Buckets, Poop, and Trees

(And twinkles, of course)

Hey there, happy December 👋

There wasn’t an email last month thanks to COVID, but it’s my party and I’ll delay newsletters if I want to.

Anyway, here’s a pretty packed edition of things I’ve found to round off 2024. And don’t worry — I won’t mention the Jaguar rebrand.

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Pootone 💩

PANTONE has announced their Colour of the Year for 2025, and… it’s undeniably turd-coloured. These announcements feel more and more like a silly PR stunt — it seems that they can spin some post-rationalised nonsense about any colour at this point. Bah humbug.

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An app that plants trees 🌳

A few months ago I mentioned Ecosia, the search engine that turns ad revenue into trees. Well, the same goes for Treeapp.

They’re a Certified B Corporation that plant a tree for every 30-second ad you watch daily. If you know your carbon footprint, you can even track how much you offset through your daily plantings.

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AI chess experiment

Google Labs has a Gemini-powered experiment where you can design weird chess pieces and pit them against an AI-defined opponent.

In my epic battle of eggs vs bacon, Team Egg met an early defeat on Medium difficulty. While egg-bishops and bacon-knights are a novelty, being beaten by computers at chess is nothing new!

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Cool buckets!

Yeah, I know, “Look at this bucket!” is fairly niche. But if you appreciate hand-made typography and curious objects, this one’s worth sharing.

From what I can tell (albeit with AI help), it’s marked with the Devanagari पानी, meaning ‘water’, likely for fire-fighting in South Asia.

If you’re one of the 21 Shell-Out readers from South Asia, do send me a message if you know more about this mystery bucket’s purpose!

But it would be far too simple to leave it there, of course! I used the bucket as a design prompt to experiment with motion design in the 2D animation software Cavalry.

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Lastly, some festive fun 🎄

Festivitas adds a string of lights to the top of your Mac desktop, along with your dock. It’s ridiculously silly, and made by a solo developer over a few evenings. $4 well spent.

Thanks for reading

Thanks for reading the last Shell-Out of 2024. I’m still loving this project, and I’m so grateful to have a small crowd of people interested in what I share 🤗

I hope you have a lovely Christmas (if you celebrate it), or simply a great December. See you in 2025… probably.

Create exuberant,
Tom 🐢

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