The creative sector adds the most value, and we should be proud to say so

After sitting on a panel to approve a bachelor’s programme for one polytechnic, I was dismayed to read right after that some of the courses were being cut. I alluded to a disinterest in learning about design in an earlier post, but I was put right by some young people who said their courses were […]

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If you want a slice of the pie, then compete

A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from. Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. […]

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The beauty of not having something

I’ve told the story about not having Noelene Morris’s The Lettering Book as a child, because I knew the NZ$5 was outside my parents’ budget. Ultimately, this was a good thing and it led me to remember and create typeface designs, later becoming the first digital font designer in New Zealand. Another item came to […]

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OED: capitalize Black American

Yesterday, we had to come to a decision about capitalizing Black when referring to Black Americans, with Black History Month. We adopt Hart’s Rules, which is silent on the matter, but the Oxford English Dictionary, which needs to be referred to in tandem, does capitalize Black American, as of the 2011 revision. We were operating […]

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One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting

  A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]

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Testing the browsers: can Vivaldi be succeeded?

Because of regular errors with Vivaldi, which they blame on my antivirus, I’ve been testing alternatives for Windows 11. The errors include this message, rendering the program useless.     Vivaldi’s people would have you believe that an antivirus program is deleting things out of the folder, but that doesn’t explain why, after many attempts, […]

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A new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four joins A Farewell to Arms among our fiction titles at Libriz today. We’ll only sell it where the title has entered the public domain, so principally our edition’s for the UK market. Fully reset, it is arguably easier to read for contemporary eyes. Being a newer title than A Farewell […]

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Publishing A Farewell to Arms, in the form Hemingway intended

Artwork, Isola Bella In Lago Maggiore, by Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80).

  We’ll soon make a proper announcement about our first fiction title under our JY&A Media imprint: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I was drawn to this title, more than any other that had recently entered the public domain. This one has a difference: we’ve restored all of Hemingway’s words, so it appears as […]

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The new Jaguar

'Create exuberant' on a colourful image featuring four people dressed in yellow, orange, red and magenta.

Originally published on my friend and international branding guru Stanley Moss’s blogs, What Is a Brand? and Endless Road, as he requested this piece.     Jaguar Land Rover announced some time back that it didn’t see Land Rover as a brand any more. It would rather we think of Defender and Discovery as brands, […]

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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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