Ben Affleck just sold his AI company to Netflix for half a billion dollars . You’ll read a lot of think pieces about it over the next month, but the TLDR is that the product isn’t an AGI-chasing text prompt seeking to benefit all of humanity. It’s a film production tool that runs locally on your shots-in-progress to create a model of the aesthetic characteristics of your project, identifies post…
Back in the 2010s after winning all those design awards, I started getting asked by London museum curators about the types of digital design work they should be collecting and exhibiting. I had a few stock answers about areas of design that I considered interesting, culturally significant and largely ignored. I thought (and still do) the news ecosystem should be considered a designed artefact with…
I find myself haunted by this notification. In October 2025, Sky News published a political comment piece. Same news, different day. This one went viral. Why? Because of how modern devices notified readers of the headline. No human wrote the headline in this way. It stems from the text being truncated automatically by the device notification system. This is called “truncation”. What is truncation?…
Not something I expected to be saying today, but The Verge have made a 15min deep dive video into my blog post from the summer about modern walkmans being bulky. They’ve gone out and interviewed modern manufacturers to find out what’s going on, and it’s pretty interesting! Link here , and my original post here .
This summer I designed some slides for Ella’s talk at The Conference about what magic can teach us about AI. Her brief was Teenage Engineering’s EP–1320 declaring war on Studio Koto. Had a lot of fun with it. You can read a transcript of the talk here .
Honestly stoked to see the Future Art Ecosystems book series (which I creative directed and designed the first volume) on display at Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s amazing Serpentine show, The Call. Feels like London has been locked in a cultural dry spell since the pandemic, then we get this and Chronoplasticity at Raven Row opening in the same week. Two hopeful, relevant and informed…
Like a lot of you I first got interested in technology through audio equipment. More specifically, my Walkman. Growing up in a rural village being able to slip on some headphones and instantly transport myself to another world was magic. I was hooked as soon as I tried my mum’s Walkman. My parents gave me a cheap model of my own for my eighth birthday, and from that point I’ve barely been apart…
I take endless photographs of design, interfaces and typography with my phone. Good, bad, accidental avant-garde collisions. I guess I like to remember things that provoke my imagination. Even more than that, I screenshot a lot of design work from the internet and social media. Historical archival pieces, new portfolio pieces, glitching interfaces, music video stills. It all goes in there. At the…
So I haven’t written anything on here for a year and a half. It turns out the old saying is true; freelancing on interesting projects while raising a small human and navigating the US visa system doesn’t leave much time for writing blog posts. But don’t worry. We’ve been having fun, surfing the doom loop, learning to love the smell of napalm in the morning, and so on. Last week Ella and I were…
Picking up the electronic music theme some more , Sean Booth from Autechre has done a couple of AMA sessions on Twitch recently which have covered some interesting stuff relating to our thing. If you don’t know Autechre, they’ve been recording music and releasing albums since the early 90s. Their sound is pretty varied, sometimes you can dance to it, sometimes you can’t, sometimes it sounds harsh…
Last summer FACT did an Against The Clock film with Rian Treanor and Mark Fell. But I’ve had a busy year which I guess is why I only found it recently. If you haven’t seen it before, Against The Clock is a Youtube series where FACT challenge a musician to improvise creating a piece of music in 10 minutes, on camera. Despite the videos predominantly consisting of a person glaring at a laptop…
Nike just announced some new interesting new sneakers. Last year I wrote a bit about Adidas and Yeezy’s efforts in circular production for sneakers, ie how we can reduce the environmental cost of consumable goods. Since then a few sections of my Instagram discovered a shoe Nike put out called the Considered BB back in 2005. The Considered BB were an early attempt at a sustainable version of Nike’s…
Haven’t been writing much recently. There’s a lot been happening in the world, and not much of it to do with things like design and whatever. Anyway, last week Yeezy announced their new red Foam Runner sneakers. As the blogs quickly pointed out, Kanye hasn’t released an all-red sneaker since his final (very rare, very expensive) product release with Nike - nicknamed the “Red Octobers”. As I…
Since we published the Command Line Interface Guidelines we’ve had a few requests on Discord and Twitter from people asking us to open source the Hugo theme so they can use it for their own projects. Unfortunately the font licensing made this tricky. Plus I’m always uneasy about taking designs intended for a specific audience and just applying them to something else without consideration. So…
Back in November I designed a tshirt with Ralph to raise some money for Blocfit climbing wall in Brixton to help them through the pandemic. The image used in the graphic is a portion of a 3D scan of the Blocfit bouldering wall that Ralph had made earlier in the year. Satisfyingly, the pointillism of the 3D scanning echoes the mechanics of the printing screens used to produce the shirts, creating a…
A few weeks ago I posted on here about my work with Replicate . As they were building it, Ben and Andreas were looking around for advice on best practice for designing command-line interactions. In contrast to best practice advice for more visible interfaces – which have had extensive books, articles and principles since Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines in 1987 – they couldn’t find much about…
One of the many weird things about this year has been having extended breaks from spending time in the sort of businesses I would otherwise visit on a daily basis. I’m thinking mostly of hipster coffee shops and bars. Coming back to these spaces and seeing them with fresh eyes, it’s almost funny how similar and yet considered the decor choices are. I know there’s been plenty written about the…
Over the last couple of months I’ve been helping Andreas and Ben with their new project, Replicate. If you weren’t working in software before widespread, free-to-access version control it’s hard to express how differently things worked then. So much of the extreme programming stuff we take for granted like remote collaboration, iterative design, test driven development, a/b testing, public…
Dylan: Not many No. 1 songs are bad, I feel like. Puja: I don’t want to like, litigate Imagine Dragons with you right now, but I would argue that there are some. Dylan: You wanna do that? Puja: I would argue there are some No. 1 songs that have not been good. Dylan: Which one? Puja: Not 'Radioactive.' What’s the other one? Dylan: 'Thunder'? Puja: Yes. Dylan: If one of my friends made 'Thunder,' I…
H&M are trialling a new recycling system called Looop in one of its Drottninggatan stores in Stockholm. It cleans and shreds old clothing into its base fibers before spinning these into new yarn, then making new clothes from the yarn. Looks amazing. Particularly love the potential for brand mischief. It’s only a matter of time before Demna starts rolling them out and charging his customers $250 to…