IV Omree Lionss — When Nike's AI Fumble Became a Design Lesson

"IV Omree Lionss."

That's what appeared in Nike's teaser video for England's 2026 World Cup kit — a garbled, AI-mangled attempt at "Three Lions." Distorted faces. Warped text. Every telltale artefact you could ask for, served up on the world's biggest sporting stage by one of the world's biggest brands.

It's the most instructive design story this week. And it has nothing to do with football.

The audience has learned to see

Here's what's changed. Eighteen months ago, most people wouldn't have clocked an AI-generated promo video. They might've felt something was off, but they couldn't name it. Now? Viewers spotted the problems within minutes. "AI slop" has entered the public vocabulary, and audiences are actively looking for it.

This matters enormously for us as designers. The assumption that AI-generated visuals are "good enough" for professional output is collapsing — not because the tools got worse, but because the audience got sharper. People now expect to be able to trust what they're seeing from a brand like Nike. When that trust breaks, the backlash is immediate and loud.

And let's be clear: this isn't an anti-AI argument. It's a quality control argument. Someone at Nike — or more likely, at an agency working for Nike — decided this output was ready to ship. That's the failure. Not the tool. The judgement.

Craft is the counterpoint

While Nike was getting roasted, a very different story was doing the rounds. Illustrator Richard Wilkinson shared the process behind Penguin Random House's "Playful Penguins" campaign — a beautiful piece of character design and animation that expands on the publisher's iconic penguin mascot.

Each character was carefully developed with distinct personality, balancing playfulness against decades of brand equity. It's the kind of work where every decision is intentional: the weight of a line, the timing of an animation, the way a character's expression sits just right against the logo.

No one's accusing it of being AI slop. Because it radiates craft.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this kind of work is getting celebrated right now. Audiences — and clients — are hungry for things that feel made. Considered. Human. The more AI-generated content floods the feed, the more handcrafted work stands out. That's not nostalgia. That's market dynamics.

A quiet CSS revolution

On a completely different note, something landed this week that made me genuinely happy: the CSS corner-shape property.

If you've ever tried to create squircle corners, bevelled edges, or scooped shapes in CSS, you know the pain. It's been clip-path hacks, SVG masks, and fragile workarounds for years. corner-shape gives us all of that natively — beveled, scooped, and squircle corners as a first-class CSS feature.

This might sound small. It isn't.

For years, the gap between what designers drew in Figma and what developers could cleanly implement in CSS was a constant source of friction. Every non-standard corner meant a conversation, a workaround, and often a compromise. corner-shape closes one of those gaps for good. If you're designing UI with any kind of expressive corner treatment, this is worth understanding now — even if browser support takes a little while to catch up.

Designing for feelings, not just flows

One more thing worth your attention. There's a fascinating framework doing the rounds that borrows from anime and superhero films to think about emotional pacing in product design. The core idea: anime tends to weave emotion through the flow of a story ("Emotion in Flow"), while Marvel and DC films tend to create emotion through conflict and contrast.

Applied to digital products, this translates into a genuinely useful question: are you designing an experience where the emotional arc is smooth and continuous, or one where tonal shifts create impact through surprise?

It's the kind of thinking that separates a functional product from one that actually feels like something. And in a world where AI can generate competent wireframes and layouts, the ability to orchestrate emotional rhythm might be the skill that's hardest to automate.

So what's the takeaway?

Three things, really.

Your eye is your value. The Nike debacle proves that knowing when not to ship AI output is becoming as important as knowing how to generate it. Quality judgement isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole job.

Craft is a competitive advantage. The Penguin Random House campaign isn't getting attention despite being hand-made. It's getting attention because it's hand-made. As AI content becomes the default, intentional craft becomes the differentiator.

Stay close to your tools. Whether it's a new CSS property or a new way of thinking about emotional design, the designers who'll thrive are the ones who keep expanding what they can do — not just what they can generate.

The Three Lions deserved better than "IV Omree Lionss." And honestly? So does every project we put our names on.