SUBGRID

ISSUE 003

Advertising is inevitable. But as consumers spending money we work hard to earn, we deserve more thoughtful typography, design and editorial in advertising in our daily lives. Partly thanks to the success of Google Adwords, online advertising over the last two decades or so has become a hellhole of clickbait and in-your-face elements that are devoid of soul and accessibility. One trip to a recipe website might drive this point home (making me reach for the "Hide Distracting Items" feature in Safari). These days, I increasingly listen to the editorial style ad placements in podcasts – they're short, occasionally useful and two taps on the fast forward button often moves an unwanted one out of the way.

Print advertising has always been the benchmark in quality and restraint, but as more and more ad dollars go to the black box of algorithmically selected digital content, I do wonder whether the future of advertising orients towards more soulless link-bait or editorial-style thoughtful messaging.

How much of a role design is going to play in advertising within the fastest-growing consumer products of today – LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude – will get clearer once the model providers integrate commerce and ads into their business models. How they will make us feel is a deeper question and will depend on how much creative freedom or room there is for the tasteful human designer to craft the campaigns within these spaces.

There is value in advertising. It can guide our materialistic selves to things, events or services we appreciate that make our lives better in minute ways. At best, it can change our lives. At worst, it can be the bane of our existence. Nonetheless, as emotional humans, we'll never be immune to it. As the creative directors of ad agencies of yore in Matthew Weiner's Mad Men monologue: "consumer behaviour is rooted in one thing: happiness." Rather, the aspiration of happiness. And that's where it gets us – much more easily when it's designed with care.
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On to this week's issue.

–Siddharth

WORDS & VIEWS

​Designing an inclusive type for a publishing icon​

Last week, I featured a conversation about publishing icon Penguin & typography. This week, we take a glimpse into the journey undertaken by Sydney-based designer Olivia King to create a custom version of the original Inclusive Sans, a highly accessible typeface built upon one simple idea: to make accessibility the default rather than the exception. "We transitioned Inclusive Sans from a Grotesque to a Humanist foundation, adding playful flicks and flourishes to create a sense of movement and approachability" – writes Olivia about Penguin Inclusive Sans, going into the small, enchanting details that went into designing this version of the typeface so it would embody the boldness, playfulness and curiosity of the nine decades-old Penguin brand. See this week's Designer of Note.

​Hyper-realistic work-like activities​

Slack and Flickr creator (and fellow Canadian) Stewart Butterfield went on Lenny's Podcast to talk about designing products. One thing he muses on is the difference between real work and 'hyper-realistic work-like activities'. Perhaps, it's just one of those you know when you see it type of things. The point he tries to make: the larger organizations get, the more of this fake work there can be. Butterfield has a penchant for coming up with interesting terms for product building concepts or at least picking up lesser-known phrases from obscure sources and for translating them in the context of product design craft in an honest, amusing fashion. Worth a listen.

​Marketing, design & AI​

How do you differentiate yourself in an industry that feels synonymous with one brand for decades? Creative Director of Ambrook, Ali Aas, talks about "leading with identity over features" in her writeup on marketing campaigns that worked for the firm. Ambrook makes accounting software for agriculture. Inevitably, they compete with QuickBooks / Intuit that has had a monopoly-like share of the SMB accounting market for years. As marketers and creatives ponder about AI-generated art and its use in campaigns, it's interesting to know what worked for a brand and what didn't. I found that this advice aligned with Stewart Butterfield's earlier quip on product marketing around "we don't sell saddles here".

​The benefits of deep knowledge​

Canadian indie developer Joshua Comeau narrates on Bluesky about asking a state-of-the-art AI model like Gemini 3 Pro (launched just ~2 weeks ago) to construct a simple, clean comparison table in HTML/CSS. What Gemini 3 Pro generated just kind of sucked and had negative implications on accessibility. Meanwhile, as Joshua writes, knowhow of a CSS grid layout feature subgrid (that I've found useful over the years and partly inspired the name of this newsletter) could have solved the problem well. It makes me wonder whether these are the 'jagged' edges that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks about in his earnings calls in the context of intelligence. Is the future of these systems simply 'smoothing out those edges', or is there something deeper amiss if in a few years humans start to look more under the hood of the stuff that AI generates?

PRODUCT DISCOVERIES

​!Weather: The good folks at Not Boring Software make some of the most playful apps on the App Store. I haven't tried all their offerings yet but I've been a big fan of their weather app. Every interaction is thoughtfully done. You can personalize the look with free or purchasable skins. Their brand messaging "Built like a game. Runs like an app." sums up the experience. The carefully curated sounds designed by a composer & audio designer add a harmonious vibe that makes this beautiful little weather app stand out in a crowded category.

​AgBr: AgBr is a minimally designed beautiful app from Tokyo that functions as a black & white emulator for photography. The black & white presets emulate present-day and expired real film stocks. The app is simple to use and you see the utility right away. I love monochrome and as much as digital photography has popularized filters over the years, you won't get this sort of thoughtful, analog-style monochrome from Instagram filters. There's a lot that's going on in behind-the-scenes in this tool, but what you interact with is a polished end product made by a team that values good design and analog photography. Available for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

​Poem/1: Poem/1 is an "AI rhyming clock". A physical object you can put on your shelf that displays AI-generated poems, powered by ChatGPT, on e-paper (like how Kindles work). The success of the Kickstarter project led its creator Matt Webb to partner with a London-based industrial design studio to turn the prototype into a finished product. What's interesting about Matt is that he ran BERG which built a much-loved product called Little Printer way back in 2011. I always wanted the Little Printer, so it's nice to see its creator making delightful stuff many years later.

​Visuelle: Visuelle is a growing collage of interesting brand identity work that spans platforms – physical and digital. Thoughtfully curated by hand, it sources work from a range of studios and designers. A great, small-batch alternative to platforms that have become too algorithmically noisy (looking at you, Pinterest) in curating design inspiration.

THIS WEEK'S BOOK

DESIGNER OF NOTE

​Olivia King​

Olivia King is a designer based in Sydney, Australia. Looking through Olivia's portfolio, the work instantly feels human, playful and bold, connected together on an arc of inclusivity and accessibility. There is deep emphasis on type design. And amidst the playfulness in the end products for the familiar brands in Olivia's portfolio, I saw an undeniable dedication to crafting letterforms with great precision and purpose. Inspiring stuff.

ARTIFACT FROM THE PAST

~ That's it for this week's edition. To an inclusive future. ~

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