Posts from 2008

A quick hurrah for my favourite typographic glyph, the interrobang. Introduced by Martin K Speckter in 1962, it was an attempt to condense the overactive punctuation of incredulous sentences such as “You drank how much?!”. Although it never really caught on, it still has some support in modern Unicode and can be used in HTML: [...]

In some design Utopia, everything would be tested. An unseen army of usability specialists would verify everything and free our minds from worrying about unforeseen outcomes. Our users would be empowered, our messages would hit home, our harps would be perfectly tuned, and our gins and tonic perfectly mixed (lime, not lemon, thank you). Until [...]

Barclaycard just unveiled their new corporate identity. Yep, another Death Star. I leapt to these comparisons right away (as did, it appears, the Creative Review). I mean, c’mon, do we need more of the same? We get it. You’re global companies. You’re bright and forward-thinking. You connect people. Blah blah blah. How much did this [...]

During the radio silence of the last few weeks, I’ve turned my attention to other tasks. The largest has been to write two substantial UX articles, which should be published shortly. More details will follow. I’ve also written a few songs, recorded one – Pilcrow (demo, mp3), kickstarted an intensive exercise program and slowly coaxed [...]

Quick personal post. dConstruct was, of course, marvellous, but I shan’t review it. My partisan stance and lack of liberty to pay too much attention mean that others have done it more justice than I could: viz. Twitter search, the BBC article, and Matt Balara’s review (although I disagree with his verdict on Jeremy’s closing [...]

I’ve decided to finally make the move to digital, so I’m selling all my CDs. Before I go down the eBay route, any of you lucky folks want to buy any? Full list here (pdf) – £3 each, £1 for EPs. First come, first served: leave a comment or hit me up at email [at] [...]

I enjoyed Lloyd Davis’s post Stick your five-year plan, in which he argues the futility of long-term planning when it comes to one’s own life. I think in some respects he’s absolutely right. While it’s useful to have some structure, some framework to life, anything beyond a couple of years is likely to be wildly [...]

It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update. As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability – which means, since [...]