An old Industrial Designer yelling at Copic marker refills.

There was a time not too long ago when we considered Tik-Tok to be the domain of the juvenile.

Slowly though, short-form, vertically-optimised, infinitely-scrolling video has permeated just about every social media platform. An end-game media format crafted to keep you on-platform as long as possible, so you can be served as many ads as you can tolerate. Even if those ads make virtually no money.

LinkedIn has dedicated a whole new tab in their mobile app to the format now.

That's correct, the platform where professionals go to be professional has unironically taken its place alongside the generation that brought us Skibidi Toilet.

But the Tik-Tokification of LinkedIn is only one of a series of 5D chess moves the platform is making to keep you there. Several months ago they pushed out a friendly email to let us all know our content was now to be used to train their AI*. Train AI on our content, so we can create content with AI, as it continues to train on its own AI.

The Beast eats its tail.

But I'm not here to rail on LinkedIn (again), or short-form video, or even AI.

LinkedIn's shenanigans is just one example amongst many taking what was good, both on and off the Internet, and wringing every last drop of value out of it. Adobe, Google Search, Humane, Temu, Juicero, Fisker, Spotify, Adobe again, the list feels endless.

What we're left with is junk that we have to use (Amazon), or junk we can't use (Car Thing).

When the value of what you watch is measured by how long you watch it for, not if it informs, entertains, or educates. When the value of what you buy is measured by who waved it in front of you, not if it serves its intended purpose. The value of the thing itself is secondary to the value extracted from it.

I was chatting to a chap at the basketball stadium several weeks ago who was wearing a pair of Adidas basketball shoes that were in tatters. They looked to be years old, but it turned out he'd only had them three months. He was surprised when I suggested he return them. He'd just accepted that they hadn't lasted. Three months is not a reasonable service life and it should not be accepted.

When so much of what we consume is designed explicitly to be the worst permissible version of itself, we've found ourselves surrounded by it. We allow ourselves to be surrounded by it.

Time To Get Mad

It's easy to let someone else's shoes fall apart underneath them, but it can and will happen to you.

Perhaps because I'm a veteran of this design vocation, a designosaur if you will, I still frequently and exclusively use pens and markers for my concept sketching. I then scan these in to put together my presentations.

I bought my first Copic marker in 1999. In my first year of university we would wander down to the art supply shop on campus and pick up a marker or two. Whatever we could afford, which wasn't much. It was a flex to have a handful of markers to do your concepts with. Over the years I've accrued a total 75 Copic markers. This represents hundreds of dollars worth of investment, even without paying retail for many of them.

Naturally, because I use them a lot I have a lot of refills too (59 to be exact). I usually don't buy one refill at a time. I'll do without a particular colour until I need enough refills to warrant an order. A week ago my order arrived.

Now I'm mad.

Shrinkflation Pro

I knew that Copic had changed the size of their refills. Instead of the 25mL volume they've been using for decades, they're now 12mL. But of course, as expected in 2025, the price hasn't reduced to match. When I bought my last full-sized refills 18 months ago, they were $14.50 each. At the same time, the new-at-the-time half-size refills were $10.75.

That's 48% the size but 74% the cost.

Or if you put it another way, what was $0.58 per mL, is now $0.90 per mL. An increase of 55%. Enough to make even Adobe blush.

But as mad as that makes me, it's not what made me mad enough to write about it.

If they'd done nothing else except raise the price, I might have copped it on the chin. The new refill containers themselves are an objectively and significantly worse UX experience. As a consumer I'm mad about the 55% increase in the cost of ink. As a designer I'm mad about how much worse refilling a marker has become.

Pay more, for less and worse.

Copic Refills: A Brief Design Analysis

Ink capacity of the refills aside, there are two key elements of the refill container that have significant impact on the UX. The shape of the container, and the thickness of the material.

In the old design, the container was rectangular and the material relatively thin. The flat, thin sides of the refill served as a kind of diaphragm that allowed you to very carefully meter out the ink. To get any significant amount of ink out of the refill and into the marker, which is necessary for the large "classic" markers, you could carefully 'pump' the sides of the container if you couldn't get enough out in a single squeeze.

By contrast, the new design is round and the material thicker. Just the change in material thickness alone would make metering out the required amount of ink harder, but changing the container to a round cross section makes it harder still. The amount of force required to refill a marker is astounding (see below). And because the force required is much higher, you can be far less precise in your application. Even with the finer tip.

This new design made zero sense to me until I had a look at the Copic website. You can see the intention of the new refill design in their header video. The refill is no longer merely a refill, but a whole new way to create™. The refill is now a marker too, allowing you to apply the ink directly to the page.

That would make the smaller, pen-like form factor make some sense. Maybe even the increase in material thickness makes some sense in this regard to restrict how much ink can be dumped onto the page in one go, though as I said I think the precision is worse because of the force required. The problem is that 99.9% of Copic users buy refills to refill their markers, not to splash ink on their pages. It would be a fraction of a fraction of the total user base that would use the new refill this way. By way of illustration, have a look how much strain our artist needs to use in the above still. That'll definitely give them RSI.

This simply reeks of a product manager finding some tenuous use case to justify selling less ink for more money.

So Whatcha Going To Do About It?

I don't buy Copic refills because I want them. I buy them because I'm neck deep in Copic markers, and I want to use those. At this time in my career, the switching costs are almost (but not quite) too high.

But what am I going to do about it? As a start I'm going to publish this article. After that, I'm going to let Too (the maker of Copic) know about it. Lastly and eventually, I'm going to reject Copic altogether. I already have the pen display (a Huion 13" 2.5k) to do it.

As a society we need to shake the apathy and start getting mad. Get vocal about what sucks and why, and more importantly, dump the things that don't change for the better. Yes, even if the costs are high. And they will be, that's how they get away with making things worse to begin with.

*Fun fact: LinkedIn actually stopped their scraping of user data in the UK when the UK's International Commissioner raised concerns about the legality of doing so.