Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

06.12.2023/09.38

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website. Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

The designer’s quest for timelessness

/06.47

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 […]

More than a single print brand

28.11.2023/21.04

[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 […]

I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it

25.11.2023/10.07

We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]

NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing

25.10.2023/08.36

How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]

Autocade traffic back on track, with 33 million page views

24.10.2023/00.06

Yesterday must have been a record day at Autocade with 41,000 page views recorded in 24 hours. What I didn’t realize was that we have crossed the 33 million page view mark, since the counter was reset in March 2022 and I forgot what I needed to add to get the total. The last […]

This weekend’s milestones at Lucire and Autocade

21.10.2023/11.08

Autocade’s 4,800th model: the Toyota Urban Cruiser Hyryder. Stuff that has happened: Lucire has turned 26. Not a huge celebration given we did the quarter-century last year. Looking back, we did it quite well. When we had our 20th and 21st, we intended to mark them through those years, but never really did. It […]

Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again

16.10.2023/09.44

Thanks to a conversation on Mastodon (which was going quite nicely till the other person lost their temper and concluded that anyone who criticizes Duck Duck Go must be a Google shill) I wanted to see if Bing had recovered on the group of sites I used to run through the search engines. It’s been […]

Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years

04.10.2023/10.44

Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’. Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified. I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]

Google News continues bias against independent media

23.09.2023/04.31

This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]