A group of red game counters gathered together to the left, and a lone black one on the right.

We need great design and brands—now more than ever

A group of red game counters gathered together to the left, and a lone black one on the right.

It is disturbing to think that design, which you’d instinctively think is an evergreen profession with constant demand, isn’t capturing young people the way it did for me. In New Zealand at least, educators are telling me there’s less demand for graphic design courses. If people are enrolling, they’re often in-house crews in big companies […]

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The journey out

When I was an infant in Kowloon, a neighbourhood girl, Kit, used to come over to play. I suddenly thought about those days in the 1970s earlier today. When we left Hong Kong, we had not expected that our earlier residency application would be granted while we were on holiday in New Zealand. Some of […]

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When dead trees beat the internet

Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]

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Autocade at 42 million, kicked off Weibo, and random links

The anorak posts about Autocade milestones now appear on Autocade World, and we hit 42 million page views earlier this week. In other news, a pro-China political post saw my Weibo suspended ‘temporarily’, no sign on when this will be lifted. Hence the Weibo logo disappearing from the footer of this blog. It is a […]

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License from us, not from US

A Lucire KSA spread with a copy of Lucire KSA underneath it.

Anti-American sentiment harming sales of your licensed fashion magazine? We have a solution for that. We still provide US coverage but without being US-owned. But, importantly, we recognize that there are great fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel stories the world over.   I have had to think a lot about whether our country-of-origin effect is […]

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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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The beauty of not having something

I’ve told the story about not having Noelene Morris’s The Lettering Book as a child, because I knew the NZ$5 was outside my parents’ budget. Ultimately, this was a good thing and it led me to remember and create typeface designs, later becoming the first digital font designer in New Zealand. Another item came to […]

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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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One of the lucky ones

The last time I had a proper birthday party—where you invite your friends—was pre-COVID. And my group of friends was, and is, eclectic. Individuals from all walks of life, many of whom are being authentic to themselves. In many cases, they are people who have looked at restrictions placed on them by society or norms […]

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January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers

After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]

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