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We appreciate how hard it is to pick a tattoo design. After all, this is something you’ll be wearing, whether you like it or not, for the rest of your life. As such, it should probably be something that remains relevant as you grow, or at least reminds you of some important time or period [...]

Our team name in junior high was the Flyers, which didn’t mean that we passed out pieces of paper inviting locals to our events, but that our school occupied an old airfield, and its gym was an old airplane hangar. In college we had a men’s team named the Redmen (not because of the natives [...]

A good friend of ours once went to Chinatown to look for a cheap, fake Gucci purse. After some searching she stumbled into the back of a store where beautiful fake handbags hung from the ceiling like stalactites growing from a cave roof in a calcium-rich mountain range. She bought an imitation Gucci purse, proud [...]

‘Tis the season to be grilling, and the biggest grill-fest of them all (July 4) is just a couple weeks away, so it’s not too soon to start thinking about supplies and equipment for that delicious day.
And though it’s still too early to shop for the stuff you’ll be grilling (whether veggie or meat), you [...]

We’re always pleased when some graphic designer takes it upon themselves to spruce up the look of an oldie but goodie music album, videogame or film. Today’s re-looking project comes courtesy of designer Huw Gwilliam (aka Littlepixel), whose re-imagined 39 Classic Album Covers as Vintage Penguin Books. Our favorite would have to be this version [...]

We all make mistakes when coming up with brand names, that’s just a fact of our product-saturated lives. For instance, a few months back (just over five months, to be exact) we had what we thought was a brilliant idea for a weblog where we would aggregate and create lists (because everybody loves lists). People [...]

We see them so often that it becomes very easy to forget that some of our favorite (or at least most familiar) logos were born in the rugged wilderness. Like the Puma puma, Camel camel, Linux penguin or Lacoste crocodile, these animals have become the symbolic figureheads of major multinational corporations, but at one point [...]

If you know much about architectural history, you’ll know that the names of architecture firms used to sound an awful lot like law firms (eg. McKim, Mead, and White, Walker O. Cain & Associates, Emery Roth & Sons, etc.). Now, however, they tend to sound like trashy nightclubs, for instance: Asymptote, Morphosis (at right), OMA, [...]

Recent news that NBC’s blockbuster, parallel-world, primetime, elite, soap opera Kings is being prepped for the slaughter got us to thinking: maybe a different title would have helped? After all, a catchy title is one of the pre-requisites to successful network TV branding, and we worry that too many people might have thought Kings was [...]

Around the office, we’re always discussing various long-term branding strategies to make Listicles seem “hipper,” more “dynamic,” “kinetic,” “edgy,” and “tantric,” although we don’t really know what those terms imply or what steps we can take to achieve such goals. These futile discussions sure do make us sound “savvy,” “brand-conscious” and “web-literate,” though, which makes [...]