Branding, leadership, typography, marketing and the media
Local bookshop Book Haven in Newtown, among others around the world, has seen an uptick in orders—and it’s clear that it’s “AI” companies buying up obscure texts. The tragedy is, after scanning the texts, they’re potentially destroying the books, removing an original source for someone else to enjoy. Book Haven has rightly refused to sell [...] Read More... from AI companies do the modern form of…
My first real Myers–Briggs test was at university. Our lecturer in human resources, his first time teaching, kindly arranged for a firm to process our tests. We were then divided into groups in the class based on our Myers–Briggs types, and we had to see if we had commonalities, reporting back to the class. He [...] Read More... from Don t mess with an INFJ
I ve had this bookmarked for some time: Facebook allegedly detected when teen girls deleted selfies so it could serve them beauty ads , in Futurism, and it s not just Sarah Wynn-Williams saying this. The Murdoch Press, which commendably has done its share of exposés on Big Tech, alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck [...] Read More... from Keeping the humanity, because tech is coming…
I recently popped into my old Instagram—which I haven’t touched regularly since the start of the decade—to find that Meta, as usual, changed all the privacy settings in the advertisers’ favour and without my consent. This is the norm for the company: even back in the 2000s I used to say the only reason for [...] Read More... from The reason for having a personal Instagram is to know who to block
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have been filled with bots for years. When I used Facebook personally, it was already bot city, and the last time I did a calculation on its user base, I seem to recall half was bot. I’m betting it’s more now, the same with Instagram. And we need to add one [...] Read More... from I am the death of real
Absolutely thrilled that my friend Austin Holmes has uploaded our OverPressure podcast interview on to YouTube—and what a joy to find that this was one of his favourites! I cover my type design career, publishing, branding, and some of the stories that I’ve never shared before, within the contexts of entrepreneurship, leadership, and service. [...] Read More... from Covering 38 years in an hour…
It’s very easy to get the impression that US Big Tech is fundamentally dishonest. Examples abound. Its politicians seem dead keen on balkanizing the place, so on public and private fronts, the image the US projects is decaying and untrustworthy. Words like honour and integrity mean little when everything about that level of the US [...] Read More... from There s one US export I wish they wouldn t…
I had an idea last year about getting rid of the junk in search engine results, and that was to link them to Curlie, which effectively succeeded the old Open Directory Project (Dmoz, Newhoo, Gnuhoo, and other names). Curlie isn’t funded anywhere nearly as well as ODP, but something like it is actually fundamental to [...] Read More... from A Curlie-influenced web is starting to happen
Akismet, which I’ve used since 2010, spat the dummy in the last 24 hours and the WordPress sites that used my API key were bombarded with spam. Akismet has enshittified, leaving only a very narrow bunch of sites where you can use it for free—completely unlike the early days. Unfortunately, they chose to suspend my [...] Read More... from Sixteen years on, farewell to WordPress’s Akismet plug-in
I have admittedly taken a softer line on some “AI” gen since our clients use it, and combined with our awareness of how desktop publishing unfolded, and where Medinge Group’s own thinking is heading, in line with our ongoing work into conscious organizations, there is a space for it. You’ve noticed my covering it more [...] Read More... from Making something out of nothing