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New Zealand has voted to keep its current flag, rejecting an alternative design that was selected following a ten-month process. In a two-part referendum concluded on Thursday, 57 percent of voters chose to not change the flag, which includes Britain’s Union Jack in the top left corner, while 43 percent voted for the alternative — a black, white, and blue design that featured a silver fern leaf. The country’s Electoral Commission announced the decision Thursday evening in the capital of Wellington.

Today’s vote marks the end of a process that began in May 2015, when the New Zealand government appointed a “flag consideration panel” to solicit potential designs from the public. More than 10,200 submissions were received, and some that…

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Inside the USC’s Ray Stark Family Theatre, the hair colors in the audience resembled a Manic Panic sampler pack. Atomic Turquoise towards the front, After Midnight across the aisle, Cleo Rose a few seats away from Bad Boy Blue with Violet Night streaks, a fried bleach job dotting every few rows. And don’t even get me started on the glasses frame action was — let’s just say that Matt Groening was sitting in the front row, and he was severely outshined.

Three generations of proud outcasts, weirdos, dweebs, punks, shy kids, cartoon fanatics, and serial fidgeters had gathered for “I Know You Are But What Am I?,” a filled-to-capacity event put on as part of the school’s Visions & Voices series. The featured artists were Wayne White, Gary…

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Matt McRae is fired up about remote controls. Or, more specifically, about getting rid of them.

McRae is the chief technology officer of Vizio, a company that sells more TVs — and with them, remotes — than any other company in America. And he thinks remote controls are very, very stupid.

“I can’t believe we have rubber buttons and a plastic housing with double-A batteries,” he says. “We’re navigating from remotes that were invented in the 1950s. That needs to be dynamited.”

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A startup in Spain has come up with a new way to grow trees from the ashes of the deceased — and to stay “connected” with them at all times. That’s the idea behind the Bios Incube, the latest creation from Barcelona-based startup Bios Urn. The product, which launched on Kickstarter this month and has already met its funding goal, is billed as “the world’s first incubator for the afterlife,” and is designed to be paired with the company’s eponymous biodegradable urn.

The Bios Urn, released in 2013, allowed people to bury cremated remains along with a seed that, in theory, would grow into a tree. The Bios Incube replicates and controls that process within a portable container that automatically waters the plant. Sensors within the…

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Android apps are going to start looking a bit more like iOS apps in the near future. Google updated its Android design guidelines yesterday telling developers that, in some cases, they should place a bar across the bottom of their app that can be used to navigate between different sections. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s exactly how most iOS apps handle navigation.

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When Nokia’s cellphone star faded, it was Samsung that stepped into the role of the world’s biggest phone vendor while others took over the mantle of being design leaders. The most copied designs today still come from Apple, but now that Samsung has introduced the superb Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, that’s about to change in a significant way. The world’s biggest manufacturer of phones is now also one of its best designers.

It was in the wake of the poorly received Galaxy S5 in 2014 that Samsung started showing a real commitment to improved industrial design. By the middle of that year, the Korean company had launched the handsome but expensive Galaxy Alpha, which was to provide the outline for a fundamental reform of its entire smartphone…

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Sometimes you just have to admit that, yes, you’re not quite sure what a thing is, or what it does, but you know — just instinctively know — that you love how it looks. So it is with 2020, a Japanese beat machine app that’s being funded on Kickstarter, and that has one of the most beautiful and brilliant looking interfaces we’ve seen in a while. So much so, that its creators — Japanese music group DUB-Russell — recommend that you use the OS X-only software on devices with Retina displays. Presumably, because using it with any lower resolution screen drives you insane as you try to distinguish between the amp and pitch envelopes for one of your six synth sounds.

DUB-Russell’s Yotaro Shuto indicates that this was kind of the idea in his…

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The First Lady needed a turnip.

By the fall of 2014, “Turn Down for What,” Lil Jon and DJ Snake’s triple-platinum trap-meets-EDM single had swallowed pop culture whole. Jimmy Fallon and Robin Wright were dancing to it on The Tonight Show; Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum posed while it blared on the soundtrack of 22 Jump Street; across YouTube, teens and kittens alike bobbed their heads along. Spin called it “an undeniable force.”

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It used to be that you’d buy an atlas of the world to hang on your wall, but now you’re better off with a map of space exploration. This poster from Pop Chart Lab follows the rough path of every “orbiter, lander, rover, flyby, and impactor to ever slip the surly bonds of Earth’s orbit.” Although it should be noted that it contains only successful missions. In space, there’s no such thing as second place.

We’ve seen charts like this before, most notably National Geographic’s fantastic Fifty Years of Exploration graphic (click here for a full size image produced by 5W Infographics). Pop Chart Lab’s take is a little more cartoonish and uncluttered, and also contains a neat spotters’ guide to probes and rovers, if you ever happen to find…

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In the early 1990s, The Topps Company was looking to recapture the magic of its Star Wars trading cards, one of its most successful lines ever. To do it, they asked some of the film and comic book industry’s very best talent to create original works of art. The result was Star Wars Galaxy, a trading card line released in three series from 1993 to 1995.

A new book from Abrams Comic Arts, Star Wars Galaxy: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, features art from more than 170 artists. The slim volume, scheduled for a March 15th release, includes art-quality reproductions of every card in the set as well as a foreword by Gary Gerani, the creator, editor, and writer of hundreds of Topps trading card products.

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