Etsy has found a very specific way to say "please don't give all your money to Amazon next week," and that way is, apparently, Jeffs. One week before Prime Day, the marketplace launched "Shop Other Jeffs," a campaign built entirely around real sellers who share a first name with that other Jeff. Btw, in case you were wondering, there are around five thousand Jeffs on the platform. None owns a rocket.

Prime Day runs on speed, scale, and the quiet thrill of getting 37% off something you forgot existed. Etsy is betting on the opposite feeling, that what you buy might matter more if there's an actual person on the other end of it. The campaign works because it turns "independent sellers," a marketplace abstraction if there ever was one, into a strangely memorable cast of Jeffs, and hands the whole anti-Amazon argument a face without ever making the comparison out loud. Etsy never says Bezos. It just leaves a blank where his last name goes and lets you fill it in yourself.

The clearest inflation report of the summer may still be an 8-year-old girl in England yelling at an ice cream truck. In a 2024 video that went viral, she was outraged that "just two ice creams" cost "bloody £9," which was charming mostly because she grasped price elasticity better than half the adult economy. The problem is she was early. A single cone at a nice scoop shop now casually drifts toward $8, which makes taking a family of four out for ice cream less "tiny summer joy" and more "small tactical budget event."

Some of this is real cost pressure: dairy, cocoa, wages, refrigerated trucks, air conditioning, all the deeply unromantic machinery required to put salted pistachio in a waffle cone. But the more interesting part is how quickly ice cream learned to act expensive. The category went from neighborhood treat to premium pint to seasonal drops, probiotic fro-yo lines, butter-dipped cones, Dubai-chocolate flavors, and $20 pints sold like concert tickets. The little treat economy only works when the treat still feels little. The danger isn't that people stop wanting ice cream. It's that they start doing the math while eating it.

After a decade of brands introducing themselves in pale pink and tidy sans-serifs, the soft visual voice of a very expensive therapy app, consumer culture has started oozing in the opposite direction. The New York Times calls the new look hyper goo: glitchy, gloppy, over-saturated, and weirdly damp. Shampoo bottles with lava-lamp lettering, snack bars in radioactive colors, and event invites that look like Microsoft WordArt caught a virus.

The mess isn't random. It's a code. Ten years ago brands made themselves look like apps because clean read as competent and modern. Now that same cleanliness reads as venture-funded, algorithmic, or worse, AI-polished within an inch of its life. So the new proof of life is the wobble: the hand-drawn letter, the nasty green, the blob of type that looks squeezed out of a tube and left in the sun. But the second a rebellion becomes recognizable, it starts behaving like the thing it replaced. There's already a meme begging designers to stop squirting brand names out of a mayonnaise bottle. The goo was supposed to say a human made this. Naturally, it's now available as a downloadable typeface.

Dawn's new website is nominated for an Awwwards, and voting is open until July 8. After a whole issue spent judging how everyone else presents themselves, it feels only fair to let you judge us. Have a look, poke around, and if it moves you, cast a vote.