COLLINS

In 1917, Charlie Chaplin built his villa in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles. Nearby, he built a film studio at the southeast corner of La Brea Avenue and Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Later, Hanna-Barbera took that studio over and, after that, the Jim Henson Company would claim the property as the home of Henson’s workshop, welcoming the world through a gate crowned with Kermit the Frog (dressed - this is worth a Google - as Chaplin). Today, Chaplin’s original villa space is home to République—a bustling bakery and James Beard Award-winning restaurant. Down the street are LACMA, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, remarkable galleries and more. (As far as neighborhoods go in Los Angeles, Miracle Mile is easily one of our favorites.) On Monday, October 27, it will be our home for a special edition of Coffeehaus, presented with our partners at Monotype and Adobe. This gathering will bring together voices working at the edges of Los Angeles culture and creativity—from those defining its style, to those chronicling its street art, to others shaping its future through technology and media. As always, there will be good pastries, strong coffee and - because it’s late afternoon - wine. For those in town to attend Adobe MAX, our hope is that this can be a fitting beginning to the conference. For those who won’t be, we hope it will simply be a good way to start the week. Either way, we’d love to see you there. You can RSVP, here: https://luma.com/knfaj567

Over 25 years, OFFF has grown from a Barcelona festival into a global landmark for creativity, where the world’s most inventive designers, artists and technologists come to explore what’s next. But as the festival expanded from a local event into a worldwide movement, it needed a new identity that could keep pace. One that honored its creative roots while projecting its future ambitions. COLLINS partnered with OFFF to redefine it as a magnetic force—a center of gravity for the creative world. Inspired by the physics of magnetism, the new system balances two dynamic forces: Attraction and Projection. Attraction pulls creative minds together, while Projection sends ideas, energy and influence out into the world. The new logo embodies this duality: each letter drawn inward, forming a powerful, unifying core. Around it, motion, color and type radiate outward, creating a living identity that expands and contracts like creative energy itself. Once redesigned every year, OFFF now has a single adaptive system to guide its next 25. A constant that can evolve just like the creative movement it represents. You can find the full case study of our work together here: https://lnkd.in/ejh4dXig — COLLINS Rebeka Arce Lorena Garcia Ortiz Sergio Lairisa John Choi Eric Park Sam Eliot Daniel Ferro Tomas Markevicius Nick Ace Alex Athanasiou OFFF Pep Salazar Elena Alekseeva

Fast Company asked eight incredible designers what their hopes and wishes for AI’s capabilities and roles might be. And, in a surprising lack of judgement, they also asked Brian Collins. They get into everything from the menial to the miraculous. You can see it all here: https://lnkd.in/eu2eRmr7 And a link to Brian's point of view is here: https://lnkd.in/ejqUrUQq

Our friends at Creative Workers Union have always created insanely valuable experiences. This year, they’re back with Creative Works ONLINE on October 2nd & 3rd, followed by five Saturdays of workshops. As always, the time will be filled with real stories, hard-won lessons and practical insights from people are swinging hard every day to make truly great work. We’ve had our very own Nick Ace and Taamrat Amaize join the team onstage in the past, and the remarkable lineup this year includes voices like Edel Rodriguez, Emily Ruth Cohen, Ken Barber, Mary Kate McDevitt, Alex Center, Sophia Yeshi, Austin Dunbar, Chelsea Goldwell and more. Run, don’t walk: https://lnkd.in/eGhjEv6p

On April 22, 1970, Earth Day rallied 20 million Americans and sparked a cascade of lasting change: the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Half a century later, at another environmental tipping point, Bill McKibben and Earth Day co-founder Denis Hayes set out to create its cultural successor in the name of clean energy. They call it Sun Day. COLLINS was invited to design the movement: a system cohesive enough to unite millions, universal enough to cross cultures and bold enough to fly on a flag. Our answer: five bold rays forming half a sun. The other half left open—for people to complete themselves. Because movements thrive when people see themselves in them. Together with partners at garden3d and Commercial Type, we built the tools: a digital commons for collective action and a typeface crafted to be re-crafted. Sun Day reframes the sun from a threat to the solution. And on September 21, hundreds of events unfolded across the world to proclaim just that. You can join in at sunday.earth Fast Company’s Alex Schwarz covers the story here: https://lnkd.in/d_J44rgk Our friend Amelia Nash at PRINT Mag covers it here: https://lnkd.in/eU3HrDnp And, the case study of our work can be found here: https://lnkd.in/e7esryYW — 
COLLINS Beth Johnson Mason Lin Eron Lutterman John Choi
 garden3d Hugh Francis Commercial Type

What happens when you ask fifty designers to wrestle with the same problem? You don’t get one answer, of course. You get fifty. Each one stubbornly, beautifully different. That’s the idea behind “100 Tens”—a new collaboration with Letterform Archive, marking their tenth anniversary. Fifty interpretations of the number one pulled from their extraordinary collection of more than 100,000 items. And fifty more created by some of today’s most restless, brilliant designers. Next Wednesday, Coffeehaus lands in San Francisco to celebrate 10 extraordinary years of Letterform Archive and the Archive’s anniversary campaign, developed in partnership with COLLINS. A way of honoring the past while pointing forward. You’ll hear directly from the designers about their work and the experiments they did along the way, from the team at COLLINS that worked on the campaign and from the marvelous folks at Letterform Archive. And, as always, some good food and drink to boot. Coffeehaus x Letterform Archive - Wednesday, September 17, 2025 - 6pm – 8pm - Letterform Archive, 2325 3rd St., 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA RSVP here by September 12th: https://luma.com/9he1f29z

Hello, London. Hello, Earth. The Financial Times, in its usual love of drama, calls the World Design Congress “the Olympics of Design.” After fifty years, it returns to London this week. And we’re beyond honored to have been invited to speak and participate. Leland Maschmeyer, co-founder and CEO of COLLINS, will be digging into the future of sustainability and regenerative design. We’re joining remarkable leaders, including architect Norman Foster, musician Brian Eno and Oxford Economist and Environmentalist Kay Rayworth. This feels a bit like being asked to jam with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Aretha Franklin – all at the same time. So, pray. This year’s stage? The Barbican Centre, the glorious 20th century Brutalist experiment. Born from the rubble of the Blitz, the architects dared to ask not just how to rebuild, but how people might actually want to live. The result: a city within a city, perched high above street level, borrowing ideas from Roman fortresses, French modernism, Mediterranean piazzas, and Scandinavian restraint. A soaring manifesto in concrete. The theme this year couldn’t be more urgent: Design for Our Planet. The climate crisis is no longer “looming.” It’s here. Everywhere. Droughts, floods, fires, storms: the catalog of catastrophe grows longer by the season. The only possible response is global, and designers—along with those who commission design—hold real power in shaping what comes next. Because design doesn’t just make things look good. It makes the world. And the world, sometimes inconveniently, makes us in turn. Which is why we must decide to make it better: • Drive zero emissions with creativity, technology + collective behavior change. • Reimagine materials, reuse waste and create circular economies • Regenerate places—restore biodiversity and build communities with skills to care for them. If you’d like to dig deeper into how we are thinking about these challenges, here are a few pieces on COLLINS Ideas that go further: 1. Stakes Design: https://lnkd.in/eZgYMn6F 2. How to Slay a Plastic Dragon: https://lnkd.in/eYbVjFhH 3. The Imaginals: https://lnkd.in/enpJWPT The World Design Congress will host a conversation that, in truth, is not about design. It’s about how the world we will now design not only sustains us, but sustains all life on Earth. See you at the Barbican. Bring hope. And, being London, a sturdy umbrella, too.

We hope your Labor Day and week are off to a great start. Our is, because we're looking forward to joining our peers and friends at Ideate Designers House this Thursday, Sept 5. Joseph Han, Lorena G. Ortiz and Rohan Rege from COLLINS will take the stage to share our thinking and work in “New Ways of Seeing”—an exploration of how design, at its core, is a practice of perception. It's an honor to be invited into the conversation alongside our peers and friends like Alex Center, Helena Jamarillo and so many more. There are still tickets. We hope to see you there. https://lnkd.in/e47KgTe3 And—a big thank you to Rahmi Halaby and the team behind IDS for creating and putting this on. We can't wait.

Overheard today at the COLLINS office: Sookie Sookie (Live) - Grant Green Autumn - Richenel Long Pond Lily - Hayden Pedigo Bolero Medley - Celeste Legaspi Sugar Water - Cibo Matto This Is Your Night - Amber It all sounds better now that our work with Muse Group is out (and in poster form on our walls). And it all reads much, much better when the remarkable team at Creative Review writes about it. You can find the story, here: https://lnkd.in/dSB8U7cx

There has never, ever, ever been as much music listened to, talked about, played and attended in the course of a project than there was in our work with the good people at Muse Group. And we could not have enjoyed building it with them more. Amelia Nash at Print Magazine covers the story, here: https://lnkd.in/gDV46vhQ And our full case study is here: https://lnkd.in/eDEPFcPF Listen up. .