3 tips for your work week, plus Brat’s anti-design

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Issue #134: how to beat writer’s block and the ugly human-ness of Brat
By Harris Sockel

Three doses of practical wisdom for your week:

• The main purpose of a meeting isn’t whatever you’re talking about — it’s something called narrative alignment, or helping everyone on your team think of themselves as part of the same story. A lot of that alignment happens nonverbally, which is why ditching meetings might make things more efficient in the short-term but backfire long-term.
• People don’t read online; they scan. Most readers follow an “F-scanning pattern,” meaning they run their eyes down the left side of the page and move to the right when they see something interesting. One lesson here, if you happen to be writing an internal document this week and want your coworkers to pay attention: Keep paragraphs short and front-load your main point into the first 3–5 words.
• I loved this deep-dive into how to get over writer’s block from game designer Doc Burford. It’s written through the lens of creating video games, but the lessons apply to any type of generative work. Here’s one piece of wisdom, a version of the adage that your first idea is never your best: “Any idea you have should be taken at least twice as far as your instinct tells you.”

Also today: the anti-design of Brat

Brat, pop artist Charli XCX’s sixth and best-selling album, has become a meme, a mindset (accept imperfection, embrace chaos), and a summer anthem wrapped into one. What stands out to me most is its lo-fi design: pixelated text set in Arial on a yellow-green background (hex code #8ACE00).

Brat is part of an anti-design trend in culture: break every rule of “good design” and make it look like a fifth-grader made it. It’s a reaction to AI, which makes everything look glossy and clean; if you want people to know you’re human, you’ve got to be imperfect. It’s also a statement against, as Charli XCX tweeted, “the constant demand for access to women’s bodies and faces in our album artwork.” Brat (design, music, lyrics) is ugly, messy, and blunt without packaging those feelings in Taylor Swiftian “poetry or over-exaggerated sass,” as Wei Ann Heng reflects on Medium. It’s refreshing to be catty and hedonistic after “the cleansing baptism of third-wave feminism.”

Creative studio Special Offer helped pick that color and font pairing. Apparently Charli wanted green from jump; they flipped through hundreds of pairings between typefaces and colors before landing on one that felt distinctly anti-trend. Then, Special Offer stretched and compressed the image to blur the type—five months of effort and intention went into making Brat’s design feel so half-baked. Brent David Freaney remembers that in the early days of release “it became a daily task for someone at the studio to have to communicate to a printer that the low res was intentional” (!).

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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