Journal

Civil Comments is a new platform that could make Internet comment sections worth reading again.

Internet comments are broken. A small population of abusive trolls have ruined Internet commenting for everyone. On this, pretty much everyone can agree. What people can’t agree on is what to do about it. Some sites nuke their comment sections from orbit. Others hire teams of moderators to try to police the trolls. And still others just shrug and are content to see the conversation shift off-site to Facebook and Twitter.

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Siegel+Gale’s Brian Rafferty explains why the best logos are the simplest ones, and why new logo backlash is something every brand should expect.

What makes a logo successful? Ask a dozen different designers, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. But how do you quantify a logo’s excellence, or lack thereof? If you’re Siegel+Gale, you organize a study of 3,000 respondents in the U.S. and U.K. to try to put some actual stats on the problem.

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When design and code combine, building websites may never be the same.

Right now, the web is split between designers and developers. The designers mock up layouts in Photoshop. The developers turn that imagery into functional code via standards like CSS and Javascript. As a result, designers have three options: just use a turnkey platform like Squarespace (and sacrifice a unique design voice), learn to code themselves (which isn’t necessarily their specialty), or constantly pay for coding services (which ultimately makes web development slower and more expensive for the client).

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You will hardly believe how many common household objects can be used to completely obliterate a zombie’s cranium. (NSFW, obviously.)

“Innovate or die” is a popular slogan in the tech sector, but it’s even more apt for describing the pursuit of longevity when facing off against zombies.

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The acclaimed artist talks to Co.Create about his OBEY brand, Sex Pistols lyrics, and the magic of murals.

Shepard Fairey likes to describe his politically charged posters, paintings, and murals as “propaganda,” but propagation, by any means necessary, plays an equally important role in the Los Angeles artist’s operating philosophy. The approach dates to 1989, when Fairey, inspired by punk rock and skateboard DIY culture, reworked a randomly selected photograph of actor Andre the Giant. The image went viral the old-fashioned way, spread by Fairey and his fans via stickers, stencils, rubber stamps, and wheat-paste posters. Paired with the slogan “Obey,” lifted from 1988 horror film They Live, Fairey made his mark in cities all around the world with these cryptic signifiers of mindless authoritarian culture.

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The grid is hopelessly antiquated and has to pull power from far away. What if your house was on its own microgrid?

When it needs extra power, this new experimental building can start pulling energy from the car parked in front. And if the solar panels on the roof start pumping out more energy than needed, the building sends it to the car.

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On Wednesday, Google announced its Accelerated Mobile Pages project, for which it has partnered with dozens of prominent publishers.

In May, Facebook lifted the curtain on Instant Articles, a native publishing platform that hosts articles directly on the social network. For Facebook, which already serves as the largest source of referral traffic for many online publishers, Instant Articles is a way to keep Facebook users from leaving the social network—and for Facebook users, the fast-loading pages are an attractive option, especially on mobile.

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The Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL has signed a contract with SpaceX to launch the world’s first private moon rover.

An Israeli company competing for Google’s Lunar XPrize has made it one small step closer to landing a rover on the moon. SpaceIL, a small Israeli nonprofit foundation working in the country’s almost non-existent space sector, announced that it plans to conduct the world’s first private mission to the moon in 2017.

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That’s the night that they tabbed an innocent man

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A big rival to website builders like Squarespace and WordPress, Wix just revamped its web design platform.

Wix, the popular website building and hosting service, rolled out a new version of its web design platform on Wednesday—with a bit of borrowed DNA from Facebook. The new version of Wix’s editor is based on React, an open-source JavaScript library developed by Facebook that also powers much of Khan Academy and Flipboard. Wix’s update signals the exact market it is trying to attract: small businesses that want to build websites in-house and would otherwise look to competitors like Squarespace or WordPress.

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