An established church in a small town has a simple sign by the side of the road. The town is growing and the road in front of the church is getting much busier. A new church down the road installs a large sign. Not wanting to fall behind the times, the established church installs a new sign, too. This sign allows the church to add custom messages to the sign by manually arranging letters.

At first, the church simply puts up their service times, but some people think that’s boring. The church needs more catchy information on their sign. Something that people driving by will engage with. The pastor recommends putting the sermon title on the sign, but after a few weeks, realizes that she’s got to come up with a catchy sermon title every single week. Someone volunteers to update it with a new bible verse each week, but they...

A new look and branding for Honda EVs

Honda showed off two new EV concepts under the new Honda Zero brand at CES — the Saloon and the Space-Hub. Most of the coverage is focused on the futuristic looks of the concept cars. As someone who grew up going to the Chicago Auto Show and seeing the cars of the future, I’d temper any expectations that the final designs will be this radical.

But as a branding researcher, what caught my attention is that they also rolled out a new Honda “flying H” logo to be used on all new electric cars. From the official Honda press release:

The current Honda “H mark” has a long history, dating back to 1981. In launching the next-generation EVs, Honda designed a new H mark, to express the...

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I adopt a theme each year and last year, the theme was Reset. That theme included focusing on physical and mental health, writing more, getting organized and rediscovering creative endeavors. I made progress with three out of four goals.

• I wrote more, getting my first journal article published and I have several others in the works. I’ve written more here on Micro.Blog in 2023. So mission accomplished.
• I did a good job getting organized, but I need to stay organized. There are still some areas I need to work on, but I feel like I made some progress.
• I worked on a bunch of my typeface designs and even though I’m not ready to release anything, I feel like I was able to dedicate some time to visual projects.

That leaves physical and mental health. I was particularly physically active for the first few months of the year, but hit a rough spot...

I always pull together my favorite eight shots of the year (as a contrast to those algorithmically generated “Best Nine” posts). I love that it gives me an excuse to go back over all of my images from the last year and relive a lot of great memories.

1. Our oldest decided to attend the University of South Carolina and had a great first semester.
2. Liz and I are notably bad a selfies, but this outtake was better than the actual selfie and I love it.
3. The girls were a little excited about seeing Taylor Swift in concert. (It was an amazing concert and I’m glad we all got to go.)
4. We have a high school graduate.
5. This is a big kitty yawn, but it looks so fierce.
6. Ryan is still playing lacrosse and bounced back after...
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I’ve reached a big milestone in my academic career: my first published research paper.

Brand new: How visual context shapes initial response to logos and corporate visual identity systems has bene published in the Journal of Product and Brand Management. It’s available now online and will eventually be assigned to an issue. If you have access to journal articles through a university or public library, you can access the article.

If you can’t access the article, here’s the abstract:

When a new logo is released, it does not have an established meaning in the mind of the viewer. As logos have become more highly scrutinized by consumers and critics, it has become more important to understand viewers’ initial response to logos. While other studies have researched the impact of aesthetic choices on viewer reaction to logos, this study aims to understand the effect of the surrounding visual identity system when a...

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Tomorrow night, the Ahsoka finale airs on Disney+. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve enjoyed the show. It’s not perfect, but I love Star Wars Rebels and it’s great to see a continuation of the story line.

I’ve got a few absurd ideas about the finale that I figured I’d share. Our heroes are on Peridea, in another galaxy. Thrawn is ready to come back to the core galaxy, partnered with the Nightsisters, to restore the Empire.

Here are 9 absurd things that are not going to happen on the season finale of Ahsoka:

1. Our heroes (and maybe villains) will remain stuck in the Peridea galaxy. That would at least explain where they were during the Rise of Skywalker.

2. Force ghost Kanan Jarrus appears to… Ezra? Hera? Jacen?

3. Yoda’s species is actually from this new galaxy, and they are the enemies of the Nightsisters.

4. There is an even darker power in the new galaxy that is...

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Recently, we started rewatching Alias, the 2000s ABC spy thriller by J.J. Abrams.¹ All five seasons are on Disney+ and we started from the beginning. Season 1 has 22 episodes, which was once considered a “full season.” Now, a streaming show rarely has more than 8 or 10 episodes a season.

Alias became a hit and attracted new viewers over the first season. But in the broadcast TV era, there wasn’t an easy way for people to go back and watch the episodes they’d missed. I remember ABC trying to rerun episodes as it gained popularity. And the “previously on” section got hilariously longer to try and catch people up.

The 17th episode of season 1, “Q&A,” is an exposition-filled clip show where a skeptical FBI agent quizzes super spy Sydney Bristow (played by Jennifer Garner). She answers his questions, explaining the premise of the series while showing...

When the exodus from Twitter first started last year, many tech-savvy people were moving to Mastodon and I wondered if brands would move their accounts to self hosted instances. After all, from a branding standpoint, @offical@starbucks.com is better than @starbucks@mastodon.social. At the end of that post, I posited that someone would come along with a service that handled the fediverse complexity for companies.

That service is Threads.

Lots of people have asked why Meta was interested in providing ActivityPub support. I honestly think part of the story is so Meta can tell brands – their advertisers – that they can just publish on Threads and it will eventually be accessible on any other non-Twitter platform. Of course, they’ve still got to deliver on that promise… right now Threads doesn’t have ActivityPub support.

So far, branded accounts have flocked to Threads. If @BRAND-NAME@threads.com becomes the default for official branded social content, Meta benefits....

I’ve been preparing for Twitter’s demise for seven years, but I didn’t see ‘X’ coming.

I’ve been preparing for the end of Twitter since 2016, when Twitter was struggling with some financial issues and the future was uncertain. I pondered what would happen of Twitter went away suddenly.

2016: Twitterless:

Which got me thinking, what if we woke up one morning and Twitter was gone. Or more likely, what if Twitter changed so radically, that it was unusable?

I’m more concerned that Twitter, or a company that buys Twitter, will change it so completely, that it becomes useless.

Fast forward a little over a year later. Twitter’s financial issues were less dire, but they were struggling with flat user growth, coupled with a rise in abuse and hate on the platform.

2018: Twitterless, Part II:¹

As...

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New social media outlets prove the viability of indie social.

The invention of the printing press made mass media possible. Printing houses produced popular books and bibles, but they also spread the writing that powered the Reformation. Major newspapers became was the dominant media for decades, but there have always been community and independent newspapers. Self-publishing, indie music, art house films and college radio are all forms of independent media.

Economy of scale¹ pushes these systems toward consolidation. But as these media outlets consolidate into a few major players, there is always a market for an alternative. Why should social media be any different?

When the internet became popular, personal sites and blogs were the ultimate form of independent media. Economy of scale kicked in like it always does. Large news sites dominate and Google Search drives the traffic to the largest most well established sites. ^{Continue Reading →}