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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘typeface design’
12.03.2023
This is one of the more fascinating type design stories Iâve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt.

A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. Iâve even seen professional advertisements set on a Selectric here. And because of all that exposure, it was pretty obvious to those of us with an interest in type that all the glyphs were designed to set widths regardless of family, and the only one that looked vaguely right was the Selectric version of Times.
Jens goes into a lot more detail but, sure enough, my hunch (from the 1980s and 1990s) was right: Times was indeed the starting-point, and the engineers refused to budge even when Adrian Frutiger worked out average widths and presented them.
Itâs why this version of Univers, or Selectric UN, was so compromised.
What I didnât know was that Frutiger was indeed hired for the gig, to adapt his designs to the machine. I had always believed, because of the compromised design, that IBM did it themselves or contracted it to a specialist, but not the man himself.
Thereâs plenty of maths involved, but the sort I actually would enjoy (having done one job many years ago to have numerous type families meet the New Zealand Standard for signage, and having to purposefully botch the original, superior kerning pairs in order to achieve it).
I think I kept our IBM golfballs, which carried the type designs on them, and hopefully one day theyâll resurface as theyâre a great, nostalgic souvenir of these times.
What is really bizarre reading Jensâs recollection of his digital revival is that itâs set in Selectric UN 11 Medium (an excerpt is shown above). Here is type that was set on to paper, now re-created faithfully, with all of its compromises, for the screen. Heâs done an amazing job and it was like reading a schoolbook from the 1970s (but with far more interesting subject-matter). Those Selectric types might not have been the best around, but the typographic world is richer for having them revived.
The hits per post here have fallen off a cliff. I imagine we can blame Google. Seven hundred was a typical average, but now I’m looking at dozens. I thought they’d be happy with my obsession over Bing being so crappy during 2022, but then, if they’re following Bing and not innovating, maybe they weren’t. Or that post about their advertising business being a negligence lawsuit waiting to happen (which, incidentally, was one of the most hit pieces over the last few months) might not have gone down wellâit was a month after that when the incoming hits to this blog dropped like a stone. Maybe that confirms the veracity of my post.
I’m not terribly surprised. And before you think, ‘Why would Google care?’, ‘Would they bother targeting you?’ or ‘You are so paranoid,’ remember that Google suspended Vivaldi’s advertising account after its CEO criticized them, and in the days of Google Plus, they censored posts that I made that were critical of them. Are they after me? No, but you can bet there are algorithms that work to minimize or censor sites that expose Google’s misbehaviour, regardless of who makes the allegations, just as posts were censored on Google Plus.
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 2022, 2023, Adrian Frutiger, censorship, design, fonts, Google, IBM, technology, typeface design, typefaces, typography Posted in design, interests, internet, New Zealand, technology, typography, UK | No Comments »
11.10.2022
Iâm not sure why I didnât spot these back in 2012. This was very high praise from Cre8d Design, on âWhat is New Zealandâs iconic font?â So nice to see JY DĂ©cennie in there.
Still on type, the fifth Congreso Internacional de TipografĂa in Valencia cites yours truly.
Como consecuencia de todos estos cambios, surgen numerosas cuestiones sobre cĂłmo afrontar el uso y la creaciĂłn de la tipografĂa en un nuevo contexto, sometido a constantes transformaciones tecnolĂłgicas. Para muchos, los modos tradicionales de concebir la tipografĂa ya no funcionan en el mundo de la pantalla. AsĂ, para el diseñador Jack Yan, la tecnologĂa estĂĄ cambiando tan rĂĄpidamente que la idea de que la tipografĂa se crea para imprimir estĂĄ llegando prĂĄcticamente a su fin. Los nuevos dispositivos electrĂłnicos empiezan a demandar tipografĂas especĂficas y no sĂłlo meras adaptaciones de las ya existentes. Esto implica igualmente un adiestramiento por parte del usuario final, el lector, que no sĂłlo debe familiarizarse con los nuevos dispositivos sino con los nuevos procedimientos asociados a la lectura dinĂĄmica.
This is pretty mainstream thinking now (and I would have thought in 2012, too) but also nice to be credited for saying itâI guess I would have first publicly pushed this idea in Desktop in 1996. But designers like Matthew Carter and Vincent Connare were already there âŠ
Amazing what you can find in a Mojeek ego search, as opposed to a Google one.
Tags: 2012, Aotearoa, design, Desktop, fonts, JY&A Fonts, Mojeek, New Zealand, Spain, technology, typeface design, typefaces, typography, Valencia Posted in design, New Zealand, publishing, technology, typography | No Comments »
13.08.2020
Goes to show how seldom I ego-search.
Hereâs something a Wikipedian wrote about me in a discussion in 2010:
Jack Yan is not a notable typeface designer. He has never laid a hand on mouse or trackball to operate a font editing application. He tells some graphic designer employees of his what he wants them to draw with software, and has them do all the work of drawing and solving all the design problems involved in creating and designing a typeface and its fonts. As a professional typeface designer myself, Yan’s involvement in type design and font production does not qualify him as a typeface designer. Not even close.
The user is called James Arboghast, whom Iâve never heard of in any of my years in the type design business.
Now, you can argue whether Iâm notable or not. You might not even like my designs. But given that Arboghast has such a knowledge of our inner workings, then maybe it would suggest that I am?
Based on the above, which is libellous, let me say without fear of committing the same that, in this instance, Mr Arboghast is a fantasist and a liar.
Iâve no beef with him outside of this, but considering that I was the first typeface designer in this country to work digitallyâso much so that Joseph Churchward, who is indisputably notable, came to me 20 years ago to see if we could work togetherâthere were no âgraphic designer employeesâ around who had the skills. At least none that I knew of when I was 14 years old and deciding which bitmaps to light up on an eight-by-eight grid.
There were still no such people around when I began drawing stuff for submission to ITC, or when I began drawing stuff that I digitalized myself on a hand-held scanner. I certainly couldnât afford employees at age 21 when I asked my Mum to fork out $400 to buy me a really early version of Fontographer. And there were still no such people around when I hand-kerned 1,000 pairs into my fonts and did my own hinting. Remember, this was pre-internet, so when youâre a young guy in Wellington doing this work in isolation, you had to know the skills. I might even have those early drawings somewhere, and not that long ago I found the maths book with the bitmap grid.
If I didnât know about the field then I certainly would have been found out when the industry was planning QuickDraw GX and I was one of the professional typeface designers advising on the character sets, and if I didnât know how to solve design problems, then the kerning on the highway signsâ type in this country would not comply with NZS. (The kerning is terrible, incidentally, but government standards are government standards. It was one of those times when I had to turn in work that I knew could be far, far better.) I’d also have been seriously busted by my students when I taught the first typeface design course in New Zealand.
Every single retail release we have has been finished by me, with all the OpenType coding done by me. All the alternative characters, all the ligatures, all the oldstyle numerals and accented characters in languages I canât begin to fathom. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. Iâve tested every single font weâve released, whether they are retail or private commissions.
The only time a team member has not been credited in the usual way was with a private commission, for a client with whom I have signed an NDA, and that person is Jasper Luki, a very talented young designer with whom I had the privilege to work at the start of his career in the 2010s.
The fact that people far, far more famous than me in the type field around the world, including in his country, come to me with contract work might suggest that, if Iâm not notable, then Iâm certainly dependable.
And people wonder why I have such a low opinion of Wikipedia, where total strangers spout opinions while masquerading as experts. The silver lining is that writing the above was a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane and a career that Iâm generally proud of, save for a few hiccups along the way.
Tags: 2010, fonts, JY&A Fonts, typeface, typeface design, typeface designer, Wikipedia Posted in design, New Zealand, technology, typography, Wellington | 1 Comment »
23.07.2020
I hadn’t expected this reply Tweet to get so many likes, probably a record for me.
It is true. That book was NZ$4·99 in 1979, when it was offered through the Lucky Book Club at school, at a time when many books were still priced in cents. Some kids in the class got it, and I admit I was a bit envious, but not having a book in an area that interested you can drive creativity. While my parents didn’t make a heck of a lot in the 1970sâwe flatted and didn’t own our own car at this pointâthey would have splashed out if I really insisted on it. After all, they were sending me to a private school and their sacrifice was virtually never going out. (I only recall one night in those days when my parents had a “date night” and my maternal grandmother looked after meâand that was to see Superman II.) But when you grow up having an understanding that, as an immigrant family that had to largely start from scratch in a new country, you have a rough idea of what’s expensive, and five bucks for a book was expensive.
As an adultâeven when I was a young man starting out in my careerâI did not regret not having this book.
Someone in the thread asked if I ever wound up buying it. I never did: as a teenager I managed to get my hands on a very worn Letraset catalogue, which ultimately proved far more interesting. But it is good to know that, thanks in large part to my parents’ and grandmother’s sacrifices, and those in my partner’s family who helped her in her earlier years, we could afford to buy this book if anyone in our family asks for it.
Were we fleeing anything when we came to Aotearoa? We left Hong Kong in 1976 because my parents were worried about what China would do to the place. In other words, what’s happening now is what they hoped for me to avoid. They called it, in the 1970s. And here I am.
Tags: 1979, Aotearoa, book, creativity, film, history, Hong Kong, immigration, New Zealand, St Markâs Church School, Twitter, typeface design, typeface designer, typography Posted in design, interests, New Zealand, typography, Wellington | No Comments »
09.07.2018

When Neil Gaiman pays you a compliment about one of your typeface families (JY Integrity, which I designed in 1993), you gratefully accept.
Tags: 1990s, 1993, 2018, Aotearoa, author, book, celebrity, JY&A Fonts, Neil Gaiman, New Zealand, publishing, social media, social networking, Twitter, typeface, typeface design, typefaces, typography, UK, Web 2·0, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in culture, design, internet, New Zealand, publishing, typography, UK, Wellington | No Comments »
29.05.2014
The below ran in Lucire today, though it is equally suited to the readers of this blog.

RIT
Massimo Vignelli, who passed away on May 27, was a hero of mine. When receiving the news shortly before it hit the media in a big way, from our mutual friend Stanley Moss, this titleâs travel editor and CEO of the Medinge Group, I posted immediately on Facebook: âIt is a sad duty to note the passing of Massimo Vignelli, one of my heroes in graphic design. When I was starting out in the business, Massimo was one of the greats: a proponent of modernism and simple, sharp typography. His influence is apparent in a lot of the work done by our brand consultancy and in our magazines, even in my 2013 mayoral campaign graphics. A lot of his work from half a century ago has stood the test of time. There was only one degree of separation between us, and I regret that we never connected during his lifetime. The passing of a legend.â
This Facebook status only scratches the surface of my admiration for Vignelli. There have been more comprehensive obits already (Fast Company Design rightly called him ‘one of the greatest 20th century designers’), detailing his work notably for the New York subway map, andâcuriously to meâglossing over the effect he had on corporate design, especially in the US.
Vignelli, and his wife Lella, a designer in her own right and a qualified architect, set up the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture in Milano in 1960, which had clients including Pirelli and Olivetti. In 1965, they moved to New York and Vignelli co-founded Unimark International (with Ralph Eckerstrom, James Fogelman, Wally Gutches, Larry Klein, and Bob Noorda), where he was design director. It was the worldâs largest design and marketing firm till its closure in 1977.
The 1960s were a great time for Vignelli and his corporate identities. He worked on American Airlines, Ford, Knoll, and J. C. Penney, and the work was strictly modernist, often employing Helvetica as the typeface family. Vignelli was known to have stuck with six families for most his workâBodoni was another, a type family based around geometry that, on the surface, tied in to his modernist, logical approach. However, there were underlying reasons, including his belief that Helvetica had an ideal ratio between upper- and lowercase letters, with short ascenders and descenders, lending itself to what he considered classic proportions. The 1989 WTC Our Bodoni, created under Vignelliâs direction by Tom Carnase and commissioned by Bert di Pamphilis, adheres to the same proportions.
Although my own typeface design background means that I could not adhere to six, there is something to be said for employing a logical approach to design. American corporate design went through a âcleaning upâ in the 1960s, with a brighter, bolder sensibility. Detractors might accuse it of being stark, the Helveticization of American design making things too standard. Yet through the 1970s the influence remained, and to my young eyes that decade, this was how professional design should look, contrary to the low-budget work plaguing newspapers and books that I saw as I arrived in the occident.
When the Vignellis left Unimark to set up Vignelli Associates in 1971 (and later Vignelli Designs in 1978), their stamp remained. The MTA launched Vignelliâs subway map the following year, and like the London Underground map by Harry Beck in 1931, it ignored what was above ground in favour of a logical diagram with the stops. Beck was a technical draftsman and the approach must have found favour with Vignelli, just as it did with those creating maps for the Paris MĂ©tropolitain and the Berlin U-bahn.
New Yorkers didnât take to the Vignelli map as well as Londoners and Parisians, and it was replaced in 1979 with one that was more geographically accurate to what was above ground.
In 1973, Vignelli worked on the identity for Bloomingdaleâs, and his work endures: the Big Brown Bag is his work, and it continues to be used by the chain today. Cinzano, Lancia and others continue with Vignelliâs designs.
Ironically, despite a rejection of fashion in favour of timelessness, some of the work is identified with the 1960s and 1970s, notably thanks to the original cut of Helvetica, which has only recently been revived (a more modern cut is commonplace), and which is slightly less popular today. Others, benefiting from more modern layout programs and photography, look current to 2010s eyes, such as Vignelli Associatesâ work for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The approach taken by Lucire in its print editions has a sense of modernism that has a direct Vignelli influence, including the use of related typeface families since we went to retail print editions in 2004. Our logotype itself, dating from 1997, has the sort of simplicity that I believe Vignelli would have approved of.
Vignelli was, fortunately, fĂȘted during his lifetime. He received the Compasso dâOro from ADI twice (1964 and 1998), the AIGA Gold Medal (1983), the Presidential Design Award (1985), the Honorary Royal Designer for Industry Award from the Royal Society of Arts (1996), the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the CooperâHewitt National Museum of Design (2003), among many. He holds honorary doctorates from seven institutions, including the Rochester Institute of Technology (2002). Rochester has a Vignelli Center for Design Studies, whose website adheres to his design principles and where educational programmes espouse his modernist approach. It also houses the Vignellisâ professional archive.
He is survived by his wife, Lella, who continues to work as CEO of Vignelli Associates and president of Vignelli Designs; their son, Luca, their daughter, Valentina Vignelli Zimmer, and three grandchildren.
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, American Airlines, Bloomingdaleâs, Bodoni, branding, Cinzano, corporate identity, education, fashion, Ford, graphic design, Helvetica, history, Italy, J. C. Penney, Knoll, Lancia, legend, Lucire, Massimo Vignelli, Medinge Group, Metropolitan Transit Authority, Milano, modernism, New York, NY, retail, RIT, Rochester, Stanley Moss, Tom Carnase, typeface, typeface design, typography, USA, Vignelli Associates, WTC Posted in branding, business, design, marketing, typography, USA | No Comments »
30.04.2013

Joe Churchward, on my last visit to his home in Hataitai in 2012.

Joe’s wall at his home in Hataitai.

Two of Joe’s business cards, given to me at my last visit.
I started the day with the sad news that Joseph Churchward, QSM, has passed away.
Joe was a great typeface designer, but, more importantly, a pioneer. He wasnât the first type designer in New Zealand, but he was certainly the most prolific, and, in the modern era, a trail-blazer.
Itâs all the more impressive when you realize that Joe did his type design without the aid of computersâhe remained sceptical of technology right to the endâusing his hand, with pencil to create the outline, then inking them, and whiting out any areas where the ink had gone too far. He left the digitalization of his work to others, including the companies that sought out his designs, most notably Berthold of Germany, through which he had had numerous releases.
Joeâs work was marketable right to the end. New typefoundries approached Joe to license his designs, authors still sought him out to write books about him, and even Te Papa held an exhibition of his work a few years ago as it realized Wellington had a living legend right under our noses. Massey University inducted him into its Hall of Fame, although when he was honoured, he was already too ill to attend.
My own contact with Joe didnât begin well. I had made the decision in the 1980s to go into typeface design professionally, and, of course, Churchward International Typefaces was the best known name. And it was right here in Wellington. Making my way up to Wang House on Willis Street, I was confronted with a notice: that the company had been wound up the week before. Later, I discovered that Joe had packed up for Samoa, where he was from.
Joe was very proud of his forebears, and the English origin of his nameâbut he was equally proud of his Samoan and Chinese ancestry. Despite being born in Samoa, he embraced Wellington wholeheartedly, living in Kilbirnie in his youthâI seem to recall him telling me of a residence in Tacy Streetâand hanging out with âthe Māori boysâ. He enrolled at what was then Wellington Technical College and some of his early hand-lettering work was created there. However, an incident there also meant that Joe could not get back into hand-lettering in his final years: a fight at the college saw a glass door smash on to his hand, a serious injury that had the principal order him to go to hospital, where surgery was performed.
Joe was arguably the pioneer in typeface design in New Zealand as far as photo-lettering was concerned, and was, to my knowledge, the designer who had the greatest number of designs turned in to typefaces for phototypesetting. I still have, somewhere among my files, a photograph from the late 1960s taken at Churchward International Typefaces, which featured Mark Geard and Paul Clarke, two well respected names in the industry. But Joeâs scepticism toward the computer age saw the company suffer, and I would not meet Joe till 2000 after he returned from Samoa.
That first meeting was a lengthy one but, strangely, we never discussed our methods. We only discussed our finished designs, and Joe actually asked me to collaborate with him a few years later. Nothing came of that, as I was gearing up to do Lucire in print at that point, and it was an opportunity missed. My own interest in typeface design was probably less strong come the mid-2000sâJoe was easily the more passionateâbut we stayed in touch, usually by telephone.
On hearing of how ill he was, I visited him last year, and it was only then that we discovered that we actually adopted the same approach to design. The scale we drew at, the pencil-and-ink-and-whitening methodâperhaps those were borne out of the limits we had. We had both started before desktop typeface design became the norm, and we both settled on the same method of drawing our creations. And we both did this in isolation, not knowing of peersâwe just knew we had a love of drawing type forms by hand.
Joe lamented that he could no longer draw because that College injury meant that he could not hold a pen properly. While in very good spirits, I could sense that Joe was pained by this. He had had a lifetime of creating, but now he was forced to sit back, watch a bit of telly, and reminisce. But the visit was a fantastic one, and the sparkle came back every now and then: Joe remained genuinely excited about type design, even to the last days. My colleague and I were gifted posters and business cards from the heyday of Churchward International Typefaces, items which we will cherish even more deeply knowing it was one of Joeâs last gestures to his peers.
I might go on about how I began designing type digitally, but thatâs not that pioneering. At least by then I had copies of U&lc and the knowledge of others who were designing type offshore. Joe began his career postwar, at a time when international communications were not as good and there was less inspiration around. Instead, he found that within himself, found the way forward himself, and just went for it. Joe was the embodiment of the Kiwi can-do attitude, and a focused Samoan work ethic. The typeface design industry is weaker today with this loss.
Tags: Aotearoa, Berthold, Joseph Churchward, legend, New Zealand, obituary, Samoa, typeface design, typeface designer, typography, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, culture, design, New Zealand, typography | No Comments »
05.11.2012

This has been my year for acquiring new technology, beginning with a new external hard drive just after Christmas 2011, to a new desktop machine right after New Year. The keyboard, printer, scanner have all given way to replacements; while even the internet package and modem are new. TelstraClear then gave me a new freebie (since the NZPO days I’ve never paid for a phone) èŻçș (Huawei) cell and while I could hardly be called a typical user—it’s the last mode of communication with me and I don’t always carry it—the ïŹrst few days (since Thursday) with the gadget suggests how I might change the way I consume technology.
First, the money. Because this device sucks up more bandwidth and because wifi in Wellington is still patchy (it might have been different if the mayoral race finished in a different order!), I’ve opted to pay NZ$15 for extra megabytes each month. I’m already paying roughly that but that was on an old 3G device. It’s not a powerful device, which means there are foreseeable memory issues, and while I’ve stuck an old 2 Gbyte Micro SD card inside it, that’s not going to accommodate much now that the photos are larger, and the videos I store need to be.
The big screen needs to be protected: my Facebook feed had seen far too many complaints about broken Iphone screens, so I ordered a leather case on Ebay for under US$5. It sure beat one on Amazon for over US$30, plus shipping. Already this gadget is costing me and not gaining me much in efïŹciency. A new 32 Gbyte card will set me back another NZ$40 and I’m not convinced I need it yet for efïŹciency’s sake.
Secondly, the division of tasks: I can foresee the desktop machine being for the heavy-duty work stuff, as it is for a lot of people, and portable devices being used for leisure. Nothing earth-shattering or pioneering about that prediction. The apps still aren’t there yet, and what is more likely going to happen is that these devices become walking CPUs that communicate with more traditional peripherals, but for now, it’s been useful as a camera and social media tool. Which means the PC is for everything else. It is proof, to me, that Microsoft made the right punt with Windows 8 as personal computing is shifting very rapidly this decade away from the desktop-bound model that started in the 1980s.
I doubt I will go to email on the go—the way I archive for legal reasons means that I’ll continue to use a traditional client and I still don’t trust the cloud for email—which points, again, to portable meaning leisure. It’s a camera, social media updater, and video player. Since I almost never give out the number, since that would mean succumbing to the technology and losing control over how I manage telephony, it’s not going to make the jump into a work tool.
It’s also not that reliable, which makes it largely a plaything. Just as I could crash Google Chrome in almost every session—earning it the dubious nickname of ‘the “Aw, snap” browser’—I can crash this one almost every hour. Since it’s Android, I assume the browser is made by Google. Plus everything is connected back to a Google account, and no matter how hard I try to maintain my privacy, Google will inevitably leak.
Google forced me to open a Gmail even though I had an existing Google Plus account. I’ve since deleted the Gmail but it remains associated with Google Play and its apps. After opening that, I went browsing through the Dashboard to ïŹnd out some disturbing things. Even though I never linked my YouTube account with my Google one, Google still managed to track that I had viewed about a dozen videos from a few months ago. It had the history in YouTube turned on as well as targeted advertising, which I had clearly opted out of (and made a big hoo-ha about it at the time because of Google’s deceptive conduct—it shows that that deception never ended despite my getting the NAI involved). And, naturally, when you visit the YouTube privacy page, you get a 404—which shows how much Google cares about privacy.
I regularly turn off the apps and have a lot of the privacy locked down on the cell. But I don’t think the US and Australian governments have much to fear from China on these Huawei phones. Google is learning a lot, lot more about us than China ever could.
The keyboard is inefïŹcient, though the design of it is as good as it can be. I can’t think of a better way.
Yet despite all this, there are plus sides. Mobile optimization for some sites is beautiful and the crash-prone browser renders things well. (A friend suggested Opera, and while I like the less graphics-intensive pages, it interprets pages with plenty of glitches, including spacing ones, which are less forgiving on a modern cell.) The Droid typeface family from Ascender Corp. has to be the number-one reason for making it appealing—my Iphone friends liked what they saw with the UI in general and felt it an improvement on what they have. And for those who are visually driven, rather than aurally, then the Huawei makes for a nice little device. I like the Tumblr app on it so some of my procrastination sites can be put on the gadget.
End of story: I’m far too ingrained in my habits to become a regular cell user. I’ll still leave it lying about at home for the most part. But on the days when I expect a call from someone, or when I need to take a quick photo, I can see it being indispensable—with much more pleasant graphics built in. And if it becomes the plaything for social media, then I might have fewer distractions when I do my real job on the desktop. Being able to divide the tasks, to me, is a very good thing—because it helps put me in charge of the technology again.
Tags: advertising, Ascender Fonts, cellphones, China, Google, Google Android, history, Huawei, law, privacy, social media, social networking, technology, TelstraClear, typeface design, typography, USA Posted in business, China, culture, design, internet, New Zealand, technology, USA, Wellington | 3 Comments »
05.04.2012
Here’s a quick post for Easter, from my friend Wayne Thompson of Australian Type Foundry. If you want decent typographic puns, you need a typeface designerânot some of those groan-worthy ones that get circulated by those outside the industry.
Private I from Wayne Thompson on Vimeo.
Tags: Australian Type Foundry, fonts, humour, typeface design, typeface designer, typography, Vimeo, Wayne Thompson Posted in humour, TV, typography | No Comments »
31.12.2011
Friday morning’s interview with Sonia Sly on Kiwi Summer was the most fun I have ever had on radio.
Radio New Zealand National was the most fair and balanced medium I dealt with when running for Mayor of Wellington in 2010, and I was glad that Sonia thought of me for its summer programming this year.
I joked to friends prior to the interview that 2011 was much like 2010: go on to National Radio to dis the Wellywood sign in the first half of the year, and have a fun interview in the second half.
This was a casual, fun interview thanks to Sonia putting me at such ease. It goes on for a healthy 17 minutes, covering my involvement in Lucire, judging the Miss Universe New Zealand pageant, my branding work, including the Medinge Group, and my typeface design career. The feedback I have had is that people enjoyed it, and I’d like to share it with you all here.
Here’s the link, and you can always find it at the Kiwi Summer page for the day, where other formats are listed.
And if you’re wondering where the opening reading comes from, it’s taken from this review of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage I penned many years ago.
Tags: 2011, Aotearoa, authorship, branding, cars, interview, Jack Yan, JY&A Consulting, JY&A Fonts, Lucire, media, Medinge Group, Miss New Zealand, Miss Universe, New Zealand, publishing, radio, Sonia Sly, typeface design, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in branding, business, cars, design, India, internet, leadership, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, typography, Wellington | No Comments »
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