In my last blog post I wrote about some of the beers made by an award-winning craft beer brewery near my home town, the Purity Brewing Co. One of their products, the intriguingly titled ‘Mad Goose’ pale ale, is named after a rather viscious bird found wandering the farm-based brewery grounds!

As I did some research about this brand, I came across several other ‘goose’ branded beers from around the world. Just for fun, here are some of these bird-themed brands!

The issue of plagiarism in logo design is one we frequently denounce. But could it be that sometimes the public may be slightly too hasty in accusing a logo creator of plagiarism?

In the UK room temperature “real ale” has been the drink of choice for bearded old men for centuries. However, in light of the huge craft beer revolution across the pond, it’s now bearded younger men (and women, though less bearded) – of the hipster variety – who can’t get enough of the chilled versions of this traditional beer.

Let’s start by analyzing our computer setup. First of all, there are different monitor brands and different video processors. Each comes with its own abilities to reproduce colors and brightness, determined by its hardware. Additionally, there exist all sorts of software setups, such as the monitor’s color mode, the color calibration of your computer and the video card software. This is why colors may look different from one monitor to another.

I could probably write a hundred different blog posts about the soft drink super-giant that is Coca Cola – the evolution and history of the brand is fascinating, as is the success of legendary campaigns such as “Diet Coke Break guy”, “Holidays are Coming” and the recent “Share a Coke” initiative, which saw the famous logo replaced by people’s names. Perhaps one day I will.

But the subject of today’s Coca-Cola-related post comes from the Middle East where, in the midst of the holy month of Ramadan, some people were enjoying their can of ice-cold Coke (during the hours of darkness, of course) without a logo on it all.

Recognise this face?

Blink and you might have missed it, but social media giant Facebook changed its logo recently and you probably didn’t even notice. There was no fanfare, no press release, no social media campaign. In fact, comparing the old and the new designs, you could be forgiven for wondering what’s changed!

Google’s image recognition software is an incredible feat of engineering. Based on the structure of a biological brain, the ‘artificial neural network’ (ANN) consists of 20–30 stacked layers of artificial ‘neurons’, each neuron talking to the next to decipher what it can ‘see’ in a given image.

Like a human brain, the ANN is ‘trained’ to recognise objects and elements of a picture, with the neurons constantly adjusting and learning until together, they are able to accurately recognise, say, a dog, a banana, a tree.

But the ANN is not yet perfect. In an effort to understand precisely what is happening at each layer of the network, programmers decided to try turning the network upside down: instead of the ANN simply recognizing elements of an image, would it be able to recreate the image?

The results were surprising – often beautiful, and sometimes pretty creepy!

You see, while our human brain can look at clouds in the sky and sometimes imagine that they look like a bird, or a heart, or a face, we know that clouds are clouds. But the ANN doesn’t know that, yet.

When presented with a picture of clouds and asked to recreate it, this happened:

On his Twitter profile, John Hicks describes himself as a “gentleman graphic designer, Whovian, cheese enthusiast and cyclist.” He’s also the new Lead Designer at browser and software company Opera, and the brains behind some of the best loved icons on the web.

London, England, turn of the 20^th Century. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, a bookbinder, and engraver Emery Walker went into business together, establishing the Doves Press printing company.

Though I took some convincing, I’m a recent convert from PC to Apple Mac. The transition was surprisingly easy to make (switch out CTRL for CMD and you’ve basically got it), but I do confess I still use Microsoft for Mac software, including ­– but only when absolutely necessary – the love-it-or-hate-it program PowerPoint.

Those of you who have ever sat through any kind of formal presentation will be familiar with the term “death by PowerPoint” – the embarassing clipart, the slow agony as the presenter reads aloud bullet point after bullet point, the cringeworthiness of words unnecessarily whizzing and twirling across the screen.

Every single one of the most successful brands in the world has a memorable logo – think of big names like McDonalds, Burger King, Coca Cola, and Apple just for starters.

Your company’s logo is the face of your business, the visual “hook” that helps customers to recognise you, recall what you do, and separate you from your competitors.

The British media reported this week that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has seen a 40% drop in the number of new people coming forward to donate blood.

Blood donation in the UK is unpaid, so relies on volunteers who are willing to spare an hour of their time once every three months to give a pint of their finest red stuff. Donated blood is used to help accident victims, cancer patients, people with hereditary blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia, women having traumatic childbirths, and for crucial scientific research. In short, it saves lives, so a drop in donor numbers is very worrying as it could mean life or death for someone in need.

In a controversial decision by the General Court of the European Union, Microsoft has been blocked from filing a trademark application for its video chat software Skype.

Lexmark, with its familiar logo with red diamond, is a brand that has been synonymous with printers and printing ever since its divestiture from computing giant IBM in 1991.