museum and finds something almost unheard of: an exhibition actually about brand design, built around seven Kontrapunkt case studies spanning FC Copenhagen, national railways and a...

Rebranding: When The Business Outgrows The Brand

Branding Strategy · Dr. Derrick Daye

Dr. Derrick Daye uses this week's UP.Labs-to-Vantora rebrand as the case study for an argument worth sitting with: the name change isn't the transformation, the strategic clarity behind it is. UP.Labs had...