No one is an island, not even when on an island

With the dismantling of the US by Lone Skum and others, Mike Masnick wrote in Techdirt: ‘And now we’re watching Musk, Trump, and their allies destroy these foundations. They operate under the dangerous delusion of the “great man” theory of innovation—the false belief that revolutionary changes come solely from lone geniuses, rather than from the […]

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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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Autocade reaches 40 million page views; thank you, humans

1985 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer.

Autocade has now hit 40 million page views, with the counter at 12,353,148, to be added to the previous installation’s 27,647,011. We’re 159 over the milestone. There has been plenty of activity as we added some pages to match Autocade Year of Cars 2025, our new print yearbook, sitting on 5,222 models, a healthy 114 […]

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Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older

A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27 tomorrow (at the stroke of midnight NZDT as the day ticks over to Monday). After prompting by my friend Richard MacManus, I wrote a piece to mark the anniversary. Though after the song and dance of our 25th anniversary two years ago, I’ve kept it low-key.   Meanwhile, I’ve thinned out some […]

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Where is brand Aotearoa?

Five New Zealand customs' officers seated on a boat.

One thing holding back exports from Aotearoa New Zealand is the absence of a true, authentic national brand. I said this even back in the days of the 100% Pure campaign, which was much lauded. I cynically asked: can we really claim this when France and Germany outspend us on the environment as a percentage […]

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Recycle time

Thirty-plus years of my files are being recycled. Only a last few years are left to go. I kept them, thinking they might be of some historical use—maybe future entrepreneurs might want to see the efforts I put in to get the country’s first digital font range known, or building up Lucire from nothing. As […]

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Which other Glen A. Larson production did this girl group appear in?

  This girl group appears in three Glen A. Larson productions that I can think of, and probably appears in more. Switch, Knight Rider and Cover Up are the three I know of. Their fashions and hairstyles, plus those of the audience, would place this in the first part of the 1970s—by the time they […]

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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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Being part of the problem, but not seeing it

There’s no big secret that I changed high schools, from one where the experience was less than stellar to Scots College, where I felt like I fitted perfectly. During my second mayoral campaign, an old boy of the first place, Rongotai College, wrote to me via my feedback form sitting on his high horse, wondering […]

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