Look around. What does your packaging look like right now?
Not the product inside — the packaging. The font, the colours, the texture of the label. Because something strange has been happening in design lately, and once you see it you can't unsee it. The clean lines are melting. The pastels are bleeding into something louder, weirder, and altogether more unhinged. It turns out that when the world starts to feel genuinely chaotic, the design world stops pretending it isn't. Today we're getting into exactly what that looks like.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?
OpenAI builds its own chip, Alibaba gets caught copying Claude & Meta wants a piece of the cloud
OpenAI just took a major step toward not being entirely dependent on Nvidia, and it named its chip after a pepper.
TechCrunch reports that OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled Jalapeño. It's OpenAI's first custom-built AI chip, designed specifically for inference (the process of running AI models in response to user requests). Built in just nine months, the chip is designed to make ChatGPT faster, cheaper and more reliable. Open AI's planning to deploy Jalapeño in late 2026. The goal is simple: the less OpenAI depends on expensive Nvidia hardware to run its models, the more profitable it becomes. With an IPO on the horizon, every dollar of reduced compute cost matters.
In less flattering AI news, CNBC reports that Anthropic has accused Alibaba of running the largest AI model copying campaign it has ever publicly disclosed. Allegedly, Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to generate 28.8 million conversations with Claude and extract its most advanced capabilities. Anthropic sent the accusation directly to the US Senate Banking Committee. Alibaba has denied the allegations.
The method is called distillation. You run a weaker model against a stronger one millions of times. Then you harvest the answers and train your own model to imitate the results. No firewall breached, no database stolen. Just 28.8 million very suspicious conversations.
And finally, Meta has apparently decided that dominating social media, building AI models and manufacturing its own hardware isn't quite enough. Bloomberg reports that Meta is now planning to sell access to its excess AI computing power to outside customers. This would put it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The company has been aggressively building out data centres to fuel its own AI ambitions. Now it wants to monetise the overflow. At this point, it's fair to ask whether there's an industry Meta isn't planning to enter?
DEEP DIVE
What the 'hyper goo' design trend says about the global mood
If you want to understand the collective psychological state of the world right now, stop reading the news and start looking at the fonts on your consumer packaging.
No, I’m serious.
I don’t know if y’all noticed. But for the better part of the last decade, consumer design was locked in a vice-grip of sanitised sans-serif.
Every single trendy direct-to-consumer brand looked identical. Flat pastel backdrops, perfectly symmetrical layouts, and clean, sterile, sans-serif typography. It was the visual language of optimisation. A frictionless aesthetic designed to make you feel safe, compliant, and calm.
But over the last few months, a chaotic, unruly new visual movement has exploded across the fashion, typography, and consumer packaging industries.
And I couldn’t be more welcoming.
I recently read in The New York Times that the design world is going completely feral for an aesthetic people are calling Hyper Goo.
And it’s everything you think it is. We are talking about melting, liquid textures, distorted and almost illegible typography, hyper-saturated neon colour palettes. It’s glitchy, gloppy, beautiful maximalism.
To some, this seems like it’s just a random shift in creative direction. But it’s actually a profound psychological immune response. Consumer design has always served as a direct mirror of geopolitical and cultural stability. And, right now, the mirror is melting.
To understand why the culture is suddenly craving distortion and chaos, we have to look at how modern history has used design to cope with reality:
The 1950s: The Illusion of Order (Mid-Century Clean)
The Mood: Post-war anxiety masked by forced corporate optimism and nuclear-family domesticity.
The Aesthetic: Rigid grids, geometric patterns, and the birth of Helvetica. The design goal was to project absolute stability, control, and structure to a public that had just survived global trauma.
The 1970s: The Psych-Out (The Bubble Font Rebellion)
The Mood: Geopolitical instability, economic recessions, and profound institutional distrust.
The Aesthetic: Thick, melting, psychedelic bubble fonts and warm, muddy, earth-toned palettes. As the world outside felt increasingly harsh and dangerous, design melted its hard edges, retreating into soft, organic, and slightly surreal comfort.
The 2010s: The Corporate Lobotomy… womp womp (The Sans-Serif Flattening)
The Mood: The rapid centralisation of Big Tech, algorithm-driven lifestyles, and data optimisation.
The Aesthetic: "Blanding." Every brand from high fashion down to mattresses adopted the exact same frictionless, minimalist sans-serif font. It reflected an era that idolised ease, predictability, and safety. It smoothed over every human edge to make consumption as mindless as possible.
The Present Day: Hyper Goo (The Visceral Backlash)
The Mood: Profound over-stimulation fatigue, geopolitical volatility, and an existential dread of synthetic, AI-generated perfection.
The Aesthetic: Gloppy, liquid maximalism, slime-like textures, and heavily distorted text that actively resists legibility.
So, why are we embracing the glop?
It’s basically a direct, aggressive middle finger to the frictionless world of generative AI and corporate minimalism.
AI can instantly output a perfectly balanced, hyper-clean vector graphic in milliseconds. So now, clean minimalism ceases to signal high-end luxury. Instead, it starts to feel cold, fake, and f*cking boringggg.
Humanity naturally craves the messy, the tactile, and the un-optimised. Texture, colour, nature is full of these things, so a world without that feels anything but natural.
Hyper Goo delivers a visual celebration of things that feel organic, volatile, and deeply emotional.
I know I sound ridiculous, like c’mon Sophie, it’s a font for fks sake. But it’s true. These are the things that define eras and the cultural zeitgeist.
And by forcing typography to melt, warp, and distort past the point of immediate readability, designers are performing a radical act of ownership.
They are reflecting the real, unstable, and chaotic emotional landscape of living through 2026.
The trend proves that you cannot capture the modern human experience inside a clean corporate box. Sometimes, to express something real, you have to let the paint run and the lines warp.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
TREND PLUG
I'm going to break your FACE!
This one's for every tiny, insignificant thing that has absolutely pushed you over the edge.
The sound comes from creator Tokyo Toni yelling into the void. And, in the newer version, an explosive crash lands right on the word "face," making it hit like a wrecking ball. Creators are using it for those moments where someone has done something so petty, so personally offensive, so completely unacceptable that rational thought has simply left the building.
Some of my favourite examples:
How you can jump on this trend:
Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever microscopic injustice has you seeing red as your on-screen text.
A few ideas to get you started:
When someone schedules a meeting that could have been an email. Again.
When a client gives feedback that contradicts every single thing they briefed you on
When the intern uses the last of the printer ink and just puts the empty cartridge back
-Devin Pike, Copywriter
ASK THE EDITOR
Got a loyalty programme set up for my shop but customers aren't really using their points or coming back as often as I'd like. Any ideas to fix that? - Renee
Hey Renee!
If you want customers to actually use their loyalty points, you’ve got to make it feel fun and easy for them to do so. You could try sending little reminders that show them how close they are to their next reward, or run “bonus” days where their points are worth double. Another idea is to turn your loyalty program into a game of sorts. For example, you could set simple challenges like "Redeem points this week and unlock a surprise."
Make sure you aren't burying the points info, either! Add reminders in receipts, your app, even on packaging if you can. People forget they have points unless you put them right in front of them.
As for getting customers to come back more often, makes sure to check in the week after they've made a purchase. You could try offering extra rewards or limited-time offers to create a bit of urgency. This could include things like early access to something new or surprise perks. Since they have recently engaged with your brand, it's the perfect time to make that connection with them even deeper.
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
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