Press Enter / Return to begin your search.

Our Brains Trust Brands The Same Way We Trust Our Friends

We look at familiar logos like we look at faces. That’s depressing.

We perceive brands the same way we perceive other people’s faces. That’s the conclusion of a study by Anne Lange and Rainer Höger, which tested 18 well-known brand logos to see how trustworthy we find the companies behind them. The results were compared with a previous study doing the same thing for human faces, and the conclusion was startling.

Read Full Story

Read More

5 Bloody Good Lessons On Creating Intensity, From The Twisted Mind Of Eli Roth

The horror maestro behind the very disturbing new film The Green Inferno talks about how intensity is what gets pulses pounding.

Something bad is going to happen. You know it’s coming—this is what you signed up for—you just don’t know how bad it’s going to be, or when it’s going to happen. Then it does happen, and it’s even more horrifying than you’d been bracing for . . . and it’s going to happen again and again.

Read Full Story

Read More

Learn How Neurons Work Through An Autobiographical, Interactive Story

Nicky Case’s Neurotic Neurons is one of the best infographics we’ve ever seen, but it’s so much more than that.

Falling somewhere between an infographic, a web comic, and an animated TED talk, Neurotic Neurons, an interactive graphic by artist Nicky Case, is charming, educational, funny, sad, and strangely hopeful. It’s ostensibly an interactive explainer of how neurons works, but it’s so much more than that.

Read Full Story

Read More

Chess Deconstructed: Inside The Saul Bass Tribute-Turned-Video Game

NotDoba is an addictive little game that looks and sounds like a Saul Bass credit sequence come to life.

The legendary Saul Bass was one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century, lending his unique unique vision to everything from corporate logos to motion picture title sequences. About the only thing the man didn’t design during his career was video game. Now, thanks to NotDoba, you can now get an idea of what that would be like: it’s a fun, frantic indie game that plays like a Saul Bass title sequence brought to life.

Read Full Story

Read More

Honda Goes Stop-Motion, Star Wars Goes 360: The Top 5 Ads Of The Week

Beats joins the rugby scrum, AT&T and ESPN’s heartbreaking story, the Wall Street Journal gets into the cocaine business for Netflix.

This week Facebook introduced 360 video to the newsfeed and, obviously, there were a handful of impressive launch partners, including LeBron James, GoPro, Saturday Night Live, and Vice. But the one that likely drew the biggest nerdgasm was Star Wars’ 360-degree view look at the planet Jakku from the back of a speeder bike driven by Daisy Ridley’s Force Awakens character, Rey. It’s no contest.

Read Full Story

Read More

The Pope Became A Social Media Powerhouse Thanks To Some Villanova Wildcats

A crack team of Villanova students are working to improve and encourage the Pontiff’s profile online.

On the evening of April 3, Melissa Connolly, a 21-year-old student from Villanova University, found herself atop the Palatine Hill outside the Colosseum in Rome, Italy, just a few steps away from the world’s biggest celebrity. Following the suggestions of the more experienced “paparazzi” around her, she positioned her camera. When the right moment arrived, with her target just 15 feet away—boom!—she got the shot she wanted. She quickly posted her picture of Pope Francis online—not on her personal Facebook page, but on the official Vatican Website, news.va.

Read Full Story

Read More

The Tangled History And Mysterious Legality Of “Happy Birthday”

Learn more about the Schrödinger’s Cat of the public domain: We may never know what’s in the box.

The headlines on Tuesday and Wednesday blared, “Happy Birthday found to be in the public domain.” Unfortunately and confusingly, they were incorrect. A judge’s ruling in a suit filed two years against the ostensible current rights holders for the lyrics to that song, Warner-Chappell Music, didn’t decide that. Instead, the judge found that Warner-Chappell lacked valid rights to the lyrics, whether or not they remained under copyright protection, even as it collected fees to the tune of $2 million a year.

Read Full Story

Read More