This week put authorship on trial in two very different arenas. A Premier League club handed its kit design to a prompt box and a crowd vote. A city swapped eight decades of local symbolism for a single letter. In between, two studios and a stray LinkedIn post did the opposite, and proved what considered, human work still looks like.
Manchester City and Puma let a fan prompt the next third kit into existence
Manchester City and Puma have revealed the club's 2026/27 third kit as the first pro-football shirt designed by a fan using AI. It was built with PUMA AI Creator, a generative tool that turns written prompts into kit designs in seconds. Fans from over 200 countries submitted more than 180,000 designs, narrowed by 1.7 million ratings to a shortlist of ten and then a public vote. The winner, a lifelong supporter named Elliott, made his white-and-sash design "on my lunch break," per BusinessCloud. The winning shirt is clean: a central two-tone sash, half sky blue, half navy, with a gradient that catches the light. But calling this "fan-designed" stretches the word. With the mark-making outsourced to a generator and the final call made by 1.7 million ratings, what you've got is a popularity contest run through a prompt box. 180,000 shirts and 1.7 million ratings is the real story here: this is what design-by-committee looks like when the committee is the entire internet and the pen is a generator.
Bloomington traded a peony, a quilt and a town square for a giant B
The City of Bloomington, Indiana wants to bin a mark it has run since 1986. The old identity is a geometric snowflake-ish form pulling from a peony, a trout lily, 19th-century regional quilt patterns and the shape of the city's Downtown Square. The replacement is a giant letter B. Residents have not taken it well, and once you clock what the mark resembles from above, you can't unclock it, which is how Creative Bloq landed on "hit a bum note." Civic rebrands provoke this reaction on schedule, from Visalia to Florence, usually the moment the invoice goes public. The deeper problem here is specificity, or the lack of it. The old logo carried a real flower, a real craft tradition, a real square. A single letterform carries none of that. It could belong to any town starting with B. Specificity is taste, and a giant initial has none.
Basketball Australia's green-and-gold rebrand is proper systems work
Basketball Australia has unveiled new national team uniforms as the visible edge of a broader rebrand by Hulsbosch. The work introduces a modernised "AUS" identity across the jersey front, custom typography and numbering, a refined green and gold palette, and detailing designed to pull the Opals, Boomers, Rollers, Gliders and Gangurrus under one shared look while holding onto the traditional colours. Side panels carry artwork by First Nations artist Danny O'Shane, representing connection to land, culture and community. CEO Matt Scriven called the teams "one Australian basketball family," per Basketball Australia. This is the kind of thing that separates real identity work from a swapped logo: a system that has to flex across five squads, built typography, and an artist collaboration doing structural work rather than sitting on top as decoration. Good local craft, worth naming.
Vrints-Kolsteren rebrands NotR by subtracting with a memory
Napoli on the Road has grown from a neighbourhood pizza truck into an award-winning restaurant with London outposts, and Antwerp studio Vrints-Kolsteren has built its new identity around exactly that movement. The name got stripped back to NotR, and the reasoning is the good part. Co-founder Naomi Kolsteren told It's Nice That that they "stripped the name back to its essential elements," but "the space between the letters still references what has disappeared. So the history isn't erased, it's still present." Co-founder Vincent Vrints framed the whole thing as feeling natural given how much the business has moved. The system leans on transport and industry language: stamps, labels, codes. A name change treated as subtraction, with the history preserved in the negative space, is the kind of decision that comes from thinking hard, not prompting fast.
Parker got a spot-on anti-AI ad from an unpaid LinkedIn post
Here is the week's bookend to Man City. A single LinkedIn spec ad for Parker pens snowballed into a competition with hundreds of entries, and Parker eventually stepped in with the prizes. The premise, as Creative Bloq put it, is that with everyone fed up of AI-generated flyers, some designers reckon it's time to rediscover what a pen can do. "Sell me this pen" is a harder brief than ever now that keyboards, touchscreens and chatbots have chipped away at handwriting, and the responses turned that pressure into sharp work. The sweetest detail: the best anti-AI advertising idea of the week came free, from a person, unprompted, on the platform we all love to complain about.
The Royal College of Art folds communication and design into one school
The Royal College of Art is merging its communication and design disciplines into a single school, ending a long-standing split between the two. For years the silos held firm, graphic designers kept away from strategy, strategists commenting on visuals at their own risk, but the industry has already moved on, with practitioners expected to slide between graphic, product and motion work as briefs demand. As Creative Boom frames it, this is academia catching up to how working designers already operate. Anyone who has run a job end to end knows the boundary was fiction a decade ago. Nice to see the institution admit it.
A week of two speeds: prompt-and-vote at one end, considered craft at the other. If the takeaway is that the machine can generate but people still decide what's good, we'll take it. More next week, same time, probably somewhere around 2am.
