Truly, she is one of Canada’s national treasures.  For a quick intro to her delightfulness, try “Lodestar.”

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he [sic!] enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it.

For seven years, Mr. Mackey had an online alter ego.

Using the pseudonym Rahodeb — a variation of Deborah, his wife’s name — Mr. Mackey typed out more than 1,100 entries on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board over a seven-year period, championing his company’s stock and occasionally blasting a rival, Wild Oats Markets.

Sigh.  A sad commentary on the state of our culture. 

You can agonize all day and night about getting a logo just right, but you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. Your logo will never bring a lot of meaning to the table. The best logo gets out of the way and lets reality do the work.

Instead, work on making your organization the best one around — the one that everyone talks about, that people seek out to get involved with. Do that, and unless you really screwed up, your logo will be great. Because it stands for something great, not because it made you great.

And take some comfort: No matter how awful your logo accidentally ends up being, I’m pretty sure it won’t be as bad as this one, which not only looks terrible and communicates nothing, but is reputed to trigger epileptic seizures, and was created at a cost of $796,000.

As someone who works for an environmental organization with a logo that one supporter once compared to a falling tree, I agree wholeheartedly with Jeff.

To dramatize the hard, quiet work demanded of transit riders, Seattle artist Christian French created a persona, TransitMan, a superhero who takes public transportation as his superpower. Then he actually donned a superhero costume and spent a lot of time commuting and traveling and documenting the travails of a man in tights dedicated to reducing personal automobile use.

Fantastic.

Hat tip to Alex.