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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One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting

  A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]

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A new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four joins A Farewell to Arms among our fiction titles at Libriz today. We’ll only sell it where the title has entered the public domain, so principally our edition’s for the UK market. Fully reset, it is arguably easier to read for contemporary eyes. Being a newer title than A Farewell […]

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Autocade Year of Cars 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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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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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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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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The designer’s quest for timelessness

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 […]

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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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