Movie Buzz The July 15th release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marks the end of the boy wizard's box-office saga which has conjured up nearly $6.4 billion, making it the highest-grossing franchise in box-office history. But with no new movies or books on the horizon, will his brand keep thriving? Fast Company and designer Mikey Burton crunched the numbers to see what the future will hold for Harry Potter and his multibillion-dollar empire. (via mikeyburton.com)
Culture Buzz These Star Wars Logos are by Barn Bocock. Where Sci-Fi and Consumerism meet over and over and over. (via The Uniblog)
HTML5 has a logo now! It seems fine, but what do I know? Also, since when do markup languages need logos? Since now, I guess. Logos are the new something something. If you don't have a logo, you cannot be interpellated as a subject. What do you guys think?
Culture Buzz The Antrepo Design Project experiment with the idea of removing all the clutter from product packaging for a minimalist effect. It's striking how much is still there after all that noise is removed. More examples here. (Via Swiss Miss.)
Fuzzy concepts, clearly illustrated. For the next time your at a party with “creative professionals,” this will come in handy.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/8-lovable-characters-with-hor...
Use Smurf toilet paper while sitting on your SpongeBob toilet seat. Save the Obama dildo for later.
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/the_b...
Brand New rates the best and worst rebrandings of 2009. Can you guess the results? You may be surprised.
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/brand...
Brand New presents some of the best (826, SanDisk, Lifetime) and worst (Pepsi, CapitalOne, Animal Planet) rebrandings of 2008.
Business Buzz Kinko’s renamed “FedEx Office”. FedEx bought Kinko’s back in 2004 for $2.4 billion — a whopping $2 million per store. The deal did not work out that well so they are re-naming the stores. Instead of a copy center, they are now touting the stores as a “back office” for small businesses. This is the hottest buzz of the year. ;)
A Spanish site devoted to parsing the visual math that led to some of the world’s most recognizable logos. Green apple plus gay pride flag divided by dentures equals the Apple logo. See how easy it is?
Business Buzz An attempt to gauge what people really think about brands via the power of tagging. Users are presented with a wide variety of brand logos — from ABC and Absolut to YouTube and Zune — and asked to tag them with the first word that pops into their heads. You can then see the user-generated tag cloud and see what other people think about the same brands.