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Seventy-Nine Days: on the recorded mistakes of rebranding
New Coke won 200,000 taste tests and was pulled in 79 days; BP's sun cost £136 million. The documented mistakes of rebranding and the psychology behind them.
October 2026
Why Log: the science of color and sound in a promotional film
Why sound fixed cinema at 24 frames, and why slow music lifted supermarket sales 38 percent: perception research behind color and sound in a promotional film.
October 2026
The Thirty Percent Lost at the Border: on multilingual identity and websites
NASA lost a $125 million orbiter to a unit error; 75 percent of buyers want their own language. Text expansion, hreflang, the Turkish dot, sound, and color.
October 2026
The Proportion of Paper: the hidden mathematics of catalog and editorial design
From Lichtenberg's 1786 letter to Tschichold's secret canon: the ratios, grids, dot gain, and reading research that shape catalog and editorial design.
October 2026
The Price of 100 Milliseconds: on the economics of web performance
From Amazon's 2006 finding that 100 ms of delay cost 1 percent of sales to Google's Core Web Vitals: the economics of speed, Fitts, Hick, and the jam study.
October 2026
The Inverse Square Law: the mathematics of light in product photography
From Kepler's 1604 law to Amazon's 85 percent rule, the non-negotiable physics of product photography: falloff, softness, highlights, and color charts.
October 2026
Light Is an Equation: on the physics of 3D visualization
Fresnel's 1823 equation, Debevec's chrome sphere, IKEA's rendered catalog: the physics and perception research behind photorealistic 3D product visualization.
October 2026
One Hundred Milliseconds: on the perception of motion and waiting
From IBM's 400 ms threshold of 1982 to the invisible gorilla: how the brain handles motion and delay, Disney's twelve principles, and animated logos, measured.
October 2026
Why Blue Wins: on the universality and ownership of color
The dress that split 1,401 viewers, the world's ugliest color, and Louboutin's red sole: the science of color perception and how a brand comes to own a hue.
October 2026
Can a Font Lie: experiments on the persuasive power of typography
From Errol Morris's 45,000-reader Baskerville test to highway signs: how typefaces shift belief, reading speed, and memory; the serif myth and the Turkish dot.
October 2026
How the Brain Reads Logos: what science says about brand marks
From the $35 Swoosh to Tropicana's $30 million mistake: what psychology, neuroscience, and marketing research say about logos, turned into design decisions.
October 2026
Pen-to-graf: Where does our name come from?
Pentograf, not pantograph. The name has two parts: pen and graf — from pen to graphic, from idea to form.
October 2026
The Surface of the System: A note on corporate identity
Corporate identity is not a visual; it is a system. A conceptual analysis of logo, typography, colour, visual language and tone of voice.
June 2026
Producing the Visible: On brand visual production
Brand identity is designed; it lives through visual production. An analysis of brand photography, promo film, product shoots and the social media visual system.
May 2026
The Visible Line of Export: Brand Visibility
Brands turning to export reach world-class product quality, yet visual communication often lags behind. An analysis of web, catalogue, trade fairs and social media.
April 2026
The Digital Face: A website is the brand’s digital counterpart
A website is not a task to be completed but a medium whose real work begins the day it goes live. On speed, typography, motion, mobile and no-code.
March 2026
The Continuity Question of Social Media
Social media is not daily post production; it is a discipline of continuity. On voice before algorithm, rhythm before tone of voice.
February 2026
The Fair Stage: The brand’s three-dimensional manifestation
A brand’s visual communication is mostly imagined in two dimensions. The fair stand is the third dimension where the brand stands in space: material, lighting, sound and digital.
January 2026