I was turned on a few years ago to the concept of a “Branded Utility” from Johnny Vulkan at Anomaly NYC. It’s a way to twist branding away from convincing in a traditional sense, what I sometimes think about as moving people down the awareness-consideration-purchase ‘funnel’, and toward something quite different but much more powerful. [...]

On the last iteration of thinky.org, there was a feature (or maybe it was a bug), where people could enter enter a fill-in-the-blank question. The site had, in big text “Zach Pousman is thinky.org. Zach is a PhD student at Georgia Tech.” Then it just said “Zach is…” and users could type in whatever they [...]