Yello Brand Guide: The Spirit of '26
It’s determined by the American people, not the White House.
The best of Yello:
Editorial:
Hey, it’s Hunter. The U.S. wasn’t feeling very optimistic about its big birthday this year. We’re just a few years removed from the deadliest event in U.S. history, the COVID-19 pandemic (which I still don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with, if I’m being honest), and we’re unable to shake years of persistent inflation while a growing majority of the country thinks the president, who’s currently engaged in mind-boggling historic levels of greed and corruption, is bad at his job. I get it.
A Pew Research Center survey late last year found 59% of U.S. adults believe the country’s best days are behind us, but I personally think they’re wrong. Have some faith in yourself and your country. In the words of former President Barack Obama, “You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.”
Forget the cage match on the White House lawn or Trump’s plans to build an arch for America’s 250th year (which wouldn’t be completed until its 253rd year, if at all). The true spirit of ‘26 isn’t dictated by the White House, it’s determined by the American people.
Americans this year have now volunteered nearly 40 million hours as part of America Gives, the largest volunteer effort in U.S. history. And when the U.S. welcomed the world for the World Cup, we wowed them with our hospitality, ranch dressing, and Big Gulps.
July 2026 was the month Madonna told us in “Love Sensation” that “there’s nothing that we cannot do.” It was also the month Trump’s approval crashed through the floor, now lower than any president going back to the 1940s except Richard Nixon right before he resigned over Watergate. While Trump’s promised “Golden Age” has been largely self serving, a bust for everyone but himself, his family, and his donors, the biggest movie of the month, The Odyssey, was about the Golden Rule and the folly of war.
Despite our national pessimism, Pew’s survey had a silver lining: from 2023 to 2026, the percentage of U.S. adults who believe the nation will be less divided by 2050 than today grew from 21% to 33%. The good news is we can improve those numbers even more before then. The power is in you and me. Don’t give into despair. Believe in your ability to effect change now, in your own community. The best is yet to come. Happy birthday to the United States, 250 years young.
History of American design:
Quilt made for a Union soldier (1861). Mary Rockhold Teter made this quilt based on a pattern from the July 1861 issue of Peterson’s Magazine for her son, a Union soldier from Indiana, according to the National Museum of American History. There are 34 stars each along the border and inside the diamond, for the 34 states in the Union before the Civil War began.
“Flag” (2005). Artist Frank Benson used a computer animation program to simulate wind and turbulence on a standard U.S. flag and turned the distorted image into an actual flag that flew as a part of the 2005 exhibition Uncertain States of America, according to the Bard Lifetime Learning Institute.
Street art sightings:
“Do Somethin’.” U.K. artist Elleanna Chapman wrote out lyrics from Britney Spears’s 2004 song “Do Somethin’” in pink rhinestones on a railway bridge over Southend High Street in Essex, England, for a commission for Focal Point Gallery (the opposite side shows Beyoncé with the lyrics “working 9-5 just to stay alive” from 2013’s “Haunted). According to the gallery, the work “invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between celebrity, power, femininity, and everyday life, proposing popular culture as a site where agency, aspiration, and collective action can intersect.”
