A group of red game counters gathered together to the left, and a lone black one on the right.

We need great design and brands—now more than ever

A group of red game counters gathered together to the left, and a lone black one on the right.

It is disturbing to think that design, which you’d instinctively think is an evergreen profession with constant demand, isn’t capturing young people the way it did for me. In New Zealand at least, educators are telling me there’s less demand for graphic design courses. If people are enrolling, they’re often in-house crews in big companies […]

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A new edition of Confucius’ 論語, The Analects

  Our third random paperback is out: 論語 (The Analects), as recorded by the followers of Confucius. After this, we’re likely sticking with our usual Lucire and Autocade brands in our publishing business for the remainder of 2025. The decision to do The Analects came from inspiration from one of my closest friends in London, […]

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Autocade Year of Cars 2025: the covers that could have been

Xpeng P7+ on the road with a Chinese skyline behind it.

Would you have bought Autocade Year of Cars 2025 if it had either one of these covers?     This one, with the Geely Galaxy E8, was rejected due to image quality. It was going to be the cover till about a week before publication. Then we zoomed in 400 per cent on the output […]

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A tribute to Helen Baxter, 1973–2024

[Originally published in Lucire] Not only did we lose Mandi Kingsbury last month, we lost a good friend of this magazine, and a dear personal friend, Helen Baxter, who tragically took her own life aged 51 on September 23. This is a reminder that physical changes to one’s health can manifest as depression, and to […]

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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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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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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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Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando

Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016.   I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility […]

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Twenty years ago, Lucire and United Nations Environment Programme teamed up for a first

  Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme and Lucire announced their partnership. I look back at how the arrangement came about in 2002–3. At the time, it was unheard of for a mainstream fashion title to make this sort of a commitment to sustainability, but I felt we couldn’t afford not to. Even […]

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Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no

This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it.     It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]

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