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

Autocade Year of Books 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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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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A bronze at Best

Front cover of booklet, Pīwari the Kaitiaki, with a bee illustration.

I’m proud to say I had a small part to play in Pīwari te Kaitiaki, which took out a bronze in the Social Good category at the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand’s Best Design Awards. My role was helping realize the translated version in te reo Māori, and it was an absolute joy to work […]

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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 21–2 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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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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As we grow and chart a new direction, a fresh site for JY&A Media

  JY&A Media has a new website, to tie in with the new direction we have for the business. I think it was evident that when we created the Autocade Yearbook and built our e-commerce shop, Libriz, that things were changing. Whereas JYA Creative and JY&A Fonts work with clients to help realize their branding, […]

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