You are browsing the archives of 2009 October.

This is why Americans will never be the best at soccer: because they aren’t passionate enough to modify whatever technological craze they’re currently addicted to in order to combine it with their favorite sport. The British, on the other hand, seem to be doing just that with this project–and promotion for the rock group Kasabian–whereby [...]

You know, it’s not just people that wear costumes on Halloween–you filthy humanist!–cars, vans, buses and motorcycles gotta get their “trick or treat” on too. And we’re not just talking about the dog-mobile from Dumb & Dumber, there are innumerable real-world examples of vehicles dressing up as other things (no, not Transformers). Cool Material has [...]

We like that new technology is bringing the rest of the world up to European advertising standards, which go with the “If it’s pretty it doesn’t need to make sense” principle. Increasingly, commercials for products big and small, from every corner of the planet, are doing simple concepts with slick visual style, like those in [...]

We always feel a little girlie wearing bandages, you know? It’s like a really childish sort of symbolic castration, which in a way is even more debilitating: not only are we injured and unable to conceal it, but we have to treat the wound with a really small and precious strip of adhesive (remember Nelly?).
Fortunately, [...]

We have no problem admitting that we’re big typography nerds. We can’t help it, we’re hopeless addicts and suckers for original and creative fonts, especially ones that are made from real world objects. As it happens, Reuben Miller’s listicle of 22 Really Creative Alphabets is full of such typefaces, our favorite of which is Jonathan [...]

Yesterday we heard the sad news that American photographer Roy DeCarava had passed away at the age of 89. One of the pioneers of a new kind of American street photography, especially between the late-40s and late-60s, DeCarava focused his lens on the desolation of the neighborhood where was spent most of his life: Harlem. [...]

We’re still working on a Halloween costume (yes, we always push this to the last minute), but we’re thinking the best way to go about the decision might be to see what the experts wear. By experts, of course, we mean people who wear costumes every day: superheroes.
As it happens, ComicsAlliance has just the listicle [...]

As the decade comes to a close and we start seeing an explosion of listicles about the last ten years, we here at Listicles labs are predicting an overwhelmingly sad, scary and disappointing summary of the aughts. We imagine that this will be an especially inescapable verdict for all things environmental, as we’ve done a [...]

The Statue of Liberty, a French gift to the U.S.A. on the occasion of the Declaration of Independence’s centennial, was dedicated on October 28 1886, which makes Lady Liberty exactly 123 years old today. As a celebration of all that that huge hunk of metal has come to symbolize over the years, we’re looking at [...]

Traditionally (meaning before WWI) ghosts were pretty much the scariest creatures humanity had invented, what with all the floating, ominous chanting, curtain-rustling and door-creaking. Over the last century we’ve proved that we’re actually the scariest things on the planet, and now ghosts are played for comedy more often than straight scares. Holytaco’s listicle of 25 [...]

As the conventional wisdom would have it, everything is for sale, so it should be no surprise that one of the most common graphic treatments we encounter is the barcode, the pattern of vertical black lines that tells us how much we owe the man. Of course, the barcode’s symbolic analogy to capitalism makes it [...]

As we plan our Halloween costume for this year we’re starting to think that maybe instead of doing a whole outfit, we might just choose one accessory that instantly redefines the rest of our wardrobe, making whatever we’re wearing a costume. At first we thought that a sword might be the best way to achieve [...]

More than any other person in the world, Helvetica Man–a fixture of signs and signals all across the globe–gets himself into all kinds of mad-cap adventures and strange, often dangerous situations. Surely you’ve seen him going through emergency exits, queuing behind red lines and crossing streets, but odds are you’ve never seen all of Fubiz’s [...]

Well, it’s officially Halloween week, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in being stingy with our Halloween listicles, so we’re giving them out by the handful now. First off, we’re loving Joy Hog’s listicle of Saturday Night Live’s Top 10 Halloween Sketches, and since we’re still working on a costume, we especially appreciated [...]

Earlier this month (October 2) we celebrated National Denim Day by wearing nothing but clothes made of denim (even denim underwear, which you’ll find below). For Lee Jeans, who started the national day of celebration in 1996, it’s a day to raise money for breast cancer research, but for us it’s also a day to [...]

We don’t always feel so optimistic on a Monday morning, but the bouncy stance and smile of this kid posing with his 7 Children’s Prosthetic Legs has us feeling in a pretty positive light about everything. If he can be happy despite the obvious difficulties his life poses, who are we not to smile?

As one of the last weekend mornings before Halloween officially hits next weekend, this seems like the best time to foreshadow what so many around the world will be doing next Sunday morning after their costumed revelry–since, were we to do this next week, you might not find it so funny. The folks at Holytaco [...]

So the World Series are about to get underway, and this is pretty much the highest stakes time of year for a baseball umpire, whose every call is all the more likely to be pored over and questioned over the next few games. Let’s hope they don’t invite the ire of sports history the way [...]

We love a science fiction film that plunges us into a completely different setting, where we get to rediscover everything from the language to the fashions to the laws of physics. Even better, we love a sci-fi movie that, within its imaginative new universe, sprouts a crazy dream sequence where the laws and rules are [...]

We’ve always thought that of all the cool kitchen utensils, the rolling pin must be the most versatile. Not only does it serve the obvious purpose of rolling out dough, but, in the eventuality that, like Steven Segal in Under Siege, we were tapped to serve as a secret agent, it would prove a very [...]