Here are April 2021ās images. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Tania Dawson promotes SomĆØrfield Hair Care, sourced from Instagram.
Austrian model Katharina Mazepa for Dreamstate Muse magazine, shared on her Instagram. This was an image that was removed from a PG blog at NewTumbl last yearāapparently this was considered ‘nudity’ and rated M.
AMC promotes the Gremlin, the US’s first subcompact car. More on the Gremlin at Autocade; 1970 advertisement via Twitter. Volkswagen 1302S photographed in June 2018, one of the images Iāve submitted to Unsplash for downloading. I did have the owner’s permission to shoot his car.
St Gerard’s Church and Monastery atop Mt Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand, photographed by me and also submitted to Unsplash.
Facebook group bots: someone else was so used to seeing bot activity on Facebook, they made a meme about it.
Holden Commodore Evoke Ute, an example of ‘base model brilliance’. More at Autocade. Morris Marina ad via the Car Factoids on Twitter. Innocenti Mini 90 and 120 via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
The aerial shot of Rongotai in 1943 is from the Air New Zealand collection. This is a scan of a photostat Dad made for me in the 1980s. The piece of paper was getting a bit old so I thought it was time to make it digital-only. The ā1929ā marks the site of the original Rongotai Aerodrome, I believe.
Instafraud, from Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter.
Alisia Ludwig, from her Instagram, photographer unnamed. Fiat X1/9 brochure, from the Car Factoids on Twitter. More on the Peugeot 508 (R23) at Autocade.
Model Skyler Simpson at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Tampa, photographer unknown, via Instagram.
My friend Keith has been away from Facebook for six weeks, for work reasons, and hasnāt missed it. And he asked, āWas it all really a waste of time?ā
I know you think you know what Iām going to say, but the answer might surprise you a little.
Fundamentally, itās yes (this is how you know this blog has not been hijacked), but Keithās question brought home to me, as well as other work Iāve done this week, the biggest con of Facebook for the creative person.
Itās not the fact the advertising results are not independently checked, or that thereās evidence that Facebook itself uses bots to boost likes to a page. The con was, certainly when I was a heavy user around the time Timeline was introduced, making us feel like we were doing something creative, satiating that part of our brain, when in fact we were making Zuckerberg rich.
How we would curate our lives! Show the best side of ourselves! Choose those big pictures to be two-column-wide Timeline posts! We looked at these screens like canvases to be manipulated and we enjoyed what they showed us.
Before Facebook became āthe new Diggā (as I have called it), and a site for misinformation, we were still keeping in touch with friends and having fun, and it seemed to be the cool thing to do as business went quiet in the wake of the GFC.
And I was conned. I was conned into thinking I was enjoying the photography and writing and editingāat least till I realized that importing my RSS feeds into Facebook gave people zero incentive to come to my sites.
This week, with redoing a few more pages on our websites, especially ones that dated back many years, I was reminded how that sort of creative endeavour gave me a buzz, and why many parts of our company websites used to look pretty flash.
The new look to some pagesāthe photo gallery was the most recent one to go under the knifeāis slightly more generic (which is the blunt way to say contemporary), but the old one had dated tremendously and just wasnāt a pleasure to scroll down.
And while it still uses old-fashioned HTML tables (carried over from the old) it was enjoyable to do the design work.
There’s still more to do as the current look is rolled out to more pages.
Maybe it took me a while to realize this, and others had already got there, but most of my time had been spent doing our print magazines lately. But designing web stuff was always fun, and Iām glad I got to find that buzz again, thanks to Amandaās nudge and concepts for jya.co, the JY&A Consulting site. Forget the attention economy, because charity begins at the home page.
Photo galleries, old and new. The top layout is more creative design-wise than the lower one, but sadly the browsing experience felt dated.
Above:Vogue Koreaās website follows the Ʀsthetic of a big lead image and smaller subsidiary ones.
This started as a blog entry but took a tangent about 500 words in, and it was better as an opāed in Lucire. Some of the themes will be familiar to regular readers, especially about Big Tech, but here I discuss its influence on web design trends and standardization. The headline says it all: āWhere have the fun fashion magazine websites gone?ā. Browsing in the 1990s was fun, discovering how people coded to overcome the limitations of the medium, and, in my case, bringing in lessons from print that worked. Maybe itās an age thing, or the fact I donāt surf as much for leisure, but in 2021 the sites I come across tend to look the same, especially the ones that were in Lucireās āNewsstandā section.
I do know of great sitesāmy friend and colleague Charlie Ward has his one, which does everything you would expect from a great designerās web presence. So many others look like theyāve bought a template. As to those of us in magazinesāIād love to see something that really inspired me again.
Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for itāit was important to get her feedback precisely because she isnāt in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new venture while working from home among potential clients.
Publishing and fonts aside, it was branding that Iām formally trained in, other than law, and since we started, Iāve worked with a number of wonderful colleagues from around the world as my āA teamā in this sector. When I started redoing the site, and getting a few logos for the home page, I remembered a few of the old clients whose brands I had worked on. There are a select few, too, that Iām never allowed to mention, or even hint at. Cāest la vie.
There are still areas to play with (such as mobile optimization)āno new website is a fait accompli on day oneāand things I need to check with colleagues, but by and large what appears there is the look I want for 2021. And hereās the most compelling reason for doing the update: the old site dated from 2012.
It was just one of those things: if workās ticking along, then do you need to redo the site? But as we started a new decade, the old site looked like a relic. Twenty twelve was a long time ago: it was the year we were worried that the Mayans were right and their calendar ran out (the biggest doomsday prediction since Y2K?); that some Americans thought that Mitt Romney would be too right-wing for their country as he went up against Barack Obamaāwho said same-sex marriage should be legal that yearāin their presidential election; and Prince Harry, the party animal version, was stripping in Las Vegas.
It was designed when we still didnāt want to scroll down a web page, when cellphones werenāt the main tool to browse web pages with, and we filled it up with smart information, because we figured the people whoād hire us wanted as much depth as we could reasonably show off on a site. We even had a Javascript slider animation on the home page, images fading into others, showing the work we had done.
Times have changed. A lot of what we can offer, we could express more succinctly. People seem to want greater simplicity on websites. We can have taller pages because scrolling is normal. As a trend, websites seem to have bigger type to accommodate browsing on smaller devices (having said that, every time we look at doing mobile versions of sites, as we did in the early 2000s, new technology came along to render them obsolete)āall while print magazines seem to have shrunk their body type! And we may as well show off, like so many others, that weāve appeared in The New York Times and CNNāplaces where Iāve been quoted as a brand guy and not the publisher of Lucire.
But, most importantly, we took a market orientation to the website: it wasnāt developed to show off what we thought was important, but what a customer might think is important.
The old headingsāāHumanistic branding and CSRā, āBranding and the lawā (the pages are still there, but unlinked from the main site)āmight show why weāre different, but theyāre not necessarily the reasons people might come to hire us. They still canābut we do heaps of other stuff, too.
I might love that photo of me with the Medinge Group at la SorbonneāCELSA, but Iām betting the majority of customers will ask, āWho cares?ā or āHow does this impact on my work?ā
As consumer requirements change, Iām sure weāll have pages from today that seem irrelevant, in which case weāll have to get on to changing them as soon as possible, rather than wait nine years.
Looking back over the years, the brand consulting site has had quite a few iterations on the web. While I still have all these files offline, it was quicker to look at the Internet Archive, discovering an early incarnation in 1997 that was, looking back now, lacking. But some of our lessons in print were adoptedāpeople once thought our ability to bring in a print Ʀsthetic was one of our skillsāand that helped it look reasonably smart in a late 1990s context, especially with some of the limited software we had.
We really did keep this till 2012, with updates to the news items, as far as I can make outāit looks like 2021 wasnāt the first time I left things untouched for so long. But it got us work. In 2012, I thought I was so smart doing the table in the top menu, and you didnāt need to scroll. And this incarnation probably got us less work.
Thereās still a lot of satisfaction knowing that youāve coded your own site, and not relied on Wordpress or Wix. Being your own client has its advantages in terms of evolving the site and figuring out where everything goes. Itās not perfect but thereās little errant code here; everythingās used to get that page appearing on the site, and hopefully you all enjoy the browsing experience. At least itās no longer stuck in the early 2010s and hopefully makes it clearer about what we do. Your feedback, especially around the suitability of our offerings, is very welcome.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
For a while, weāve been thinking about how best to facelift the Lucire website templates, to bring them into the 2020s. The current look is many years old (Iāve a feeling it was 2016 when we last looked at it), which in internet terms puts this once-cutting edge site into old-school territory.
But whatās the next step? When I surf the web these days, so many websites seem to be run off one of several templates, and there arenāt many others out there. After you scroll down past the header, everything more or less looks the same: a big single-column layout with large type.
I know we have to make things responsive, and we havenāt done this properly, by any means. The CSS will have to be reprogrammed to suit 2020s requirements. But I am reminded of when we adopted many of the practices online publishers do today, except we did them nearly two decades ago.
Those of you who have been with us a long time, and those who might want to venture into the Wayback Machine, might know that we provided āappsā for hand-held devices even then. We offered those using Palm Pilots and the like a small, downloadable version of the Lucire news pages. We had barely any takers.
Then Bitstream (if I recall correctly) came out with tech that could reduce pages to a lower resolution and narrower pixel width so those browsing on smaller devices could do so, and those of us publishing for larger monitors no longer needed to do a special version.
So that was the scene 20 years ago. Did apps, no one cared; and eventually tech came out that rendered it all unnecessary. It’s why I resisted making apps today, because I keep expecting history to repeat itself. I can’t be the only one with a memory of the first half of the 2000s. As a non-technical person, I expect thereād be something like that Bitstream technology today. Maybe there is. I guess some browsers have a reader mode, and thatās a great idea. And if we want to offer that to our readers, it canāt be too hard to find a service that we can point modern smartphone users to, and they can browse all sites to their heartsā content.
Except I know, as with so many tech things, that it isnāt that easy, that in fact itās all so much harder. Server management hasnāt become easier in 2020 compared with 2005, all as the computing industry loses touch with everyday people like me who once really believed in the democratization of technology and bridging the digital divide.
Back to the templates. I wrote on NewTumbl yesterday, āRemember when we could surf the web pretty easily and find amazing new sites, and creative web designs, as people figured out how best to exploit this medium? These days a lot of websites all look the same and thereās far less innovation. Have we settled into what this mediumās about and thereās no need for the same creativity? Iām no programmer, so I canāt answer that, but it wasnāt that long ago we could marvel at a lot of fresh web designs, rather than see yet another site driven by the same CMS with the same single-column responsive template. Or people just treat a Facebook page or an Instagram feed as their āwebsiteā, and to heck with making sure itās hosted on something they have control over.ā
And thatās the thing: I havenāt visited any sites that really jumped out at me, that inspires me to go, āWhat a great layout idea. I must see if I can do something similar here.ā My very limited programming and CSS design skills arenāt being challenged. This is a medium that was supposed to be so creative, and when I surf, after finding a page via a search engine, those fun moments of accidental discovery donāt come any more. The web seems like a giant utilitarian information system, which I suppose is how its inventor conceived it, but I feel it could be so much more. Maybe the whole world could even get on board a fair, unbiased search engine, and a news spidering service that was current and didnāt prioritize corporate media, recognizing that stories can be broken by independents. Because such a thing doesnāt really exist in 2020, even though we had it in the early 2000s. It was called Google, and it actually worked fairly. No search engine with that brand name strikes me as fair today.
I am, therefore, unsure if we can claim to have advanced this medium.
Iāve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While Iām not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, of course, Google.
Iāve never known what to do with those meeting.ics files that come in but I assume they are digital diary entries for those who donāt like paper. But I can open them in a text file and figure out when meetings start and end and with whom Iām having them.
If someone sends me a Zoom or Google Hangoutsā link then Iām all good, as I can head straight there and attend the meeting. But for one organization, which has been on Google for longer than Iāve been on their board, Iām expected to get this from the ICS file itself. Fortunately they have an excellent secretary and convener who sends me the link privately since Iām the only one out of the 10 or so who attend these Google-based meetings who canāt figure out how to use this technology.
Apparently, for everyone, they receive the email and they get a Google Hangout link inside a Calendar entry like this:
and for me, and Iāve spent two hours on this, this is all I get:
I can tell you itās not inside the ICS file. Thereās no link at all.
Before you say, āJack, you have non-standard privacy settings on your browser and computer,ā let me answer that now: Iāve downloaded a fresh copy of Opera with no privacy blocks whatsoever, and instead of retrieving the ICS from my usual Eudora email client, Iāve gone into Gmail, where theyāve sent the same invitation, and pretended to like Google and tried to do everything within their ecosystem. This is my only Gmail account, which we are all required to have on this board.
Iāve opened the email containing this link. If I click on āAdd to calendarā, I get the screenshot of mine above. Next to the meeting.ics attachment is āDownloadā. If I click on that, I download exactly the same file I had on my regular email, with no Google Hangoutsā link. Surprisingly, there is no way to add an ICS file from Gmail to your Google Calendarānot even a customized right-click optionāwhich must rank as one of the stupidest things that Google could do if they expect us to use their products as a suite.
There is no obvious way to open meeting.ics from within Google Calendar. However, you can import (Settings, then Settings, then Import/Export) the file, and the result? Same as before.
Our notifications are sent through a service called Our Cat Herder, and when I click for the full meeting details, I just get taken to that site, again with no Google Hangoutsā link.
I get that our brains are all wired differently, but there must be a simple, logical explanation on why everyone else can see this link and I canāt.
I realize that when I spot something Google does, and write about it on this blog, I usually go, āThatās dodgy. These guys are a bunch of wankers,ā and 99 per cent of people go, āThatās dodgy but Iāll put up with it because free stuff,ā so I know we are different. However, Iām struggling to think how anyone has managed to navigate Gmail, Google Calendar and all their non-search crap to find this link.
Iāve asked the person convening the meeting to show me in person how they get to their Google Calendar window after we come out of lockdown, but I really have clicked everything under the sun in Gmail, Calendar, Google Account, my profile, and anything else they let me access. I spent 90 minutes one morning and another half-hour today: two hours of letting this Big Tech crowd know all about my computer and invade my privacy. It just cannot be done. Except logic tells me if nine other people can, then their brains must be wired so differently that they are clicking on something that I obviously cannot see. That Google has made it that invisible or that illogical to my 1 per cent brain. But, Gmail users, what else should I click on? There isnāt anything else. I’ve clicked on everything that’s obvious and even on things that were obvious dead ends.
Above: I’ve clicked on what I thought are the obvious links, so where’s this mystery Google Calendar file that reveals a Google Hangouts’ link?
But logic also says that if we are all receiving the same emails and the same meeting.ics file then why are they different? Even the time is different (theirs is 4.30 to 6 p.m., mine is 4.30 to 6.30 p.m.) as is the title (theirs has the name of the organization in it).
This is yet another case where Google doesnāt work. Iāve written plenty about why this companyās products are bad for us, their record of censorship, their exercise of a monopoly, their taking and exposure of user data, and their general incompetence. We all know about their failure to be transparent, especially with the one product which makes the most moneyātheir (independently unaudited) advertising. Recently I wrote about how Google Drive does not work, and now you can add Gmail and Google Calendar to the list. Conclusion: this hodgepodge of services is a waste of time. Like Microsoft Word, I’m glad I didn’t get laboured with them early onāand know to stay well away from them in the general course of my work.
Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and itās another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. Itās very useful to see how countries are performing over time as itās animated, and to get a handle on what trajectory youāre on.
Iāve plotted us against some Asian countries and territories in the first graph and western countries in the second. South Korea is doing quite well and Taiwan is really bending its curve down. Try it yourself by clicking on either of the screenshot graphs below.
I did say Iād blog when Autocade hit 4,100 models, which it did yesterday. Proof that the hundredth milestones arenāt planned: the model was the Changan Zhixiang (é·å®åæēæ or éæå®åæēæ, depending on which script system you prefer) of 2008, a.k.a. Changan Z-Shine. A less than stellar car with a disappointingly assembled interior, but it did have one thing many period mainland Chinese cars lacked: a self-developed engine.
It shows the nationās quick progress. The Zhixiang was Changanās (back then, weād have written Changāan) first effort in the C-segment, after making microvans, then A-, then B-segment cars, with quick progress between each. The Changan Eado, the companyās current C-segment sedan, might still be rather derivative, but the pace of improvement is still impressive.
After 1949 through to the late 1970s, Chinese cars in the PRC were few in number, with mass production not really considered. The first post-revolution cars had panels that were hand-beaten to the right shape in labour-intensive methods. Some of those cars borrowed heavily from western ones. Then came licensed manufacture (Jeep Cherokee, Peugeot 504, the Daihatsu Charade at Tianjin) as well as clones (CitroĆ«n Visa, SEAT Ibiza). By the 1990s some of these licensed vehicles had been adapted and facelifted locally. The PRC started the new century with a mixture of all of the above, but by the dawn of the 2010s, most Chinese press frowned upon clones and praised originality, and the next decade was spent measuring how quickly the local manufacturers were closing the gap with foreign cars. Itās even regarded that some models have surpassed the foreign competition and joint-venture partnersā offerings now. Style-wise, the Landwind Rongyao succeeds the companyās (and Ford affiliateās) Range Rover Evoque clone, the X7, with a body designed by GFG Style (thatās Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro, the first production car credited to the father-and-son teamās new firm) and chassis tuned at MIRA. The Roewe RX5 Max is, in terms of quality, technology, and even dynamics, more than a match for the Honda CR-Vāa sign of things to come, once we get past viral outbreaks. Styling-wise, it lacks the flair of the Rongyao, but everything else measures up.
But the Zhixiang was over a decade before these. Changan did the right thing by having an original, contemporary body, and it was shedding Chinese manufacturersā reliance on Mitsubishiās and othersā engines. To think that was merely 12 years ago, the same year Autocade started.
