You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

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Paging Kiwi magazine licensors

  I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing. There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in […]

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Type coverage—in 2012

I’m not sure why I didn’t spot these back in 2012. This was very high praise from Cre8d Design, on ‘What is New Zealand’s iconic font?’ So nice to see JY Décennie in there. Still on type, the fifth Congreso Internacional de Tipografía in Valencia cites yours truly. Como consecuencia de todos estos cambios, surgen […]

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If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader

Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand Government’s […]

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More Wikiality—and this time it’s about me!

Goes to show how seldom I ego-search.    Here’s something a Wikipedian wrote about me in a discussion in 2010: Jack Yan is not a notable typeface designer. He has never laid a hand on mouse or trackball to operate a font editing application. He tells some graphic designer employees of his what he wants […]

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Neil Gaiman on JY Integrity on his UK paperbacks

When Neil Gaiman pays you a compliment about one of your typeface families (JY Integrity, which I designed in 1993), you gratefully accept. They are glorious. Thank you so much for making the font. — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 7, 2018 You may also like A three-decade time capsule hanging on my door You never […]

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Finishing off 2011 with the most fun radio interview I have ever done

Photo by Xavier Collin/Snapstar Live Friday morning’s interview with Sonia Sly on Kiwi Summer was the most fun I have ever had on radio.    Radio New Zealand National was the most fair and balanced medium I dealt with when running for Mayor of Wellington in 2010, and I was glad that Sonia thought of […]

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The minutiæ of 2011

As some of you know, I have been using Tumblr since 2007, and when Vox died (at least for me) in 2009, I began using Tumblr more. It was good to record brief thoughts of little consequence, but as I hunted through the archive for 2011, I realized it was quite a good way to […]

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Intellectual property doesn’t deserve a black mark, but some powers-that-be do

After being interviewed about the outcome of the ‘Wellywood’ sign vote yesterday (a summary of what I told Newstalk ZB can be found on my Facebook fan page) I was reminded about how a few Wellingtonians, who supported my quest to stop the sign in 2010 and 2011, were not that thrilled that I used […]

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A few more swashes for JY Pinnacle Italic

JY Pinnacle Italic will be re-released as a Pro version shortly, and above are some of the extra characters we’ve added.    I know the swash k still needs work, and it will be fixed up by the time of release.    Pinnacle always had a decent bunch of ligatures, but if you have the […]

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