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Back in the 1930s, Robert W. Woodruff, president of the Coca-Cola Co., would carry a red swatch in his wallet. Of course, it wasnt just any red. It was Coca-Cola red. And so anywhere he went and encountered his brandpainted on a wall, wrapping a refrigeratorhe would pull out the little swatch to check that it matched.Woodruff understood the importance of Coca-Colas brand equity as it expanded globallya challenge that has only grown since, now that Coca-Cola sells 2.2 billion servings a day across 200 countries, 150 languages, and 30 million points of sale.But where Woodruff used a swatch, Coca-Colas design team has spent the past four years dreaming up a modern operational upgrade to its 400 pages of brand guidelines. Teaming with Adobe, it developed Project Fizzion. Trained specifically on Coca-Colas design logic, its a brand-managing AI that lives inside Adobe platforms like Photoshop and Illustrator, generates designs, and, most of all, helps keep designers across the globe brand-compliant as they dream up the next big campaign.In a design world thats equally dependent upon and terrified of generative AI tools, Coca-Cola is clear that Fizzion is not about cost cutting via AI. As its integrating Fizzion globally, its doing so with no reduction in spending on brand campaigns. Instead, the company believes its charting a path forward thats sustainable for creatives to drive better work and eliminate headaches under deadline.Fizzion was never a design automation tool, says Rapha Abreu, global VP of design at Coca-Cola. Its a creative copilot that is powered by AI but guided by designers.Dreaming up a new AIWhen Abreu joined Coca-Cola in 2021, his design teamwho spent countless hours in meetings explaining to external agencies that their seemingly great ideas broke brand guidelinesbecame almost philosophical in imagining another way forward. Given that any Coca-Cola campaign can include up to 5,000 separate assets, it had become nearly impossible to manage.We had this kind of crazy idea, Abreu recalls. What if the Coca-Cola logo could learn what to do and what not to do? They imagined software built so a designer literally couldnt place the logo in the wrong context. And if that could work for the logo, maybe the same thing could be true for colors, typography, and imagery associated with Coca-Cola campaigns. It was an enticing thought that was ahead of its time, but only a little. Within two years, ChatGPT and other GenAI tools would drop upon the world to automate all sorts of tasks that never before seemed possible. [Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]Companies including Adobe and Canva quickly whipped up GenAI tools that could suck in brand guidelines via PDF, then apply them to design templates. Sometimes they worked. And sometimes they didnt. These sorts of guidelines can have trouble scaling to new, complex projects, and of course they do. Guidelines are just words trying to articulate visual relationships that are sometimes as instinctual as they are codified. Coca-Colas idea, led largely by its global head of AI design, Dom Heinrich, was to start with the images themselves, and to train a machine on Coca-Colas visual sensibility rather than a written rule set. Given that Coca-Cola and its partners were already working inside Adobe products, partnering with the company on building out such an AI system made a lot of sense.It happens inside the tools that creatives already use, says Abreu. For us, that was the most important thing.Together, the Adobe and Coca-Cola teams developed a different approach to training AI and deploying it at scale, which they call Project Fizzion (what seems like a most certain nod to Coca-Colas carbonated roots).[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]How does Fizzion learn?Many AIs are already trained on images, but Fizzion takes a slightly different approach. Its trained more on visual design systems, stuffed full of actual Coca-Cola assets. This means Fizzion isnt analyzing a century of soda campaigns in order to hallucinate a polar bear dressed as Santa Claus sharing a Coke. Its specifically not generating imagery like Adobes own Firefly or DALL-E, but it will create a new variation on an existing design, mixing and matching Coca-Cola assets to do so.[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]Fizzion lives like Microsoft Copilot right inside Adobe software, considering the interdependencies of things on the screen.[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]When youre designing a visual identity system, the model should beable to learn, not just from the images but from the relationships between all the components, how the text maps to the images other elements that need to be part of it, says Ash King, senior director of Firefly enterprise solutions at Adobe. That allows [the designer] to test various aspect ratios, free-form.Fizzion can see the canvas a designer is working on in real time, complete with the positioning of logos, imagery, and typefaces. The AI learns from Coca-Colas own designers only when a project is finalized. Once a designer has a product they likeand knows works with brand standardsthey save it as what they call a Style ID that adds to the AIs knowledge. Thats basically the visual logic of one Cola-Cola campaign. At this time Fizzion also collects all necessary brand assets for that campaign so that it can incorporate them perfectly whenever necessary. (In other words, Fizzion is pulling the Coca-Cola logo fresh every time, rather than dreaming up what its supposed to look like from old references.)[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]This is how Fizzion is trained to learn new styles. (It also incorporates background from Coca-Colas 400-page brand guidelines, via Adobe Firefly.) From there, Fizzion sits atop a global production pipeline that allows partners to tweak the visual formula without breaking it.[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]How teams across Coca-Cola use FizzionBuilding a marketing campaign in Fizzion can start with a prompt to generatesomething like Coca-Cola polar bears on the oceanor with a blank canvas as Fizzion watches along.At the very top of the stack, the Coca-Cola design team has full access to build or alter anything across the brand that it wants. Partner agencies that Coke hires to make ads have more limitations. They can generate a new aspect ratio for a campaign on demand, and the AI will piece it all together. But if they want to stretch the logoreal badFizzion wont let them. However, they can send that change as a request to Coca-Cola proper through the platform to get approval (saving a meeting). [Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]As design teams go down the chain from America to local markets, more and more of the design process becomes about localization. These teams have the least amount of access to tweak a campaigncertain assets and layers may be lockedthough they can still make requests up the chain. This might sound controlling (and of course to an extent Coca-Cola is very much controlling its brand). But the design team argues that having these brand guidelines integrated into design tools is ultimately more freeing for design partners.[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]One thing that we speak a lot internally about this global system is that we need to help designers and creatives downstream do the right thing, right. So it cannot be a burden for them to try to be compliant with the brand, Abreu says. We need to make this as easy as possible.However, with kerning off the table, Coca-Cola argues that it leaves time for creatives to focus on everything else about a campaign: storytelling, having ideas, making sure cultural nuance is applied, and [focusing on] emotional resonance, Abreu says. [Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]Indeed, despite all of the checks and balances in the system, Coca-Colas designers are hoping that their creative partners continue to push back. In fact, they are depending on it, as thats the only way they believe a brand can grow and evolve. If everybody builds on the same LLM, it just follows the same kind of way of interacting with an AI. We will just get a lot of the same, says Heinrich. We believe that designers need to be more in charge. . . . [They need to] be more creative in order to push the AI to the next level. The better you are at your job and the better you push, the better the outputs are and the more uniqueness comes from them.[Image: Adobe/Coca-Cola]For now, Coca-Cola is all-in with Fizzion. Since March of this year, every partner agency thats building a campaign is required to create it with a Fizzion Style ID. And the Coca-Cola team believes Fizzion is so efficient at handling design standards that its 400-page PDF guidelines will fall out of use. As for Adobe, its built a powerful design tool that, no doubt, many companies using its platform would benefit from. However, its also been designed to meet the gargantuan needs of Coca-Cola, meaning its probably too big and multitiered for many teams to adopt efficiently.Few companies are thinking on the scale as Coke is right now. So we need to take a future-forward look at this and figure out how its best applied, says King. We like to start with the use cases. We like to have something very concrete that a customer wants to do and then build backwards into what were [shipping].
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E-Commerce
Like other famous structures of similar dimensions, the 48-story Transamerica Pyramid, a revolutionary 70s modernist skyscraper and San Francisco icon, has a bit of history buried beneath its ground floor. [Photo: Nils Huenerfuerst/Unsplash] A recently unearthed time capsule, buried in 1974 and discovered during a recent round of renovations, offers a picture of San Francisco’s past. The site of the structurethen a parking lotwas initially part of the original shoreline of the city that reeked of historical significance, from the citys growth as a shipping and banking capital. The capsule even contains a recipe for Pisco Punch, a cocktail that was invented at the nearby Bank Exchange Saloon, site of the citys original stock exchange. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] Part of an exhibit in the building lobby opening May 18, the time capsules contents are timeless: pictures of the buildings steel frame beginning to stretch skyward, or vintage news clippings and images of the city after its last 60s flowering. But within the cylindrical steel capsule, which looks a bit like a large propane tank, theres also a narrative about building in America, and how thats radically changed in the last 50 years. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] The battle over the permitting and construction of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco from 1969 to 1972 offers a flashback to a different time in development, real estate, and construction. The tower was proposed and built in just three years, a sprint compared to the time it takes today to build a signature part of a city skyline. Construction alone for the One World Trade in New York City took eight years; the Comcast Tech Center in Philadelphia, which had issues with cracks in some of the steel frame, took five years; and the St. Regis in Chicago took four years. An analysis of high-rise buildings by Construction Physics found building speeds decreased significantly over the past century, in many cases extending the time it takes to finish by roughly 50%. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] Buildings are more complex and require more permitting today, including complicated environmental review processes. This time-consuming process of development has led to backlash against what opponents call stifling building regulations. It has also led to more engagement from architects around code reform issues including elevator rules and exit stairs, and the formation of the abundance agenda, a center-left push by pundits like Ezra Klein to get the nation building fast again. The pace of the approval and the construction here is unbelievable, says developer Michael Shvo, who paid $650 million to acquire the Transamerica Pyramid in 2020, at the depths of the COVID office freeze.. The Mayor was very determined to get this thing approved, and Transamerica was very determined to get a building built, and with all the controversy, once they got the green light, they ran as fast as possible. They built it in two years, we couldnt do that today. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] A more humane debate Transaerica was then a massive business conglomerate with interests in banking, financial services, and insurance. According to former public relations staffer John Krizek, who worked for Transamerica during the pyramids construction and ultimately created the time capsule, the back-and-forth between protestors and developers at the time was more humane, more respectable, and more amusing. The conversation around the Transamerica Pyramid was, at the time, a larger debate about images, architecture, and aesthetics. The tower was not just a unique shape, but would tower above the skyline. It was to be the citys tallest building, and wouldnt be surpassed until 2018s Salesforce Tower. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] Artists and community members protested the building for aesthetic reasons, and general distrust of large corporations. Posters passed around the city at the time proclaimed San Francisco Gets the Shaft or Artists Against the Icicle. The citys then planning director called the pyramid, designed by architect William Pereira, inhumane. [Photo: courtesy SHVO] During early street protests in front of the companys office, Transamerica execs sent secretaries to bring ice tea to the protestors lining up outside. During another protest, Krizek and his colleagues printed up fake fortune cookies at a nearby Chinatown bakery, frantically stuffing messages like TransamericaNot a square outfit or People who protest pyramid seek Che-ops publicity. Krizek recalled that the company was determined to break ground in December 1969. The building plan was announced in January of that year, and there was a tax break worth approximately $750,000 expiring at the end of December. Since Krizek and his coworkers knew that as soon as the company was given approval to build, there would be an appeal, they planned to move fast and break ground before paperwork was filed. To head off any challenges, they staged a tractor and truck near the site and sent someone to pick up the approval during the midday lunch break; they were able to get a time-stamped photo of someone digging at site while those opposing the project saw their appeal delayed as staffer enjoyed their lunch. The emotions around this building, Ive never seen this for any other building in the world, says Shvo. The debates today are more practical; this structure will block my view or cast a shadow. You cant say that about this building, it was a pyramid designed to let the light down to the street level. It didnt block views, the only thing people could complain about was this idea of the Manhattanization of San Francisco. Originally, Pereiras design was meant for a new building for ABC in New York City. The network passed on the project, deeming the design too futuristic, and went with another architects vision. Today, the Transamerica Pyramid stands as an icon in San Francisco, with 80% of the space leased in a challenging office market. The building ABC picked instead? Its since been demolished.
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E-Commerce
Students are still setting fire to their Chromebooks for TikTokand now they’re facing the consequences. Fast Company first reported on the #ChromebookChallenge trend last week, following a series of school evacuations caused by students igniting laptop fires. The fires are started by inserting items such as pencils, paper clips, and pushpins into the charging ports of school-issued Chromebooks. This can cause the battery to overheat, potentially sparking a fire or explosion that releases toxic fumes. The #ChromebookChallenge reportedly began in Connecticut and has since spread rapidly. Newington High School was the first to evacuate students on May 1 after a laptop caught fire and the fire department was called. Since then, two students at Southington High School were arrested in connection with a separate laptop fire on May 7. The teens were charged with reckless burning, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and second-degree breach of peace. On May 8, a Plainville middle school student was hospitalized for smoke inhalation and is now facing criminal charges for deliberately causing the incident. That same day, Belleville High School in New Jersey was evacuated after a laptop fire started outside a classroom. Responding officers and firefighters found a charred Chromebook just outside the building. A 15-year-old student has since been charged with arson and criminal mischief. The trend has spread westward: As of late last week, Denver Public Schools had received 30 reports of students attempting to ignite their laptops, according to Axios. The Colorado Springs Fire Department has reported at least 16 similar incidents. With no sign of the trend slowing, schools across the countryincluding in California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Washingtonhave issued warnings about the reckless challenge. Parents and guardians are also being urged to talk to their children about fire safety and the dangers of blindly following social media trends. A TikTok spokesperson tells Fast Company that it takes down content that violates the platforms Dangerous Activities and Challenges policy. The company is currently working closely with the National PTA to fund programs in high schools about online safety and civility. In addition, searching for the term Chromebook challenge on TikTok brings up a safety warning: “Some online challenges can be dangerous, disturbing, or even fabricated,” it reads. “Learn how to recognize harmful challenges so you can protect your health and well-being.” However, the trend is still circulating under other hashtags, such as #ChromebookDurabilityTest and #FStudent. Many of these videos go viral, garnering thousands of views and comments from fellow students and baffled adults. The clips often feature a sound bite from fitness podcaster Ben Azoulay: The F students are inventors, Azoulay says. Theyre so creative that they couldnt sit in class. Now theyre sitting in jail cells.
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E-Commerce
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