LSN : Daily Signals : Artist Shantell Martin re-imagines Comic Sans font

A sober St Patrick’s Day with Guinness 0.0

Holding out for a Zero by Guinness, Ireland

Ireland – Guinness launched a St Patrick’s Day campaign that surprisingly asked customers to go easy on the booze. Instead, the Diageo-owned brand encourages people to try its non-alcoholic beer: Guinness 0.0.

The sober dark beer is set to be available in cans and micro-draught across the country, with four iconic pub façades in Dublin, Galway, Cork and Belfast rebranding as Guinness 0.0 pubs; O’Donoghue’s in Dublin will become 0.0’Donoghue’s, for example. At the Guinness Six Nations rugby finale, customers will get a free pint of Guinness 0.0 using an app, and 164 Tesco shops will give loyalty card-holders a free four-pack of Guinness 0.0 for every regular Guinness four-pack bought.

The accompanying video campaign taps into a recent TikTok trend featuring screaming foam faces on top of everything from a beer to a latte. Guinness adapted the gimmick to its stout glasses with the faces singing along to Bonnie Tyler’s 1984 hit Holding Out for a Hero. As discussed in our Sober Bars report, the brand’s campaign finds inspiration in a growing non-alcoholic movement – especially among the younger generation.

Strategic opportunity

Moving into the non-alcoholic market is an important strategy for alcohol brands as it will attract a growing segment of young consumers who are less enamoured with traditional drinking

Artist Shantell Martin re-imagines Comic Sans font

Shantell Sans by Shantell Martin, US

UK – British artist Shantell Martin has created new font Shantell Sans, based on her signature felt-tip handwriting. Martin is known for her large-scale black and white drawings and collaborations with Tiffany & Co, New York City Ballet and Adidas.

To create the typeface, Martin used her favourite medium-sized felt-tip marker, a Staedtler Lumocolour, to write several sentences containing every letter in the alphabet. Type designer Stephen Nixon of Arrow Type jumped in to trace Martin’s writing and tweaked its heights, widths and spacing to make it consistent. Launched at the beginning of March, Shantell Sans has been downloaded 3m times on Google Fonts.

As a self-proclaimed ‘proud dyslexic’, she frequently features block text in all caps in her work as she finds it easier to read. Shantell Sans resembles the famous 2000s Comic Sans font. The 2023 redesign has sparked conversation about inclusive design and early tech aesthetic nostalgia.

Strategic opportunity

When designing, aim to create an inclusive experience that neurodivergent individuals can enjoy

AI prompt engineer is tech’s hottest new job

Global – As generative artificial intelligence becomes the crown jewel of big tech, prompt specialists, a new engineering job that does not require coding skills, are in high demand.

Powered solely by keywords, AI tools like Chat-GPT can deliver the best visual worthy of first place in an art competition or the worst essay filled with fake news. To reach its full potential, several industries are now looking for prompt engineers.

Simon Willison, a British programmer, told The Washington Post: ‘There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying: ‘Oh, Lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box.’ But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells – and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work, and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.’

Should AI destroy categories of jobs, it will also create new roles. As all industries start seeking AI keywords, prompts will soon require their own market, writers, sales experts, intellectual property lawyers and archivists, among others, who will build a new Alternet Economy.

Photography by Anastasia Shuraeva, Global

Strategic opportunity

The prompt economy is only just starting. From selling ready-made lists of keywords to consulting, how can you capitalise on your expertise to help others feed AI with the right prompts?

Stat: What matters to online shoppers in the US

Photography by Pixabay

US – With over three quarters of online shopping baskets being abandoned, a new report explores how retailers can change this narrative and incentivise conversions.

Online checkout solution Bolt has partnered with YouGov in a poll on the online shopping behaviour of 994 adults in the US. Convenience has emerged as a key element that consumers want from e-commerce experiences. For nearly half (45%) of shoppers, having to sign up for an online store account is a drawback and 62% would prefer to use a single account across several platforms.

Consumers increasingly engage in leisurely online browsing without real purchase intent – a digital equivalent to window shopping. Retailers can gain an edge by shifting from transactional to inspirational platforms, and implement creative incentives like Hollister’s Share2Pay feature, which allows teens to share their carts with friends or parents.

Online shoppers are also discount-driven; nearly two thirds (63%) admitted that a discount code is likely to make them complete a purchase they weren’t fully committed to. Considering that 14% of shoppers aren’t planning to purchase items they add to online baskets, retailers can use this data to nudge conversions and tap into the Inflationary Loyalty Market.

Strategic opportunity

E-commerce platforms should use these insights to their advantage – removing barriers to buying and implementing incentives are small but impactful actions to help drive conversions