{D} 161: Is everything embarrassing now?
pics + links // photos are gateways // questions are invitations
Hey there from the high valley of Mexico City.
A personal update, as they say.
I’ve redesigned the delightful web site as part of repositioning towards a collective model.
For now, the collective is me (hiya) and my partner in work + life, Maru. Maru does video. She’s amazing. Here’s the reel of her work with Adidas, Bumble, Reebok, and more.
If you have a video project that needs doing — production, directing, editing, any of it — give me (us!) a shout. We work in Mexico City with clients around the globe: heythere@thisisdelightful.com
Also on the site: new and improved case studies, including content work with Work & Co, cultural research work with Canopy Insight, and brand strategy with Otherward. I plan to make these case studies more elegant and informative eventually 🤞🏽, just had to get the new design out first.
I “coded” the site in webflow, which some of you may recognize as a visual web site builder + hosting platform with cms integration (I built the Rental Car Rally site in webflow, too). Had I known about framer before I began this redesign I would have experimented a bit with that. Seems more of a designer-friendly tool, whereas webflow is intended more for developers.
I briefly considered rolling this thing with AI but I didn’t have a great experience with Lovable (the most friendly platform for non-coders imo), and tbh you don’t need AI to build a web site with a simple cms integration.
Anyway site still has a few kinks, so don’t judge too harshly.
I’m just glad the mobile version looks good!
-s.
p.s. Updates from friends!
Now available for pre-order: Compost After Reading by friend of the letter
. Huzzah!p.s.s. All the videos from friend-o-the-letter
’s latest Brand X conference are now up. I had a nice stroll down memory lane with Rex Sorgatz’s talk on the history of talking to computers. Rex’s new company And Then lets you play generative/narrative games using only your voice. A lot of fun, and definitely one direction for the future of gaming! Check it out.
<shakes magic 8 ball> Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? [Vogue]
Or maybe it’s having followers: It’s cool to have no followers now [The New Yorker]
Good to know: Being hungover is apparently an effective state for writing [The London Review of Books]
But maybe also consider: How I Broke My Drinking Habit with Edith Zimmerman [TED]
There are only two types of jokes: affiliative and adversarial [Big Think]
Speaking of affiliative jokes: “Faith sort of runs on a subscription model now: misogyny for men, astrology for women, wellness for the rich, conspiracies for the alienated.” Living Inside Collapse: An Interview with Anika Jade Levy [Chicago Review of Books]
Am I a minor writer? Are you? [Zona Motel]
How to Be Miserable, a lesson in doing the opposite [tiktok: Jack Lawrence]
Very much related: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life [The Drift]
Apple’s new logo animation was created by hand, is gorgeous (there’s a new audio tag, too) [Vimeo]
TIL: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound [New Yorker]
But don’t worry because: AI can now translate scenes in your head into text [Nature]
The absolute coolest explanation of what dithering is [visualrambling]
Beautiful graphic experiments in letterform construction [Alphabetical Playground]
Probably the coolest type generator ever [Space Type]
The Getty Museum made it’s collection rights free [Getty]
The decade’s best designed magazines (still have the first copy of Civilization) [It’s Nice That]
When Grand Buildings Signal Institutional Decay [Project Syndicate]
The rise of ‘beauty horror’ [Design Observer]
Lights, camera, IP: How brands are adopting Hollywood’s production logic to build cultural portfolios, not just marketing calendars [Sociology of Business]
The first AI artist has charted, created by a black woman poet. AI Artist Xania Monet Debuts on Adult R&B Airplay — a Radio Chart Breakthrough [Billboard]
Oh and: the number one country song in America is AI [Whiskey Riff]
Only boomers prefer traditional search engines + AI is effecting publisher traffic: In Graphic Detail: How AI search is changing brand visibility [Digiday]
The guy behind the Timmy Chalomet look-a-like contest has launched an agency and Slack has partnered with Mr. Beast, starting with a video called <wait this is a joke right> “the world’s biggest trap”
If you’re of a certain age, you remember the stickman kung-fu fights created with Flash. This is the story of its creator, and how Nike ripped him off: When Stick Figures Fought [Animation Obsessive]
For fans of the latest season of The Diplomat, a history of “salted” bombs and doomsday machines [Doomsday Machines]
Related: The Doomsday Scorecard [Doomsday Scorecard]
Can’t pick a best sentence from this gonzo Sam Kriss piece about Burning Man, a thing I’d rather stab my eyes with a fork than experience, so let’s go with this: “The main reason she wanted to be in here is that being a Japanese lesbian is apparently very difficult experience. Japanese people are not always known for being the most confident, open, and outgoing when it comes to their desires. Lesbians aren’t either. Put the two together and you get stories like Kyo’s. Once she hosted and organised a three-day lesbian orgy and didn’t get laid once; she was too busy making sure everyone else was having a good time.”
Numb at Burning Man [Numb at the Lodge]“I had been working at a flower stand on the side of the highway since 2008, but I wanted to be a sailor. A girl I knew in San Francisco had gone off to the Bronx to attend a maritime college in Throggs Neck. I looked up the school on the internet occasionally, but I couldn’t stop taking OxyContin.” The Hatred of Podcasting: Talking has finished off writing [The Baffler]
Health! You shall grow tall! Live a thousand! Cultural responses to sneezing around the world [Wikipedia]
75 years of teen girl accents in movies and TV [tiktok: Tawny Platis]
i draw things
Started a new series on slot machines in Vegas. A few years back, they were all branded with American IP, like Game of Thrones. Now, they’re seemingly all devoted to Chinese mythology. With these slot machines, I want to both show how huge they are, and also how small they make their players. Hopefully divorcing them of their casino context does that, at least a little bit. Gonna have a really cool black background with some neon schtuff, but right now this piece is a work in progress, just like me :)
Delightful is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter with links and things, usually. Your host is Steve Bryant, friendly neighborhood insights and content strategist. Let’s work together or go on a hike or something. steve@thisisdelightful.com
{ 🔒 archive }
Creativity, illustration, language, stuff like that
What did you learn about yourself today?
Notes on picking up drawing 30 years later26 things I’ve learned while learning a language
Notes from someone who’s working at itHow to write
On moving and watching and paying attentionCuriosity and Research 101
On finding out about thingsA map of what you meant to say
On the 3D space of languageThe A.I. isn’t a moron. She’s your wife.
On making ads with AI
Brand strategy, content strategy, etc
Observational and Culture Study Cheat Sheet
A template and tools for researching people and communitiesMy content strategy toolkit
14 tools for organizing, measuring, and creating contentMy concept diagram template
A Figjam for diagramming the complex relationships between conceptsProduct Content Strategy 101
For anybody who’s creating a product that requires editorial contentThe Bento Box Method for developing topical content
A cute and useful way to structure your content topics
Thanks for reading. Be seeing you.
“What’s art, anyway? Somebody making some little something.”
—Sally Mann, Art Work