Some surprises on day one with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G

Top: Decent enough specs for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G. Above: Very respectable download speeds (in the header) as the phone updates 71 apps.   My Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 5G is here, and it’s proved better than the reviews suggested.    First up, kudos to the seller, YouGeek on Aliexpress, who not only […]

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Spacing in French: figuring out how to punctuate professionally

With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, we’ve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition.    There are […]

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Title design in 1970: big geometric type rules

There is something quite elegant about title typography from the turn of the decade as the 1960s become the 1970s.    There is 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever by Maurice Binder, which apparently is one of Steven Spielberg’s favourites, but I’m thinking of slightly humbler fare from the year before.    I got thinking about it […]

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Why the British people still prefer Boris Johnson

When you see the utter dog’s dinner the British government has made of COVID-19, namely turning their country into a petri dish for mutations while they plunder the place with impunity, you have to wonder why many there still prefer these current Tories, when even Max Hastings and Sir Nicholas Soames don’t. Is it because […]

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Fixing Wordpress’s problem of fake bolds and italics

I haven’t been able to find anything on this bug online, but it’s very common.    As far as I can recall, all of our online publications that use Wordpress have themes designed or modified by yours truly. However, Lucire Rouge has a mostly bought-in theme, where my changes have been limited to a couple […]

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Rotten sequel ideas, no. 1

I’m not a comedian by any stretch of the imagination (neither are a lot of the people on comedy programmes here in Aotearoa) but every now and then my mind goes to funny places. Such as this:    Since Coming 2 America was so uniformly awful (the best bits are in the trailer), this was […]

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Helvetica in metal, 1985

This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used?    Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good […]

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From my desk, 1986

Before this gets recycled, I thought I’d scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isn’t mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout […]

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How to delete Windows 10 system fonts for real, not just remove registry references to them

My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but that’s not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to […]

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When not having something drives creativity

I hadn’t expected this reply Tweet to get so many likes, probably a record for me. I knew my parents couldn’t afford The Lettering Book, so I went without, which forced me to create my own typeface designs. Later I became the first digital typeface designer in this country. — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) July […]

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