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 […]
Read More… from Autocade Year of Books 2025: the covers that could have been
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you
In the editorial to one of our print publications—not yet at liberty to say which—I show a 2004 cover of Lucire featuring Jennifer Siebel inset in the text. It got me thinking how, when I first designed the cover, with Jon Moe’s photograph, I was aiming for a classical timelessness. Now nearly 20 years on—in […]
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 […]
One thing that marketing teaches you is that you need to have a market orientation: put yourselves in the shoes of the consumer and figure out what they want, rather than force something on them. And one thing that leadership teaches you is owning up to when you’ve got it wrong, and making the necessary […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]