"Who doesn't remember the first time they entered a natural history museum and dropped their jaw at a large, articulated skeleton of some megamammal—most likely a mastodon, mammoth, or African elephant—that greeted them in the rotunda? I have fond memories of museum visits from my youth that transported me to locations around the world, revealing the fauna and flora characteristic of often exotic sites. Museums of science and natural history have come a long way since the days of static dioramas, and the new Age of Mammals hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County does not disappoint. It inspires the wonder I felt when I was younger while incorporating an accurate depiction of mammalian evolution that visitors of all ages can grasp."...

Read the full article here.

The new Gap logo was a huge disaster. Click here to read the whole story on Adage. While the Gap logo may have been misguided, there are plenty of re-branding initiatives that have been very successful in 2010.

The financial giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers, has dropped the full name in favor of initials. Everyone has been calling them pwc for years, anyway. The new "pwc" typemark and colorful digital flower thingy, designed by Wolf Olins, is a departure in the financial sector, and will hopefully begin to establish a new vernacular. An animated version of the logo can be seen on the pwc site.

Read some backstory about the new brand strategy here.

Bausch and Lomb worked with Pentagram to help them rebrand their business to focus on total eye health care. Their previous brand focused on contact lenses exemplified by refraction. The corporate colors have been freshened up and transparency has been introduced to exemplify the new direction for the brand. B+L's re-nu brand has been redesigned too. See more examples of the re-branding and read the strategy on Pentagram's site.

F1 engineers have been exploiting loopholes in regulations to make their cars faster since the sport began. So, it's no surprise that Ferrari has applied that same strategic thinking to promotions. Marlboro has been Ferrari's title sponsor since 1997. The official team name is Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro. In 2002 the FIA, F1's governing body, banned cigarette advertising on F1 cars. Ever since, the Scuderia has been referencing, eluding to, and hinting at a Marlboro logo, without showing the logo. In May of this year the FIA finally said enough is enough and forced all references to Marlboro be removed permanently. While these outlines, stripes and barcodes are not a registered trademark of Marlboro, they certainly mean Marlboro.

To celebrate SFM's success at tricking the FIA for nearly eight years, I have collected as many iterations of these logos I could find online. Please send me more if I have missed any. A contemporary artist in LA has been wheat pasting a parody of the Marlboro logo all over town. Thought it made sense to include it here too. To see more work by this artist click here. To read the full story of SFM's battle with the FIA click here.