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Marketing & Design

Brand, creative, martech and the consumer, read for the decisions behind the work rather than the work alone.

Marketing and Design covers the work of making people want things, and the decisions that sit behind it. Three stories a weekday at 11: a rebrand and what it risks, a visual system and why it was built, a consumer shift and what it costs to ignore. The beats are brand strategy, creative and design, martech, and consumer insights, with a Funny lane for the campaigns that made us laugh, on purpose or otherwise. We write every summary ourselves and link to the publisher, because the reporting is theirs. What is ours is the choice, and the editor’s note under the day’s lead says why it was made. Readers here run marketing functions, design teams and agencies in India, the United States and the United Kingdom, and the stories are chosen for what travels between those markets.

Original illustration of William Shakespeare by Chunks Microlearning

Picture credit

Every story we have kept in Marketing & Design, newest first. Headlines link to the publisher; the tags below narrow the list.

27 stories in Creative & Design
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Advertising i
2026-09-22
Cattle armchair by Design By Them among 13 new products on Dezeen Showroom

Dezeen's showroom feature rounds up thirteen newly released furniture and surface products, including a Design By Them armchair, plus tiles and lighting from Vipp, Iris Ceramica, Vitra and Andreu World.

2026-09-22
Dezeen Showroom New Releases newsletter includes oak modular kitchen

Dezeen's quarterly showroom roundup highlights five newly launched furniture and lighting pieces, including designs from Vermland, Rakumba, Plank and Design By Them, curated from products published over summer 2026.

2026-09-21
Charlotte Fox on painting the space between 'desire, repulsion, connection and fantasy'

A profile of Brooklyn painter Charlotte Fox describes her collage-based process transforming found imagery into paintings exploring longing, unease, intimacy and imagined narratives, following her recent exhibition Unravel at 303 Gallery.

2026-09-17
Nina lounge chair by Patricia Urquiola for Andreu World

Patricia Urquiola designed the Nina lounge chair for Andreu World, pairing upholstered seating with a recycled-thermopolymer back shell inspired by Velazquez and 1970s silhouettes.

Editor's noteA single chair leads the section because of what its back shell is made of. Recycled thermopolymer in a piece pitched at the high end, from a designer with this reach, moves recycled material out of the sustainability brief and into the part of the catalogue people actually buy from.

2026-09-17
Ma Yansong and Daniel Libeskind join Dezeen Awards 2026 master jury in London

Dezeen named its 2026 Awards master jury, including architects Ma Yansong and Daniel Libeskind and Nike design chief Martin Lotti, who will select 49 winners from 392 entries.

2026-09-16
Laneige Turns Skincare Customization Into a Four-Story Experience

Laneige opened a four-storey flagship in Seoul's Myeongdong district, designed by PlayLab, with personalised scent, shade and skin-formula stations turning skincare shopping into an architectural experience.

Editor's noteFlagship stores are usually brand theatre. This one is closer to a product line rendered as a building: each floor performs a step of personalisation that the brand otherwise asks customers to do online, which makes it a genuine test of whether retail space can carry that work.

2026-09-16
The Cladding, Insulation, and Flooring of This London Loft Extension Are All Made of Cork

Office S&M Architects renovated a damp Victorian home in Walthamstow, London, using cork for cladding, insulation, flooring and render across a 1,290-square-foot extension.

2026-09-15
The eyes have it: How we're bringing Creative Boom's mascot to life in different time zones

Creative Boom animated its longtime eye mascot with motion designer Dan Silverstone, creating time-zone-responsive expressions, building on original 2017 design work by Samantha Wilkinson.

2026-09-14
Seeking €820K, This Serpentine Home Is Perched Above a Pond in Southern France

A serpentine timber-and-zinc house in Fiac, France cantilevers over a pond and lap pool, listed for 820,000 euros with low-energy building certification.

2026-09-14
London design "an international success story" says Sadiq Khan

London Mayor Sadiq Khan called the city's design sector an international success story, citing 2.2 million pounds of public investment that unlocked 1.23 billion, while acknowledging Brexit friction.

Editor's noteA mayor praising his own city's design sector is routine; the number under it is not. Two point two million in public money is claimed to have unlocked one and a quarter billion, and the same speech concedes Brexit friction is still costing studios talent. Both halves matter.

2026-09-13
georgia o’keeffe: architecture and the artist’s homes, buildings, and landscapes

The Detroit Institute of Arts opens an exhibition of nearly 40 Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, organised geographically, tracing how the artist depicted barns, skyscrapers and New Mexico's adobe architecture.

2026-09-13
These cat animation designs look nothing like what I expected

Studio Original Force revealed behind-the-scenes art for the Warrior Cats film adaptation, showing an expressive CGI style with elongated proportions rather than the glossy look of recent animated features.

Editor's noteAnimation coverage usually leads on release dates. This leads on craft instead: a studio showing elongated, expressive proportions where the current house style is glossy realism, which is a visible argument about where mainstream CGI goes next rather than a marketing beat.

2026-09-06
A new house in Croatia is broken down into components to create a curious composition

A two-storey private house outside Zagreb, set back from the road in a planted landscape, broken into components by its Croatian architects so it reads as several small buildings.

2026-09-06
Hot Lab and Garage Italia give the Fiat 500 Spiaggina restomod a nautical makeover

The original Fiat 500 crossed every class line in its lifetime and became a design classic afterwards. Two studios have now given the open-topped Spiaggina version a boatbuilder's treatment.

2026-09-06
Silk fashion collection informed by robins among projects from Häme University of Applied Sciences

Student work from a Finnish university includes hand-painted silk clothing taking its cues from robins, a collection shaped by Alvar Aalto's architecture, and a dress made from recycled denim.

2026-09-06
Thunderbird is OMI’s multidimensional orbital laboratory developed for Max Space

Space stations remain an irresistible brief for designers, and this proposed orbital laboratory leans in: pure function, dramatic light and weightlessness, drawn with the optimism the setting always invites.

2026-09-06
OpenAI's controversial ChatGPT-6 Astra advert paints a sad vision of the future

A new advertisement for the latest ChatGPT release has landed badly with designers, who read its portrait of creative work as bleak rather than aspirational.

Editor's noteAn advertisement that upsets the people whose work it portrays is a reputational problem before it is a creative one, and the reaction is the story rather than the film. Worth watching whether the campaign is quietly retired, because that decision will say more about the company than the advertisement did.

2026-08-27
A Collaboration of Ampersands

A limited-edition book by Studio Sutherl& celebrating the ampersand through more than a decade of commissioned work, workshops, found forms, and creative collaborations, turning a typographic symbol into a study of connection and creativity.

2026-08-17
Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

AI will remain transformative despite job displacement, accuracy problems, and market turbulence, predicting broader workplace adoption, continued automation of knowledge work, and growing influence from both proprietary and open models.

2026-08-13
De Pé No Chão

Illustrated series reimagines iconic Brazilian samba album covers through simplified icons and forms, exploring visual memory and suburban cultural identity embedded within recognizable imagery.

2026-08-13
Creative Boom IRL just got bigger! Here's how to join us

Creative Boom IRL, free in-person networking events for creative professionals, secured sponsorship from Affinity and Cavalry by Canva. Events are expanding to Glasgow, New York, Shrewsbury, Nottingham and other cities.

2026-08-13
This dark Slavic fairy-tale game is like Devil May Cry with ballet combat

Tsareva: Age of Tales incorporates motion capture from professional ballet dancers to create a combat system inspired by Devil May Cry that emphasizes choreographed, dance-like fighting mechanics.

2026-08-12
Brennan Lee Mulligan returns with Dimension 20: Toylight trailer

Dimension 20: Toylight, a new tabletop roleplaying season featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan and the Intrepid Heroes cast, launches September 16 on Dropout. Players portray toys defending an enchanted realm against a dying child's fading imagination.

2026-08-12
Has the world been too harsh on Disney's Hexed?

An analysis examines Disney's Hexed film and evaluates whether critical reception has been unfair, examining its adherence to traditional animation techniques through shot-level examination.

2026-08-12
Do You Have a Beautiful New Project? We Want to See it!

Communication Arts invites designers and creative professionals to submit innovative projects for free featuring on their website and potential exposure to the global creative community.

2026-08-11
People can't decide whether Newcastle United's logo design poll is a joke

Newcastle United conducted a logo design poll featuring three options that fans struggled to differentiate, sparking debate about whether the exercise was genuine or satirical.

Editor's noteA rebrand poll only works if the options differ enough to choose between. These did not, and the resulting argument about whether it was satire is more instructive than the logos: consultation that offers no real choice reads as contempt, whatever the intent behind it.

2026-08-11
A Foundation for Multiple Dimensions

Typographer and designer Andrew Footit explains how he developed his distinctive color palette and two and three-dimensional illustration techniques through systematic experimentation with various materials and approaches.

Editor's noteAndrew Footit built his palette and his illustration technique the same way, by trying materials until one refused to behave. It led Marketing & Design because a style manufactured one test at a time is more useful to a designer than one discovered. The difference between a look and a practice is whether you can say how you got there.

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