Notes, essays, conversations & fragments gathered along the way.
Bitta is the journal arm of Barbitta …a space for thinking aloud.
Here, you’ll find reflections on branding, design, culture, human behaviour, and the quiet details that shape how people feel.
Some entries are short. Some stretch out. Some are inspired by those building culture from the inside.
Others are field notes from streets, signs, books, and moments.
It’s not always polished.
But it’s always intentional.
A fragment of something bigger.
Here's a Wall
Public art in WA is at its best when someone refuses to hand over just a wall. On the brief, the site, and the work that happens before the artist picks up a brush.
Walkman Is Still for Sale
Sony never killed the Walkman. You can still buy one. The name survived. The meaning didn’t. Those turn out to be very different things.
The Brand That Agrees to Disappear
Every ingredient brand signs a strange contract before it reaches a shelf. It agrees to do excellent, consistent work, and to let someone else take the credit for it. Gore-Tex doesn’t get the jacket’s name. Dolby doesn’t get the cinema’s marquee.
The Title Is the Alibi
Every discipline eventually gets renamed by the people who arrive late to it. This season's arrivals are easy to spot. Scroll the job boards and marketing has quietly changed its clothes. The brand strategist is now a narrative engineer. The content lead is a media engineer. The person who used to run campaigns now architects growth.
Artist Psyops and Synthetic Taste
When a Brooklyn band shrugged off accusations of being an industry plant, it said something more honest than any denial could: in a market built on concealment, suspicion is the only rational default.
The Dashboard Doesn't Lie. That's the Problem.
Short-termism isn't a mindset problem. It's an architecture problem …built into the infrastructure of how marketing is now planned, funded, and evaluated.
The New Creative Shortcut
Are the tools that once lived behind agency walls are now accessible to anyone? What they can't supply is the standard against which to measure what you've made.
The Mirror in the Queue
Hypebeast culture gets dismissed as shallow…trend-chasers buying logos. But it might be the most honest thing branding has done in decades.
Flex Appeal
Stefan Ytterborn kept every Fibreflex board from 1975 to 1979. Every iteration, across four years of a culture building itself before anyone knew what it would become. It says this mattered before anyone said it did.
Does Design Work on Subscription?
Design, at its best, is not a throughput — it is an act of authorship. The subscription model, at its most optimistic, creates the conditions for deeper work. At its least optimistic, it creates the conditions in which cheapening becomes the path of least resistance.
The optimised life
Creative life was supposed to blur the line between work and passion. Somewhere along the way, it also blurred the line between presence and productivity.
The Address Was the Brief
The Meatpacking District became a global symbol of design culture not through polish, but through tension. Its influence came from the space between what the neighbourhood had been and what it was becoming.
The Syrup Doesn't Lie. The Packaging Does.
Standing in the supermarket aisle looking for maple syrup, I found something more instructive than I'd bargained for — a shelf full of beautiful packaging, and almost no maple syrup in sight.
When Your Customer Isn't the Point
When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirmed their partnership, the internet immediately started rendering it. AI-generated images flooded social media: brightly coloured bioceramic Royal Oaks, plastic octagonal bezels….What arrived instead was something far more strategically interesting. And it sold out anyway.
Why everyone suddenly wants the thing no one else can have
What people are reaching for is proof that the thing cannot be duplicated….that it carries no other owner's story but theirs. This is the rise of the collectable.
Why Has Braun Become So Collectable?
Braun never set out to be collectable. The products were designed for desks and kitchens and beside beds, doing exactly what they were made to do….nothing more, nothing less. The question worth asking isn't why people collect them. It's what it says about us that we need to.
The tote-bag economy
No one needs another tote bag — and yet the market was worth $2.75 billion in 2025. When something nobody claims to need keeps growing, something else is usually going on.
Is Canva the Temu of Design?
Canva and Temu don't share an industry, a business model, or even a target audience. And yet something about the cultural space they occupy feels eerily similar.
The original “shops inside a shop”
Department stores were the original marketplaces. Multiple brands, one roof, curated discovery. The internet didn’t replace that model, it unbundled it.
Is It the End of Choosing One Brand Architecture?
Brand architecture used to be fixed. One model. One system. One hierarchy. Now businesses operate across multiple structures at once, separating audiences, testing ideas and moving faster without stretching a single brand too far.