First impressions of the Royal Kludge RK100 with blue switches

After only a few days’ wait, my (oddly named) Royal Kludge RK100 keyboard with blue switches arrived. It’s going to be my daily driver (I hope) to replace my Cooler Master Quickfire TK with Cherry MX Brown switches, which is going to another office. First impressions: I love the return of the click sound. If […]

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Why an SVG logo does not render in Firefox

Thanks to the participants at the Mozilla forum for answering why my name, rendered in SVG, did not show up in Firefox on this website. It turns out that Chromium is a lot less strict (remember the days of Internet Explorer?). As a result, it rendered the SVG file even when it really wasn’t supposed […]

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Sharper headlines for Lucire

  We’ve made a tiny change to the look of the Lucire website, replacing Aileron Ultra Light in the headlines with Newsreader Display Light, namely the 72 pt cut. It always bothered me that Aileron didn’t have proper italics, only obliques. We could have licensed Freight Big Pro Light to match the print magazines, but […]

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We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again

When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point […]

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Panos: My Life, My Odyssey wins commendation at Business Book Awards 2023

I might not have made it to London for the Business Book Awards 2023, but my mug did, as Panos: My Life, My Odyssey won a Highly Commended in the Business Journey category. The organizers were kind enough to include me on the screen as Panos picked up the prize for his autobiography. It was […]

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The original (and shortest-lived) look to this website in 2002

When I said this was the third template for this site yesterday, I was wrong. There was one more at the very start, thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, making 2023’s new look the fourth. In September 2002, very soon after I acquired the jackyan.com domain around the time of my 30th […]

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Revamping my personal site after a decade

After 10 years, it was time for a new template for my personal site—I think it’s only the third in 21 years. Ten years is a long time on the web, and the previous template hadn’t been up to snuff for a long time. But there’s always the issue of finding time—which, thanks to Easter, […]

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These seem very fashionable right now

  I keep saying that 2022 was a lot like 1973 stylistically, so now that it’s 1974 I find myself strangely compelled by these Audi 50 press shots. You might know this car better as the Volkswagen Polo, which it later became, though with a lower specification initially. It lasted longer than the original Audi. […]

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The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived

This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt.     A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]

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Nostalgia is not a business strategy

Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, […]

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