Kurt Andersen and Jian Ghomeshi, the host of Q, the CBC's daily arts and culture show go head to head in a cross-border cultural quiz. The North American showdown is the culmination to our month-long redesign project. Ophira Eisenberg, host NPR quiz show Ask Me Another, plays quizmistress ...

Just in time for Canada’s 145th birthday, Studio 360 gives our northern neighbor a brand makeover. To get beyond hockey, beer, and Mounties, we asked the international firm Bruce Mau Design to come up with a visual rebranding. As part of its research, the BMD team talked with ...

Last month, we asked for your suggestions for a new six-word tagline for Canada. And the slogans poured in, more than 750 submissions. The winner was one of the first, and it remained our favorite to the end.

For decades comedians have been shaping the way Americans understand Canada: Samantha Bee, Martin Short, Mike Myers, to name a few. As part of its preparations to rebrand Canada for Studio 360, the team at Bruce Mau Design called up Mark McKinney of The Kids in the Hall ...

Video: The Kids in the Hall, "Message from Queen of England to Canada"

To help make the Canada brand more vivid and memorable we hired Bruce Mau Design, an international firm that has created marketing and branding campaigns for Coca Cola, General Electric, and MTV. Hunter Tura, the firm's president and CEO, says that with offices in both the ...

Video: What Should Americans Know About Canada?

What would Canada and the US look like if we gave each other a makeover? Kurt Andersen joins forces with Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC’s daily arts and culture program Q, for our new redesign project. All through June, the two programs will be giving each countries' brand identities a jolt ...

Submit your slogan for Canada

Face it, Americans don’t get Canada. After hockey and Celine Dion we know shockingly little about our strongest ally, our largest trading partner, the nation with which we share 5,500 miles of border.  Studio 360 thinks it’s time to change that. Canada’s image in the United States needs a fresh start ...

Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers. "I have been teaching for 15-plus years and have enough of what I deem 'apple crapple' to last me a lifetime." So we recruited the New York design firm Hyperakt to give teachers a ...

Video: Inside the design process

To rebrand educators for the 21st century, Studio 360 selected Hyperakt, a New York design firm that’s done projects for UNICEF and GOOD magazine, among others. At a recent brainstorming session, former public school teacher Jenna Shapiro summed up the concern of her colleagues ...

For our next redesign project, Studio 360 is giving schoolteachers a makeover. Turns out a lot of teachers hate the treacly, old-fashioned visual imagery that gets dumped on them (ABCs, 123s, chalkboards, rulers, apples). One teacher told us she calls this iconography "apple crapple." ...

Five years ago, Studio 360 redesigned Christmas. We commissioned the design firm Pentagram to come up with a fresh, 21st century concept for the holiday that could be used — and loved — universally. Since then we've done several other redesigns, including of the rainbow Gay Flag, Valentine's Day, and the Monopoly boardgame.

What do you think we should redesign next?

Five years ago on the show we redesigned Christmas. The whole holiday. We hired the graphic designer Michael Beirut, of the firm Pentagram, to come up with a fresh, 21st century concept that could be used — and loved — universally. Since then we've done all kinds of redesigns of symbols and holidays ...

What should Studio 360 redesign next?  Tell us!

Last month, Studio 360 announced plans to redesign the board game Monopoly. Capitalism and real estate have changed a lot since the Monopoly was first sold by Parker Brothers in the 1930s, and we decided the game needed a major overhaul. We collected dozens of inspired suggestions from listeners, and delivered them to...

Studio 360 is redesigning Monopoly, and to help us decide what to toss and what to keep, we’ve gotten advice from an all-star team.  The former investment banker William Cohan suggested we let players leverage their holdings and create a bank with vested interests, but former ...

Since the board game Monopoly first came out in the 1930s, capitalism and tycooning have changed a lot. Someone who knows that better than most is former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who now hosts a public affairs program on CNN. Spitzer told Kurt Andersen his first lesson ...

The Scottie dog has all the fun. Along with the battleship, the race car, and the top hat, it’s always part of the in-crowd of Monopoly game pieces. Consistently among the first to be selected, the Scottie dog confidently strolls down Boardwalk and turns heads as it passes Go in ...

We're assembling a top-notch team of advisers for our Monopoly redesign. This week Kurt Andersen called finance expert William Cohan to find out how to make the rules of the game more representative of capitalism in the 21st century. Cohan is a former investment banker and the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World ...

Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's full conversation with William Cohan

Later this year, Hasbro will unveil a partly-electronic version of one of the classic board games.  But Studio 360 thinks Monopoly needs more of a makeover to bring it into the 21st century.  Game designer Brenda Brathwaite says Monopoly is practically designed to be boring: it’s "literally just about waiting for people to run out of money...

Slideshow: Monopoly Through the Years

Thanks to all the listeners who heeded our call to redesign Uncle Sam and made videos of their new National Anthems. We were impressed and honored.

See and hear all the entries

I’m as patriotic as the next guy.  But this morning on the subway, I couldn’t help but feel a bit deflated by the sight of our national mascot peddling fast cash. Uncle Sam, how could you?  Playing into our all-American desires to get rich quick and bling ourselves silly. That’s why Studio 360 proposed ...