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Daily Bafflements

Make Hats Undesigned Again, a tweetstorm in a teacup, and a gut check

• Was the Trump campaign’s decision to spend 3.2 million on badly-designed hats between July 2015 and September 2016 a good one? Over at the Fast CompanyBaffler art director Lindsay Ballant gives an insight into why it was indeed. “Hillary’s branding felt too corporate,” she says.

But that also reflected an entrenched reputation she had to push against. And the design, while very good, unfortunately only served to reinstate that fact, especially when you think of how big of a deal it was when the logo was unveiled. It was treated like a Mastercard, Airbnb, or Uber reveal . . . Good design has an elitist bias, particularly because good design is expensive . . . In a way, the fluke success of that hat was a rejection of “design thinking” and “design strategy” as a whole.

• “Every so often, a text comes along that perfectly captures the mood of a certain section of society at a certain time, something that screams their pain for them in ways they can’t quite manage to do themselves,” writes Sam Kriss at Slate.

 Thanks to Eater, which has named Heather Havrilesky’s foodie takedown “A too-rare gut check . . . on what it means to dine like so many us have been lately.” Have at it.