Who leads when the house of cards falls?

Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]

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Autocade reaches 34 million page views

  We crossed the 34 million page view mark at Autocade a few days ago, with the counter currently on 6,444,257. Add that to the 27,647,011 that we netted before the old server was decommissioned, that’s 34,091,268. The site is sitting on 4,872 models, quite a few of which were uploaded while I put together […]

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Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website.   Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

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The designer’s quest for timelessness

In the editorial to one of our print publications—not yet at liberty to say which—I show a 2004 cover of Lucire featuring Jennifer Siebel inset in the text. It got me thinking how, when I first designed the cover, with Jon Moe’s photograph, I was aiming for a classical timelessness. Now nearly 20 years on—in […]

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More than a single print brand

[Cross-posted from Lucire]   Lucire will get a sister title in print. As the only magazine from New Zealand that’s licensed internationally—as far as I know—we could do one of two things: not pursue new titles because no one else does this work in this country, or expand our horizons further because no one else […]

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Cloudflare’s unpredictable blocks could come in handy

A few weeks ago, I removed Design Taxi from our links’ list because I received this:     so I assumed the site had gone or had made a decision to block certain people or countries. But it turns out that it hasn’t and I now have egg on my face. I’ve no idea why […]

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NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing

How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]

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Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate

A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]

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A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money

  Eda Tang’s excellent piece revealing that New Zealand Chinese Language Week receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party came out last week, but unfortunately illness kept me from blogging about it properly. It was to have been my final post for September. Many of us suspected this from the start, […]

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Nice to be back on The Panel

David McCallum with Melinda Fee and Craig Stevens in The Invisible Man. (Who’d have guessed? Illya Kuryakin and Peter Gunn on the same show!)   Haven’t had this much fun on RNZ’s The Panel ever—since for once I knew my fellow panellist, Alison Mau. Both Ali and I weren’t in the studio with Wallace Chapman, […]

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