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Maybe you’ve noticed it while driving down the road. The chrome logos. The sleek sans serif fonts. It can be hard to tell one electric vehicle brand from another. Theres a reason EV brands like Tesla, Rivian, BYD, Neta, Jaguar, and Zeekr have become a sea of sameness, and it all comes down to a single influence: Many of todays most technologically advanced cars owe their aesthetic to a decades-old vision of the future. Most EV brands use a font that includes cutouts, slashes, or entire missing segments. This is a font style called stenciling, and if it looks inherently futuristic, thats because its most often used in science fiction media. It’s shorthand for the future, says Stephen Coles, editorial director and associate curator at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, who also authors a blog called Chromeography about the history of car branding. What Tesla has in common with Blade Runner The classic 1982 film Blade Runner, set in 2019, imagined a dystopian version of Earth threatened by intelligent humanoids. It didnt get a whole lot right about the modern day, but it turns out that some of the films aesthetics were pretty spot-on when it comes to predicting the branding of EVs. Blade Runners original poster sets the films title in a stenciled font. Stencils are typefaces with slits in their letters that make them appear as though theyve been cut, and they represent a printing technique that dates back to prehistory. Historically, stencilings ease of replication has made it ideal for uses in the military, transportation, and poster design. But in the late 20th century, it also became a hallmark of science fiction. [Images: Tesla, Warner Bros.] Dave Addey, an Apple engineer and author of the book Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies, runs a blog where he analyzes typography in iconic science fiction films. Stenciling comes up constantly. In Blade Runner, its used in the logo for the evil Tyrell Corporation. In 1979s Alien, it appears in the films opening sequence and on the back of Captain Dallass jacket. Later, in 1989s Back to the Future II, it pops up multiple times, including as a hypothetical logo for USA Today and in the branding of a Texaco gas station. Back to the Future Part II, 1989 [Images: Universal Pictures] If you look at the typography of those films, [stenciling] is something you see over and over again, Coles says. Stenciling is so ubiquitous in science fiction media that in a blog post titled How to Make Your Text Look Futuristic, Addey includes it as one of the key steps. Rule 5: Remove an entirely pointless and arbitrary segment of the text, he writes. Among EV brands, Rule 5 appears to have become branding gospel. Blader Runner, 1982 [Images: Warner Bros.] Tesla was one of the first brands to set the stenciling trend, but it was quickly followed by competitors like Chinas BYD and Neta. Jaguars new branding has a bit of stencil in it, while the luxury EV brand Rimac takes this strategy to the extreme, erasing almost entire portions of each character. It looks like it could be on the side of a spaceship in a sci-fi movie, Addey says. [Collage: FC] The great blanding of the automotive industry Its no surprise that the style is pervasive, says Terrance Weinzierl, executive creative type director at the tye foundry Monotype. One of his theories for the connection between sci-fi and EV branding is that the automotive industry is really a copycat industry. Just look at the most divisive EV brand of our time as proof. In November 2024, the legacy brand Jaguar announced that it would be shifting its focus away from gas vehicles and transforming into a luxury all-electric company. To usher in this change, the brand traded its iconic leaper cat logo for a thin, sleek, sans serif wordmark. Just a month later, Audi announced its own line of EVs in China, ditching its iconic four-ringed logo for, you guessed it, a thin, sans serif wordmark. The general trend in graphic design logo types maybe 15 years ago was to start going more geometricthe blandification, Coles says. Theres been a move away from serifs and other kinds of expressive type, which happened in the tech industry first. It seems like the car industry is 10 years behind that. [EV branding] feels to me like it’s a second phase of that general trend. [Photo: Jaguar] This flattening was a precursor to stenciling. Weinzierl notes that legacy brands including Kia, Chevrolet, Subaru, Porsche, Lexus, Infiniti, Mazda, Hyundai, Dodge, Lincoln, and Acura have all opted for flattened sans serif wordmarks in recent yearsa sharp contrast from the early days of car branding, when loopy scripts were everywhere. Just like the blanding trend of the 2010s, if one successful EV brand (like Tesla, for example) sets a certain typographic tone, others might feel compelled to follow. Coles believes that brands are also using this technique to appeal to millennial nostalgia for retro-futuristic aesthetics. If you think of who would be buying cars now and what influenced their feeling of what is futuristic, a lot of the films that [Addey] talks about in his book are from that periodthe 70s, 80s, maybe some early 90s, Coles says. Of course, some brands stand out as exceptions to this general rule. The EV company Scout Motors uses a wordmark that pulls inspiration from the script automotive logos of old. Other luxury brands, like Bugattis Tourbillon model, are doing something similar. [Collage: FC] Weinzierl says its important to remember that compared to the traditional automotive industry, EVs are still almost entirely new. As the category exits its nascent phase, we may see an increase in experimentation and brand differentiation. What I love about the EV industry is that there’s so much innovation and so much overhaul that’s happening, Weinzierl says. It reminds me of smartphones in 2008 or 2010year over year, the products were just dramatically different, and there was so much competition and so much innovation happening really fast. I see the blossoming EV industry as a mirror image of that.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sam was barely a month into his CIO role when he saw the writing on the wall. The companys much-touted AI transformation was already unraveling. AI had been declared the centerpiece of the companys enterprise strategy months earlier and placed under the chief innovation officers remit. But after his predecessor left, ownership splintered. Sales launched their own pilots. Marketing spun up a tiger team. The CTO declared AI strategy now belonged to his team. By the time Sam arrived, priorities overlapped, resources were being drained by pet projects, and internal turf wars threatened the companys ability to competenot just externally, but against itself. Sams experience isnt unique. Were living through a new era of hyper-competitionwhere the gap between AI and digital leaders, and those struggling to keep up, is widening fast. McKinsey reports the performance divide has surged over 60%, with AI leaders delivering two to six times more shareholder value than laggards. To compete, organizations must transformnot just technologically, but operationally. That means aligning hundreds or even thousands of people across business, tech, and operations to move in sync. But too often, transformation efforts break down from within, leaving teams on the ground with whiplash. Weve seen it firsthand. Kathryn, as an executive coach and keynote speaker, and Jenny, as an executive adviser and learning & development expert, bring frontline insights from coaching senior leaders and building systems that scale. The five strategies that follow are designed to help leaders align on what matters mostso the organization moves together, stays focused, and competes at the pace of change. 1. Reset the Executive Team Around a Shared Mission As a new CIO, Sam didnt yet have the authority to realign the enterprise, but he had something just as powerful: insight. In his first 90 days, he listened. He tracked how AI efforts had fractured across functions and documented where resources were duplicative or misaligned. When the CEO asked him to share his observations with the executive committee, Sam presented a simple, yet revealing map of overlapping initiatives. Crucially, he didnt catch his peers off-guard. He previewed his findings with each executive beforehand, inviting input and building trust. That transparency prompted the CEO to bring in outside support. Together, we helped the executive team articulate a shared purpose: what only they, as the senior leadership team, could uniquely deliver for the company. They identified five enterprise-wide priorities, each with a clearly defined owner, desired outcome, and expected impact on employees, customers, and performance. Heres how Sam approached his first 90 days combining insight, relationship-building, and clear communication to set the foundation for enterprise alignment. Days 1-30Days 31-60Days 61-90Key ObjectivesListen and Map LandscapeSocialize and InfluenceAlign and Set the FoundationActivities Conduct 1:1s with all executive peers and direct reports to understand priorities and concerns Review previous AI initiatives to understand points of duplication or tension Use a stakeholder mapping framework to identify key influencers and relationship gaps Document where AI workstreams and ownership had fragmented Create a high-level map of overlapping initiatives Preview findings 1:1 with each peer to build trust and reduce surprises Tailor insights to reflect what matters to each stakeholder (e.g., link to their KPIs) Begin to draft what a unified path forward could look like Present synthesized observations to the CEO and executive team Recommend a reset: frame what the executive team can uniquely deliver Help the executive team align on 35 shared priorities and clarify cross-functional ownership Propose monthly progress reviews to protect alignment after the meeting ends This first act wasnt about fixing everything. It was about creating enough clarity to stop the internal land grab, and lay the groundwork for collective leadership. 2. Make the Workand the RulesVisible The next step: operationalize the strategy. The team mapped each enterprise priority, identified the key workstreams underneath, and assigned shared ownership. For each priority, they named what would need to changestructures, resources, meeting rhythmsto deliver on the commitment. Boundaries were clarified. Duplication was reduced. Expectations were reset. Just as important, they agreed on how decisions would be made going forward. New governance forums were established to drive consistency across business, technology, and operations. Shared metrics were also introduced to track progress and flag misalignment early. Sam helped reframe AI, not as a stand-alone initiative, but as the enabler of every enterprise goal. When your executive team agrees on what matters most, the next challenge is making it operational. These six questions can help you turn strategy into execution: Ownership: Who owns each workstream, and where is accountability shared? Decision rights: Who decides, who advises, and when? Governance: What forums and cadences keep teams aligned? Resourcing: Are people, budgets, and tools sufficient? Metrics: Are KPIs aligned and visible across teams? AI enablement: How will AI enhance, not hinder, core priorities? A strategy that isnt operationalized is just a slide deck. Turn priorities into ownership, decisions, and habits. 3. Sequence the Work So Teams Dont Collide Even the best strategy sessions wont fix a broken operating model. The real test of alignment is what happens after the meeting ends. This team didnt leave follow-through to chance. They created a monthly executive rhythmnot just for updates, but to review priorities, flag bottlenecks, and refine how they worked together. The meeting became a forcing mechanism to stay focused and accountable. But alignment isnt just about sticking to the planits also about pacing. With every departmnt eager to lead, the team had to get intentional about sequencing. Instead of launching everything at once, they assigned each enterprise priority to a lead function and a specific quarter. Each team had clarity on when to step upand just as importantly, when to support others. For Sam, this meant aligning with his peers on milestones, outcomes, and KPIs upfront. Rather than letting Sales, Marketing, and the CTOs team charge ahead in parallel, the CIO worked with the CEO and fellow executives to establish a clear sequence: Q1: The CTOs team built the core AI infrastructure and governance standards. Q2: Sales piloted AI-driven prospecting tools based on that foundation. Q3: Marketing launched AI-powered customer insights and personalization campaigns. This staggered approach gave each function space to lead, and ensured that each phase built upon the last. Teams had space to lead, room to learn, and clarity on when to pivot. Thats what sequencing unlocks. 4. Cascade Relentlesslyand Build a Feedback Loop Even the strongest executive alignment fails if it stops at the top. Sams team knew that priorities dont become real until theyre understoodand acted onat every level. To make it stick, they rolled out a deliberate cascade plan. Enterprise priorities were translated into department-specific objectives, with clear owners and timelines. Managers were equipped with simple, consistent talking points. Leaders reinforced the why, not just the what, connecting daily work to the bigger picture. Just as important, they established a real-time feedback loop. One early win came from a frontline support team using an AI-enabled tool to streamline customer inquiries. The impact was quickly elevated and scaled across other units. If your priorities havent reached the teams doing the work, you dont have alignmentyou have a memo. 5. Build the Skills Your Transformation Demands Sustained transformation doesnt just require execution: it demands growth. Even senior leaders need support as they shift roles, evolve mindsets, and lead through uncertainty. Thats especially true with AI, where capabilities change faster than most organizations can hire or retain. Thats why Sams company paired their reset with skill-building. With the CEOs backing, they invested in leadership development, executive coaching, and experiential learning focused on cross-functional collaboration, strategic influence, and change management. Sam also upskilled his own team. Once a centralized AI strategy group, they became enablershelping business units adopt AI tools effectively. That required new set skills: AI literacy, and consultative problem-solving. Lead the Way, Then Lead Together Transformation isnt a one-off project. Its an ongoing investment in how people think, work, and lead. In high-stakes environments, even the strongest strategies can fracture without focus, discipline, and shared purpose at the top. Sams story is a reminder: success doesnt start with a new initiative. It begins with how senior leaders show upso that transformation becomes more than a mandate. You dont have to do everything at once. Just make sure the most important work gets donetogether.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bernadette Berger is the director of innovation at Alaska Airlines, where she leads transformative initiatives that reimagine the travel experience for guests and employees. With a background in industrial design and a career path that spans dance instruction, stage performance, UX, and more than a decade spent designing aircraft interiors at Teague, Berger brings a unique blend of creativity, human-centered thinking, and technical insight to the aviation industry. Berger is on a mission to humanize travel. In my conversation with her, we discuss how design can foster dignity and independence in travel, and she shares how her team is using emerging technologieslike AI and automationto solve aviations hardest problems, not just for today but for years ahead. Have you always been a creative person? Yes! This is actually my fourth careerIve had a jungle gym of a career instead of a ladder. My first career was as a dance teacher. I taught kids and adults how to dance, choreographed recitals, and did competitions. I learned a lot about teaching creative skills and mastery to people of all ages. Then I thought, maybe Id be a performer. So I was an actress for many yearsmusicals, eight shows a week, the whole thing. I learned to sing, act, and develop a very specific creative skill. But I remember one lighting tech rehearsalI was standing there, waiting, and thought: Im spending all this time fulfilling someone elses creative vision. I think I could do this better. I want to be the one coming up with the creative ideas. So I went back to school and fell into industrial design and spent many years designing airplanes. Now, working at an airline, Im in a different rolebut Ive carried all those lessons with me. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] How did you find your way into the airline industry? I studied industrial design at the University of Washington. At the time, industrial design was just starting to sneak into digital interfaces. It was the early days of what later became the entire UX design practice. I found myself leaning toward projects that had both physical and digital componentsor some sort of spatial element with a digital layer. That interest led to me connecting with the design consultancy Teague. For over a decade at Teague, I got to design aircraft interior architecture, which involves anything you touch, see, or interact with inside the airplane. I also got a chance to learn many other design skills: lighting design, audio design, haptics, materialityall the ways Id classify as experience design. Thats what got me into travel. But the thing thats kept me in travel is this: I think travel can be the best tool for fighting hate. It can be amazing for fighting discrimination, racism, xenophobia. Its really hard to hate another group of people when youve experienced their culturewhat they eat, how they move through their city, their town, their villagehow they relate to one another. I love working in the travel space because its about connecting people.Does that perspective influence your design? 100%. One of the jobs of a designer is to make sure you’re not designing for yourselfthat you’re really walking a mile in the shoes of the end users you’re designing for. There’s no better way to learn how to design a travel experience for someone who doesn’t speak English than to go to a country where you don’t speak the primary language. There’s no better way to learn how to design a better way to move bags around an airport than to go load bags for a full shift in the rain. You learn really fast when you experience those challenges yourself versus hearing about it secondhand or observing someone doing it. It changes the conversations you have, the ideas you think of, and the way you launch solutions. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] How has the airline industry adapted to experiential design and service design? The ones that are adopting a user-centric approach wholeheartedly are the ones that are winning. It’s easy to see when decisions are made purely on what’s best for business without considering what’s best for humans. At Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines, care and customer care are central tenets of our business. Great customer care comes from our frontline employees. If we’re not creating great tools and experiences for our flight attendants, pilots, and customer service agents, they won’t be able to be their best for our guests. There’s as much focus on creating a well-designed employee experience as there is on the guest experience because they’re so related to each other. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] What about designing for better interactions between airline staff and airport staff? Absolutely. Guests are constantly handed off from airline staff to TSA and back. If youre on an international flight, you may show your passport three times. We’re working closely with TSA to allow identity verification using your face or phone. Imagine not needing to dig out your wallet at bag drop, TSA, or the gate. This year, there will be 13 moments in the travel journey where you can use your face or phone instead. Wht role does your team play in shaping travel experiences at Alaska Airlines? As an airline, we look at how people are boarding in Asia, how guests take short flights in Europe, or how travel is booked in South America. We often examine our own industry, but as the innovation group, we also get to look outside of aviation. We’re trying to make the flight booking path as easy as buying something on Amazon. We want the day-of-travel experience to be as seamless and interactive as planning your day at Legoland or Disneyland. We study personalization from places like Sephoratheir app, stores, and online experience. We look both inside and outside our industry because the same traveler buying sunscreen on Amazon is coming to our airport with high expectations for personalization, seamlessness, real-time information, and self-service. Even though other companies dont have the same constraints we do in flying people across the world, our bar still has to be just as high. It sounds like senior executives are really invested in this. Did you have a lot of work to do to prove that this innovation group works? Yes. Working on moonshot ideas is not for the faint of heart. Its for people who get excited about what might be, and who arent held back by fear of what might go wrong. Our job is to prioritize the really gnarly challenges that we face as an airline and then ask over and over: What would need to be true for this challenge to go away? What tasks can we do that are fast and inexpensive so we can learn more, whether it’s that a technology isnt ready yet or that a process could be automated, or that we should communicate differently with guests? We constantly ask ourselves: Are there different ways to tackle this problem? What are the hard-and-fast rules, and where can we think differently to get different results? [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] What are some of the challenges that design has helped the airline industry overcome? Design has helped more people travel. Historically, aviation was expensive and not accessible to everyone. But design has changed that. Now, more people can travel safely, independently, and with dignity. Think about booking a tripan airline, a hotel, a car, fun activities. Design helps deliver not just information, but the right, relevant information for each person. It helps guests who are blind, deaf, traveling with a service animalit helps them enjoy travel with the same independence and dignity as anyone else. Theres still more work to do, but one of the major successes of design in this industry is making travel more accessible to more people. How are you using AI in your work? Do you think AI can improve designs contribution to the travel industry? AI is a big part of our innovation strategy and really, almost every departments strategy. Its well integrated across the airline to elevate how we work. Right now, were using AI where it excels: looking at lots of data sources and synthesizing them for humans. AI is great at pattern recognition, prediction, detecting things, and using rules to make quick decisions. We use AI for complex scheduling, improving safety, rerouting aircraft around storms, and in computer vision. Its already being applied in machine learning and automation. But the next level Im excited about is AI as your best team member where it helps humans make nuanced decisions, use intuition, and observe when automated processes are going wrong. Thats where well start to see jobs improve in quality. Were currently using automation on the ramp to help move bags from plane to plane more effectivelyespecially with tight connections. AI can track bags, planes, and people, and find the best routes for bag transfers. That frees up human ramp agents to focus on the complex problem-solving theyre experts in. You work with both creative and noncreative people. How do you motivate themespecially people who dont consider themselves creative? I have a spicy take. I believe, deep in my soul, we are all creative. Creativity is a form of problem-solvinga trial-and-error process. My heart breaks when people say, Im not creative. I want to say, Who told you that? Because almost everyone I work with is a great problem solver. They may use analytical tools, but theyre still making creative choices. How do I motivate people? A lot of it is looking at problems from a different perspective. Asking, What if? What would need to be true for this to work? When you invite people into that way of thinking, they can contribute using their own methodssketches, words, process flows, or whatever it may be. The killer of creativity is fearfear of embarrassment, fear of failure. Most of what we try doesnt work out, but we learn so much from the process. Thats the point. To me, thats creativity. What advice do you have for aspiring designersespecially students? I used to teach at the University of Washington, my alma mater. I loved seeing lightbulbs go off when students finally got something. Id assign them to go somewhere and experience a challenge firsthand. Want to design for a user group? Be that user for a day. Dont just observe them. If youre ambitious and want to be a senior designer or creative director, spend time around those people. Watch how they carry themselves. Learn from their presence. One of my mentors walked into a room with confidenceheels clicking, bag down, commanding attention. You cant learn that on Teams. So my advice is to get in front of people in real life. Experience what they experience. Sit with coworkers. Build bonds. Learn from mentorshow to be and how not to be. That all requires showing up in person. Working from home is efficientand I love the flexibility with my kids. But creative teams need bonds. You need trust to have honest conversations about work without it feeling personal. You have to apologize when you mess upbe transparent. When I show vulnerability, my team can too. Vulnerability is a requirement for trust.
Category:
E-Commerce
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