🛸 The Orbit Dispatch: Issue #14
A quick tour through design drama, unhinged products, nostalgia-fueled aesthetics, and the internet’s latest creative detours.
Hello!
We’re back with your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities and internet curiosities. Grab a coffee, or whatever fuels your creative weirdness and dive in!
In this issue:
The $20 billion Adobe merger is officially dead (RIP).
Lollipops that broadcast audio into your skull
Saying “I do” to a $35k plastic BuzzBallz ring
Anti-Valentine’s marketing that admits nothing is more romantic than splitting the rent.
Typing with a biohacker’s body & the return of 70s horror fonts.
🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes
On January 21, 2026, the $20 billion merger between Adobe and Figma was officially terminated due to regulatory pressure from the UK and EU. This is the Liberation Event of the Year for designers. The widespread fear was that Adobe would “Grey Goo” Figma—slowing it down, bloating it with legacy code and locking it behind the Creative Cloud paywall.
Procreate Dreams, the animation app that promised to revolutionize the industry, faced continued backlash in January 2026 for bugs, missing features (like a basic lasso tool), and data loss issues a year after launch. The Procreate Dreams saga illustrates the danger of the “Hype Cycle.” The marketing promised a revolution; the product delivered a beta. In 2026, users are no longer forgiving of “roadmap promises.” The patience for software that “will be good eventually” has evaporated. This aligns with the “Reality” trend—users want tools that work now, not tools that might work in 2027.
A sugar-free lollipop that transmits audio through the jawbone, delivering music or podcasts directly to the inner ear while you eat it. This is Internet ephemera made physical: a novelty echoing early-2000s HitClips, updated with biohacking-adjacent tech. It gamifies consumption—you don’t just eat candy, you consume content. More importantly, it marks the attention economy’s final frontier. Screens own the eyes, earbuds the ears, haptics the hands. Now media enters the mouth. Even a snack break becomes a streaming surface.
Rick Owens is designing for the “Urban Apocalypse.” The inflatable boots are literal airbags for the feet. The spikes are “social distancing” made flesh.
Sundance serves as a mirror for the indie creative economy. The buzz around “weird” films like Buddy (an evil kids’ show horror) 35 suggests that the only way to break through the content noise is with extreme concepts. Meanwhile, the lukewarm reception to traditional indie dramas like Carousel 36 indicates that the “mumblecore” era is truly over. Audiences demand high concepts or stark reality (The Lake), with little patience for the middle ground.
At Consumer Electronics Show 2026, the standout shift wasn’t generative AI, but AI embedded into physical objects - signaling a move toward “phygital” hardware that augments play and domestic life rather than pulling users into screens. LEGO’s Smart Brick, which senses motion and structure to produce real-time audio feedback, exemplifies this trend: advanced computing hidden inside familiar forms to deepen tactile interaction instead of replacing it.
The Grok scandal, where the tool was used to generate non-consensual deepfake pornography of real women and children—triggered immediate global backlash, with governments condemning it as abuse and platforms accused of monetizing harm. The fallout marks the end of AI’s regulatory “Wild West,” accelerating a 2026 shift from passive oversight to active enforcement, where “Safety by Design” becomes a legal, code-level requirement rather than a policy promise.
💘 Seasonal Orbit: The Algorithm of Love
Romance is in the air, or maybe that’s just the scent of limited-edition, deep-fried marketing.
💚 BuzzBallz: The $35k Cocktail Proposal
Ready-to-drink brand BuzzBallz is auctioning a diamond ring to launch their new “Pink Lemonsqueezy” flavor. The 9-carat, lab-grown pink diamond is set inside a bedazzled mini-mold of their iconic round bottle. Proceeds from the auction will benefit a ‘heart-related’ charitable cause.
💚 Sweethearts: “Love in This Economy”
Forget “Be Mine.” This year, the classic candy brand updated their conversation hearts to reflect the crushing reality of the 2026 cost-of-living crisis.
Instead of love notes, the hearts feature pragmatic propositions like “SPLIT RENT”, “CAR POOL”, “COOK 4 2” and the ultra-romantic “BUY N BULK”.
Check out their video campaign: here
💚 Tinder: The “Breakup Bangs” Campaign Tinder closed out 2025 with a campaign that screams Anti-Valentines Day: “Breakup Bangs.” Breakups usually come with a need for radical change. Often, this tends to take the form of a very specific haircut: Bangs.
Partnering with the agency Mischief and celebrity stylists, Tinder dropped an actual bangs giveaway for people to test out the look before making it permanent.
🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations
Wiggly Paint - Where Every Line Comes Alive
Experience the pixel magic of Wiggly Paint’s drawing tool. Pro tip: Turn on the sound while drawing ✨
Live Font Ever - Typing With a Human Body
We came across a Note by danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁) where she talked about a hilarious tool she created: livefontever.com. It lets you type with a font made from Bryan Johnson (the millionaire who’s trying to live forever, notorious for swapping blood with his son).
BlackBerry fans, this is for you: Meet the Clicks Communicator
Ten years after BlackBerry ended its classic smartphones, the keyboard is back. The Clicks Communicator was created in collaboration with Joseph Hofer, the designer behind some of BlackBerry’s most iconic devices. Changeable covers, shortcut keys and the return of the 3.5mm headphone jack - enough to convince us.
Image source: clicks Archive Team — Saving the Internet While It Disappears
Since 2009, the Archive Team has been salvaging all of our digital history. A loose collective of archivists, engineers and volunteers dedicated to saving our digital heritage before they vanish through shutdowns, mergers and quiet deletions.
Internet Artifacts — A Museum of the Digital Mundane
Talking about archiving the web, you gotta check out Internet Artifact. It’s basically an interactive excavation of the internet’s history, from the first spam email ever sent (1978) to the first set of emojis. The site also lets you interact with the artifacts - listen to the dial-up screech, click the original “Under Construction” banners, and feel the phantom weight of a geocities page.
Source. Internet Atchifacts 📸 Visual Inspiration
Why Stranger Things revived the ITC Benguiat font and why designers went wild for it.
When the Duffer Brothers were dreaming up Stranger Things, they kept thinking about the stuff that scared them as kids – thick Stephen King paperbacks with dramatic covers and even more dramatic type. When they hired Imaginary Forces to design the opening titles, they brought those books along as references. The common thread? ITC Benguiat, a 1977 typeface that once ruled horror shelves and mall bookstores, then got quietly exiled during the age of clean sans-serifs and “tasteful” minimalism.
Using Benguiat wasn’t an accident—it was a vibe choice. Imaginary Forces leaned all the way in: glowing red letters, slow zooms, film grain, tiny imperfections. The type didn’t just show the title, it set the mood. The result won an Emmy and accidentally kicked off a design chain reaction. Suddenly, decorative fonts were cool again. Designers everywhere took it as permission to loosen up, embrace nostalgia, and have a little fun. Benguiat didn’t come back as a retro joke, it came back as proof that personality beats polish, and that sometimes the best way forward is through a slightly spooky, over-the-top serif
🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month
KFC romance novel
KFC Tender Wings of Desire: A Colonel Sanders Novella
In 2017, KFC released a branded romance novella titled Tender Wings of Desire. Yup, an actual love story, starring a smoldering, shirtless Colonel Sanders. It was published just in time for Mother’s Day and played completely straight, borrowing the breathless tropes of paperback romance: forbidden attraction, lingering glances, and fried chicken as fate.
The stunt was marketing absurdity at its peak—and that’s why it worked. KFC didn’t sell chicken in the book; it sold vibe. By turning a corporate mascot into a romantic lead, the brand collapsed irony, nostalgia, and internet horniness into one highly shareable object. It’s peak Internet Ephemera: a cultural artifact designed less to be read than to be screenshotted, memed, and remembered as proof that brands briefly lost their minds—and won attention because of it..
🤔 Poll of the Month
Thanks for reading!
Forward this newsletter to your favorite design-nerd friends, internet nostalgics, and lovers of all things odd. See you next month—stay curious!
🛸 – The Orbit Team
loved this issue a lot! from the links like Internet Artifact, Stranger Things font to the new Sweethearts campaign and the Rick Owens show, truly inspiring. <3
I was a huge fan of KFC's dating sim game and Hallmark romance movie but is didn't know there was also a book!