Carry on designing

Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]

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Bringing the JY&A links’ pages into the 2020s

After 21–22 years, we’ve redone the links’ pages on the Jack Yan & Associates website. The old template dated from 2002, and, oddly, while cellphone browsers from a decade ago could by default enlarge the type to suit, modern ones can’t. (I’m still waiting for the software developers to incorporate the Bitstream technology from the […]

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Online history lesson

  It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

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Jack Yan & Associates gets a new home page

  Not really major news, since it’s virtually the same template as we used for JY&A Media earlier this year: Jack Yan & Associates has a new home page. Gone is the random image that headed the old page in favour of a photo I took in Dubai that I rather liked—one of the earlier […]

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Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

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At the dawn of the ’90s

  More from the slimmed-down archives. Here’s a little item from 1991, when I was 19. St Luke’s Church in Wadestown, Wellington was holding a 1960s-themed dance and I designed and hand-lettered the tickets. You can see I was into Swiss modernism even then. The large type was drawn from memory: I didn’t go back […]

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A positive report from one blind reader

Feeling positive about this feedback from a blind Mastodon user, Robert Kingett, when he checked out Lucire and Autocade online. I know lots of internal pages need proper alt text, but his cursory report is very good, and encourages us to do better.     I generally hear positive things about the use of alt […]

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My friend Randy writes a book; our ‘Written by humans’ graphic; Hart’s is economical

  Extra plug for my friend Randy Scobey, who has written a memoir. Since Randy and I met through blogging in 2006, it seems fitting to mention this on my blog. What I wrote in Lucire about his book is heartfelt. If you want to read a first-hand account on the stigma felt by the […]

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The allies who are helping fight back against misinformation

The truth-tellers are starting to emerge on the web, combatting the misinformation that Semrush users have been uploading for the last few months. The best written is from Crestify Studio in New Jersey, where its president Allen Wang has been a great ally. They were innocently and very briefly caught up in the misinformation but, […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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