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Bible designs tend to be variations on a theme—tissue-thin paper and unforgiving font sizes, owing to the 783,000 words crammed into a single normal-sized book (the average novel, by comparison, clocks in at 70,000–100,000 words). Cheap faux-leather covers. A bookmark ribbon, maybe. If you’re a person of faith, it’s perhaps not the most fitting frame for what is defined as the literal word of God. If you’re a design zealot, it’s heretical object quality. If you’re both, well—prayers. The Bible is a book utterly ripe for a redesign. So Dylan Da Silva did just that with his Byble project, which released a bespoke hypermodern 11.5-pound edition of Genesis (the fi…

Accessibility is often treated as a technical problem. Does it meet standards? Is it ergonomic? Is it safe? Those questions matter, but they are incomplete. Many products fail not because they don’t function, but because they make the user feel singled out. Shame is one of the most powerful barriers to product adoption, and it is rarely discussed in design reviews. People delay using canes, grab bars, hearing aids, or mobility supports even when they would meaningfully improve daily life. Why? Because many products still communicate something the user does not want to say out loud: Something is wrong with me. If we want accessible design to succeed, and we want pe…

2025 was a year defined by buttholes and fury. AI companies, fueled by unlimited piles of cash, got in line with the same approach to branding: what’s been scatalogically dubbed a “butthole logo.” The amorphous circles neither propel you forward like a Nike swoosh nor ground you like an Apple’s apple. Instead they spin you around, hypnotizing you into who knows what’s next, just keep staring. At the same time, a polarized America debated its way through a newly political era of design—what you can see everywhere from the The President administration’s choice of typeface to its decision to weigh in on brand plays from Cracker Barrel and American Eagle. Marketers s…

I had to submit my résumé for a role. Then I went through three interviews, with nearly identical questions each time. The problem? The role was for a freelance writing position. Not to become a company employee. I got all the way to the third interview only to learn that the role paid a fraction of my usual rate, even though I’d provided my rate up front. I’m experienced enough as a solopreneur to know that going through three interviews was a bad sign. The potential client wasn’t communicating internally (as confirmed by the fact that my rate had been overlooked). Multiple interviews are incredibly uncommon in my line of work, and indicated to me that the comp…

The world’s biggest fast-food chain by locations isn’t Starbucks, KFC, or even McDonald’s. It’s Mixue Ice Cream and Tea. The Chinese quick service restaurant chain currently has about 45,000 storefronts across Asia and Australia, according to the research firm Technomic. That’s about 2,000 more than McDonald’s’ global store count and 5,000 more than Starbucks’s. But the boba tea purveyor really picked up broad attention when it debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday—and raised an IPO of $400 million. Shares surged by around 43% before by the end of the day, bringing the company’s total valuation to $10 billion. (Storefronts aside, McDonald’s’s market ca…

As startups race to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, some of them seem to be borrowing from China’s exacting work culture—which normalized a 72-hour workweek, or a “996” schedule of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he once said of the “hardcore” work ethic promoted at his companies. Now that culture seems …

The business world’s most exclusive club has always been the boardroom. For decades, it has operated as a roped-off circle of experience, where pattern recognition, war stories, and collective gut instinct guided the biggest decisions. But the most recent quarterly earnings calls and 2026 spending projections across industries from tech to finance make it clear: That era is ending. As business complexity explodes and competitive cycles compress, those old methods are showing their limits. Artificial intelligence is exposing blind spots, surfacing inconvenient truths, and rewriting how boards govern, challenge, and lead. The transformation goes beyond adding new to…

Lorrie Faith Cranor’s latest effort to educate people about privacy is a short, colorfully illustrated book written for an audience who probably can’t read it yet. Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Pittsburgh school’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, wrote Privacy, Please! after publishing more than 200 research papers, spending a 2016–2017 stint as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist, and making a quilt and dress illustrated with commonly used weak passwords. In a Zoom video call, Cranor says she got the idea for this self-published children’s book when planning for a privacy-outreach event at a loc…

In a sign of the times, Boy Scouts can now earn badges in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity as they learn tech survival skills. The Boy Scouts of America, which rebranded as Scouting America after 115 years back in February, counts about 1 million scouts in its ranks, and has traditionally offered badges to encourage kids to learn outdoor survival skills like first aid, hiking, and cooking, or soft skills like public speaking, communication, and citizenship in the world. (Here’s a look at all the 141 badges.) “The artificial intelligence (AI) merit badge introduces Scouts to the fundamentals of AI and automation through hands-on activities and real-wo…

You might not spend a lot of time thinking about your web browser, whether it’s Safari, Chrome, or something else. But the decades-old piece of software remains a pretty important canvas for getting things done. That’s why Tara Feener, who spent years developing creative tools with companies such as Adobe, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, decided to join the Browser Company and within two years became head of engineering, overseeing its AI-forward Dia browser. “This is more ambitious than any of the other things I’ve done, because it’s where you live your life, and where you create within,” she says. Whereas a conventional browser presents you with a search box on its home scre…

On May 19, 2023, a photograph appeared on what was then still called Twitter showing smoke billowing from the Pentagon after an apparent explosion. The image quickly went viral. Within minutes, the S&P 500 dropped sharply, wiping out billions of dollars in market value. Then the truth emerged: the image was a fake, generated by AI. The markets recovered as quickly as they had tumbled, but the event marked an important turning point: this was the first time that the stock market had been directly affected by a deepfake. It is highly unlikely to be the last. Once a fringe curiosity, the deepfake economy has grown to become a $7.5 billion market, with some prediction…

Featuring Joon Choi, President, Weverse; Aron Levitz, President, Wattpad Webtoon Studios and Co-President, Wattpad and Gita Rebbapragada, Chief Operating Officer, Crunchyroll. Moderated by Tania Rahman, Social Media Director, Fast Company. Cultivating a loyal fan base is every brand’s dream. So why not take a page out of the book of companies that have made fandom the foundation of their business? Hear from execs at Weverse, Crunchyroll, and Wattpad to gain an understanding of how these companies cultivate and serve their diehard fandoms—and how you can apply that approach to your customers. View the full article

In many states, you can get kicked out of your home if the local government thinks someone else will generate more tax revenue. The Takings Clause is a part of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and it says that if the government wants to take away someone’s private property, they have to do it in a way that’s fair. Most of us grew up hearing adults say that life isn’t fair. And they’re right—it isn’t. Neither is an authority forcing you to give up your property for whatever they think is fair. Courts have said the government can take your property if it’s for something that benefits the public, like building a road or a park. As if that could…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Doom-and-gloom narratives about artificial intelligence going rogue to the detriment of humans are a staple of popular culture. For some people, just say “AI,” and visions of Skynet from the Terminator movies taking over the world will instantly pop into their heads. Skepticism about AI isn’t just in the realm of science fiction, of course. As AI becomes more mainstream, legitimate concern…

Most leaders understand their message needs to define exactly who their work is for. Fewer realize that it should also define who it’s not for. Fewer still realize that their message is unintentionally excluding some of the very people they want to attract. Effective messaging repels on purpose. Careless messaging excludes by accident. And for leaders, knowing the difference can make or break your organization’s credibility. REPEL TO ATTRACT The idea of intentionally turning away potential customers can make leaders uncomfortable. It seems counterintuitive, even reckless, to deliberately shrink your total addressable market when you’re trying to grow. But tryi…

The Ford Pinto. New Coke. Google Glass. History is littered with products whose fatal flaw— whether failures of safety, privacy, performance, or plain old desirability—repelled consumers and inflicted reputational damage to the companies bringing them to market. It’s easy to imagine the difference if these problems had been detected early on. And too often, businesses neglect the chance to work with nonprofits, social enterprises, and other public interest groups to make product improvements after they enter the marketplace or, more ideally, “upstream,” before their products have entered the crucible of the customer. For companies and consumer groups alike, this…

AI is reshaping how work gets done in institutions, both public and private. However, the impact is uneven—consumer AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Gemini are fundamentally mismatched to the realities of government work. That doesn’t mean government agencies aren’t turning to AI. They cannot hire their way to capacity, so they’re looking to technology to lighten the load. More than half of local governments report difficulty filling positions, a problem especially potent in larger metros. San Francisco’s local government, for example, has more than 4,700 open positions. Since 2020, state government employment has increased, but much of that is a …

In July, President The President signed an executive order aimed at expanding access to alternative investments like private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement accounts. The move reflects a broader shift in how Americans think about wealth building and financial freedom, and it is a signal to employers that the future of employee benefits is going to look very different. While crypto may have once seemed fringe or speculative, digital assets have steadily moved into the mainstream. From Fortune 100 companies to institutional investors, the appetite for diversification beyond traditional asset classes is growing. According to a survey by NYDIG, 36% of employees ag…

Discussions around the role of work in our lives are frequently divided into two camps. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, one side proclaims. The other: “A job just needs to pay the bills.” The first school of thought is an example of “intrinsic motivation”. Here, the enjoyment of work for work’s sake is motivating enough, rather than relying on external rewards like money or praise. And while it’s great to love your job, recent research suggests that it can become problematic when intrinsic motivation is regarded as morally superior to other motivations. “When a neutral preference becomes charged with moral meaning, social scientists c…

One of the most pervasive rules of business is compete-to-win or perish. But as more organizations struggle to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape, some innovative leaders are choosing to collaborate over compete. This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement. The competition within the organization makes it harder to navigate the disruption and certainty on the outside. How do leaders banish in-h…

The battle for Warner Brothers Discovery got hotter this week as Paramount launched a hostile bid of $108.4 billion for the company, topping Netflix’s agreement last week to pay nearly $83 billion for the company’s streaming and studio assets. It’s the largest M&A deal of 2025 and rightfully will receive tough scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate price for Warner Brothers Discovery will certainly factor heavily into who wins the fight, especially with investors, and there could be additional bidders and proposals. For sure, an acquisition by Netflix of one of the oldest Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, and its HBO Max streaming service would have…