Home today for a warranty repair to our AC unit that developed a slow leak over the summer. Service is expected to take 3-5 hours. Goodness, they must be disassembling the whole thing.

I think I’ll likely stick with the base model iPhone 17 this year. It will be a massive upgrade from my iPhone 12 Pro. I’ll probably pick up a new Apple Watch, too, to replace my ancient Series 4, which I still wear every day.

Looking forward to the iPhone event tomorrow. I’m in the market for an upgrade… and whatever they announce will be a big step up from my iPhone 12 Pro.

Scout Motors partnered with local coffee shops to buy coffee for Columbia today. Pretty cool event, and we are happy to have Scout in our community. Thanks for the free drink today! (And the stickers.)

A coffee cup with an orange sleeve and a "Scout" sticker is placed on a wooden table in a cozy café setting.

Some thoughts on the Cracker Barrel rebranding fiasco from a visual identity researcher

My Ph.D. research is focused on consumer response to logos and visual identity, so as you can imagine, I’ve talked about Cracker Barrel1 a lot over the last few weeks. Everyone has an opinion and is eager to share it. I held off writing this because the social media chatter was just chaotic, but now that things have calmed down, I wanted to share some quick thoughts based on my research.

People care about logos.

In my forthcoming study on logo attitudes with a sample of 1,000 American consumers2, over 60% of respondents agreed that if their favorite brand changed their logo, they’d want to know why. Cracker Barrel did a really poor job of explaining why they were changing their logo. It seemed to consumers like change for the sake of change and when challenged by consumers (plus a really strange political...

Most of our neighbors have doorbell cameras and motion-activated cameras around their house. We don’t. This morning, one of our neighbors showed us a clip of a guy walking through our yard and trying our car door (which was locked). He then went to their house and tried to open their car doors. Now, I’m wondering if we should have security cameras, even though I think it’s a privacy nightmare…

I switched from the Tiny Theme to the Mythos Theme for my main blog. It’s really nice, but it’s going to take me a while to fully customize it.