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Branding as Time Travel

At Otherwise, while exploring metaphors that allow us to look at branding from new angles. we’ve recently been intrigued by a set of studies in cognitive science suggesting that the human brain processes language and music in fundamentally different ways—each tuned to time, but in strikingly different registers. When we process language, we read (or […]

Nov 18 2025 by Nancy Lerner in Brandshrink
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The Peril of Perfect Moments

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut conjures a world in which time is not linear but fixed — all moments exist simultaneously, and humans, like insects in amber, are stuck inside them. “Trapped in the amber of this moment,” he writes, evoking both the beauty and the horror of timelessness. It’s a vivid metaphor for what happens […]

Nov 9 2025 by Nancy Lerner in Brandshrink
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The Butterfly Effect: Small Gestures, Big Weather

In 1961, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running early computer simulations of weather patterns when he made a small change—rounding an input from 0.506127 to 0.506. To his surprise, the resulting forecast diverged dramatically from the original. This discovery led to his 1963 paper, Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, and a poetic phrase that would eventually enter pop […]

Oct 26 2025 by Nancy Lerner in Editorials
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Reflexive Branding: A Taxonomy of Becoming

In language, reflexive verbs turn the subject back onto itself. To examine oneself. To lose oneself. To renew oneself. These are essentially recursive acts — feedback loops of change, awareness, and becoming. In branding, where identity is never static and coherence must emerge through complexity, the reflexive voice offers a window into a world that […]

Oct 13 2025 by Nancy Lerner in Editorials
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Rethinking Order, Beauty, and Meaning Through Asymmetry

For centuries, symmetry functioned as both aesthetic preference and worldview. From the balanced forms of Greek temples to the mirrored ideal of the Vitruvian Man, symmetry stood as a proxy for truth, order, and divine proportion. The ancients called it symmetria — a mathematical harmony that reflected the cosmos itself. By the time of the […]

Sep 28 2025 by Nancy Lerner in Brandshrink

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