Weekly Links — 7th October 2026

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus

• The feed I produce myself — On working with agents, producing more than ever, and losing the ability to see anything whole. Maestro, we have six more deliveries ready — Created by the author with AI I’m writing this on a Sunday morning. While I write, several agents are work...
• Stop blaming the model for slow AI. Using Doherty’s threshold as a guideline. — Two eras of computing, held to the same 400 millisecond standard. Stop blaming the model for slow AI. Use Doherty’s threshold as a guideline. Doherty’s threshold set the rules and has now moved from the answer to the acknowledgment. The fix is a w...

Branding

• Playing With Your Food — Packaging expert Lisa Cain shares her opinion on Center’s branding for meal company Riff. The post Playing With Your Food appeared first on BP&O - Branding, Packaging and Opinion .
• Perfect Storm helps switch pet protection firm from identibase to identi — Anyone who looks at the old identibase brand will see the problem that Perfect Storm had to deal with – it was professional, clean and simple, but in an increasingly crowded space it was feeling increasingly corporate and stale. Instead, it needed...
• Absolut and KAWS Turn Vodka Bottles Into Collectible Works of Art — Absolut and KAWS transform the iconic vodka bottle into a collectible art piece, bringing the artist’s CHUM character, signature XX eyes and street art roots to the packaging. The limited edition continues Absolut’s decades long tradition of putti...
• JKR’s Tropical Smoothie Cafe rebrand is deliciously on the nose, and all the better for it — “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a phrase bandied about a fair bit across all facets of existence, but in some cases, that sentiment really does make sense. Such is the case with the iconography of ‘tropical’: it’s bright, it’s bold; it’s pere...
• The Dieline’s Best of September 2026 — September’s best packaging design stories: Colgate’s lawsuit, Chef Boyardee’s refresh, glow-in-the-dark ranch, canned sparkling wine, and more from The Dieline. The post The Dieline’s Best of September 2026 appeared first on DIELINE .

Design

• Tengile Malamala Collection — An immersive experience showcasing Tengile MalaMala’s quiet luxury through cinematic storytelling and refined editorial design, bringing Africa’s iconic wilderness to life.
• Milledollars — Milledollars is a creative bureau focused on high-end video production.
• Google’s 3D emoji design process — How Google brought 3,977 Noto emoji into 3D.
• Blume — The open-source docs framework for humans and agents. Drop Markdown into a folder and ship a fast docs site.
• Jesper Landberg — Swedish design engineer building visually rich, motion-driven websites.
• Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking — Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

Motion

• Dear Upstairs Neighbors: How Connie He Taught a Machine to See the Way She Draws. — Pixar alum Connie He turned a sleepless pandemic night into a six-minute short, then taught custom Veo and Imagen models to reproduce her own concept art. Jesse Rylander talks with her about pre-production, control, and what it took for animators ...
• TRASH | Lucas Durkheim & Eddy
• Solo-Made Short Machines Learning Premieres at October Film Festivals — Brooklyn filmmaker Anthony Koithra’s debut original animated short, Machines Learning, premieres this October at NYC Indie Shorts Awards, Newport Beach Film Festival, and the Oscar-qualifying San Jose International Short Film Festival. The darkly ...
• 2025: One Motion Sequence | Nikita Didenko
• Bayeux Tapestry Comes to Life | Hocus Pocus Studio — The Bayeux Tapestry arrived in the UK in September, on display at the British Museum for the first time in almost a thousand years. Ahead of what became the most in-demand exhibition in the Museum’s history, the British Museum commissioned Hocus P...
• Busy Bodies brings hand-drawn printmaking to Vimeo — Kate Renshaw-Lewis’s Busy Bodies is a 2D, hand-drawn animated short that combines screen printing and inkjet printing. The independent film was an official selection at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and won the Animated Shorts Grand Jury Prize a...

AI

• VLM Enhanced Metadata For My Icon Galleries — Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries: I’d like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might lo...
• — For the designless, How is AI changing design?, UX context design, Delegative UX: Designing the agent experience , Design system conventions, and more.
• AI Animation, IP and the Next Phase of Creative Production — Generative AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into professional animation and commercial production. For studios, agencies and brands, the opportunity is significant. Work that once required lengthy technical processes can now be explored, ...
• The New Big Ball of Mud: Why Agentic AI Systems Turn Fragile — AI makes building nearly free, so users grow agentic systems piecemeal into fragile messes they no longer understand.

Misc

• Humane Interfaces — So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin : An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics”...
• Beginning at the end — For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, t...
• im Water — This promotional video is either too weird or not weird enough, but I like core idea of im Water: a carrying strap for a water bottle designed into the label itself. The family business had a screen printing business growing up, including a big di...
• Tupo — “Triple Threat” Josh Collinsworth has a brand new daily puzzler game called Tupo . On it’s surface it looks like a simplified 4×4 Sudoku block but with colored squares. That is the foundation for a simple ruleset: Every row and column contains eac...
• Twenty five years of writing on adactio.com — On this day, twenty five years ago, I wrote my first journal entry on this website. Twenty five years! A quarter of a century! That’s a significant portion of the lifetime of the World Wide Web itself. Actually, this site did exist before Septembe...
• Experience with Nectar Beds — I recently bought a bed setup from Nectar. (This is not an ad; I just prefer linking to things.) I needed a quick setup for a guest room, and an online ad showing the no-hardware bamboo bed frame caught my attention. The pieces just slide together...

Nerd Alert

• Agent skill: Libraries.dev — Teach your coding agent Border beam, Thinking orbs, Gooey, Voice, Bot avatars, Liquid metal and Image.
• In/tension modeling: what gives us the right? — How to navigate opposing voices and lived tensions. By Julia Beard , Naman Mandhan, & Stacie Sheldon Asking the Hardest Question First “What gives us the right to make the interventions and choices we are contemplating on behalf of others?” asks E...
• I helped shape McLaren’s brand. Here’s what worries me about the refresh — The reaction to McLaren’s new identity has been loud and largely negative. Having spent two years as its head of brand, I don’t think the objections are really about a logo. In 1970 the Rolling Stones...
• Why Studio Playground asked a kidswear brand to design its team uniform — The European publisher teamed up with Oxox Club on a limited-edition workwear set that swaps conformity for freedom. If you’ve been invited to a big industry event, you’ll recognise the stress of know...
• Modern web types — TypeScript intentionally doesn’t support all new APIs, but there’s an easy fix.