From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us

My visits to Sweden have been few and far apart, since it is quite a distance to travel from New Zealand: summer 2002, autumn 2003, winter 2010, and summer 2024. There are many interesting observations one can make with so many years in between, seeing how society has changed with brief snapshots from each visit, […]

Read More… from From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us



To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air

Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo.   [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your programme didn’t deserve cancellation. This country needs proper, long-form current affairs, and with Sunday airing its final episode [on Sunday] night, this has come […]

Read More… from To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air



For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward



To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong

I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]

Read More… from To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong



Keep the parliamentary term as it is

Rumblings about extending our three-year parliamentary term to four surface from time to time. I don’t think we should change a thing, more so in the era of coalition governments under MMP. And it shouldn’t matter which side of the fence you sit. The length of the term should be inversely proportional to the power […]

Read More… from Keep the parliamentary term as it is



The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

Read More… from The crunch time media face is nothing new



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 […]

Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you



We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters

We need to change our habits slightly with the new pay-by-plate meters in Wellington City, as I discovered. If I arrive in town for, say, two 90-minute meetings with, say, 15 minutes between them, what I might do after the first is to move my car. I might also put a bit of extra money […]

Read More… from We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters



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 […]

Read More… from The designer’s quest for timelessness



More than a single print brand

[Cross-posted from Lucire]   Lucire will get a sister title in print. As the only magazine from New Zealand that’s licensed internationally—as far as I know—we could do one of two things: not pursue new titles because no one else does this work in this country, or expand our horizons further because no one else […]

Read More… from More than a single print brand