Dazzling. From John.

Tom Robbins died yesterday. Robbins didn’t just write about the 1960s—he lived it, inhaled it, let it marinate in his bloodstream, then set it loose on the page in an explosion of adjectives and high-proof if not 100% whimsy. He wasn’t documenting an era; he was mainlining it. The man hitchhiked across the country, dropped acid like it was vitamin C, and managed to crawl out of it all with a head full of prose and, somehow, a pulse. He understood the sixties not as a collection of headlines, but as an intoxicating atmosphere—one you had to breathe deeply to describe accurately. “Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafes, Melville his New England with its tall ships,” Robbins wrote in his 2014 memoir. “I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal.” Which is to say: Tom Robbins was the rarest kind of writer—one who understood that the point of a quest is not to arrive, but to keep moving. Good night, Tom.

And then, this happened.

In 1981, the president of Millenium Records, Jimmy Lenner, politely declines to sign an up and coming artist after listening to several of her songs. She later went on to own the Super Bowl. Professionalism blinds.

TIME TRAVEL We woke up to snow in Woods Hole. Time stops. So I was asked a time travel question. One I've heard often. If you could go back, what would you change? About you? About starting your company? My answer? Nothing. With good reason. When my co-founder Leland Maschmeyer and I began, we had 4 desks, 2 laptops and 1 idea: Design is not what we make. Design is what we make possible. We knew where we wanted to go. We wanted to build a company that would place one eye on business outcomes–growing value for our clients. The other on creativity and craft. We wanted to build a community of artists & engineers that didn’t exist when either of us started out. One that would not hire based on grotesque “cultural fit"–the “only” college or “right” employment history. That’s pernicious. Instead, our community would be based on "cultural contribution." How everyone could be DIFFERENT from each other. Call it DEI. Call it common sense. It creates a richer, stronger, resilient tapestry. It works. At the beginning of anything, knowing nothing is daunting. But knowing everything is paralyzing. We understood that just making a start was the best thing we could do. Why? We knew we needed to try stuff, accumulate mistakes. A lot of them, fast. So we found ourselves on our toes or on our asses. As we navigated those first years, we found that the moments directly after any one of us blundered, moments usually used for blame or finger-pointing, we tried to use, instead, for understanding. I am not, not perfect at this. But in that pause after a botched meeting or a fumble (mostly mine), we learned to sit, listen and find a lesson that would point us in a smarter direction. No one admits this: Success is nice, but calcifying. It can teach you to perpetuate the same thing. Mistakes, however, force you to re-examine. Grow. The compounded knowledge and momentum you gain as a result will shock you. In 2008 we went on a retreat with Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön in upstate New York. That's when we heard her words: To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. Cherish your mistakes. Honor where you tripped up. Pause when you look back at them. Maybe that was the best you could do. Okay. You feel like shit, but that's where you learned some serious stuff. I don't know of any leader who has NOT gone through a brutal realization that they were not the leader they thought they were. But it’s often at that point when you can become a real leader and learn how to put others before you. I would argue you are no leader until you have learned to give away the credit for success to your colleagues and clients, and accept failure as your responsibility. Always. Once you learn that, you'll learn everything. And time travel? Pointless. Especially today, when the snow is perfect.

Today, @jstrelioff is MY favorite brand mascot.

Our job as designers is to imagine and build better futures with our clients. The way we see it, it is our job as colleagues to break down barriers, and build an inclusive future for all. Today, CA reposted an important story we did on this topic several years ago. The Black Designer’s Journey infographic our team designed was included in The Black Experience in Design, an anthology published in 2022 by Allworth Press. Check it the full story, here. And thank you for the repost, @CommArts. These days, it's important more than ever.

Form follows fantasy. Every good idea comes from a spark of imagination, not pragmatism. Facts are important. But possibility creates futures. ...... Everyone at here at COLLINS was thrilled when The Sims called us. They invited us to work with their remarkable people (and their real-life remarkable people, too) to help reimagine the future of their brand—not that it needed much help, considering how people have been joyfully mismanaging their Sims' lives for a quarter of a century. Yes. The Sims. Which is 25 years old today. And is ridiculously, insanely, increasingly popular. Why? Easy. The Sims lets you experience life as it SHOULD be—where buying a house takes five clicks, your dream job hires you on the spot, and if someone, anyone, annoys you, well, you can simply remove the door to their house. It’s a game where you control everything—except when your Sim refuses to eat dinner because there’s a mauve lamp slightly in his way. In fact, I think The Sims is really Charles Dicken's "Great Expectations." Except, instead of Mrs. Havisham, an ancient bride in a fabulously crumbling Victorian wedding dress, you’ve got a Sim who refuses to shower for three weeks despite standing in a new bathroom. Not pretty. Nevertheless, here you can build a career, start a family, plan a castle for zebras, or—let’s be real—spend four hours choosing flowered, art deco wallpaper and then never actually play. And then there’s just the sheer unpredictability: spontaneous combustions, alien kidnappings, and entire family lineages obliterated by a rogue (but probably delicious) grilled cheese sandwich. And now, after 25 years of unhinged digital drama, it's "humple borpnah" to our friends at The Sims—which, in Simlish, probably means “Happy Birthday for 25 years of weirdly specific...tragedies.” In fact, you can still join the great 25-hour Sims Livestream. As for the full Sims re-imagination and brand and design case study? That's coming, soon. After all the celebrating. And once we finish the grilled cheese sandwiches. Happy birthday, Sims. Thank you for inviting us to the party.

The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out. - Ursula K. LeGuin

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the he hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps. - Carl Jung

THIS THURSDAY The Moore College of Art has invited COLLINS to their campus as the 2025 Graphic Design Department’s visiting artists. Everyone here is insanely honored. Design Director Morgan Light will be joined by Senior Designer Lorena G. Ortiz for a lecture hosted in partnership with the good people at AIGA Philadelphia. Morgan and Lorena have worked on some of our most recent and visible work, including Target, Guild and the upcoming OFFF Festival in Barcelona, which they will share for the first time during their presentation. February 6 Reception: 6 PM Lecture: 7 PM Moore College of Art & Design Graham Auditorium This event is free and open to everyone.  Register here:

No Alpo. Just electricity. Oil. And, maybe, a tune-up wrench.

@cvos No. But funny.