Had a nice trip in London yesterday for a project meeting (an amazing collaboration with a team developing a workwear wardrobe for a famous brand) and as always, to pick up a carrier-bag of the latest magazines covering the design world.  And oh boy, are the newsstands a busy place for titles clamouring for your […]

I have so little knowledge of how other industry’s work (like programming – proper coding, not playing with Webflow) it’s not surprising to sometimes happen on words or idioms that people in other work-spaces have as part of a wonderful alternative lexicon or jargon particular to it. By way of illustration, a word that came […]

Sparked by a post on a social media thread where you least likely find much that was meme-worthy*, @Rob Estreitinho had a nice graph illustrating the rise and fall of social sites ranked by the volume of the popular shortcut-to-the-heart-of-culture message, format, thing they emit. Knowing (well, hang on. Assuming) everyone knows what memes are, […]

Our job as communicators ordinarily demands we get to the point. Quick-snap. We’re paid to reward with clarity, supposedly because we possess some kind of second-sight that our commissioners lack (or pretend to. I know most of my clients are way smarter than me.) Leaving our audiences perplexed or confused? How’s that going to help […]

“Humanity makes headway by going in circles” You know that feeling, where you’ve been stuck in a project that just seems endless? The one with the file names that spiral into _final_FINAL_v23_081022_update.pdf Exhausting isn’t it? And more importantly, how on earth to you keep mentally attached – or better still, keep finding at ways to […]

Anyone who gets to work with brands, at the execution rather than origination-end of things, will know what a joy it can be to work within the strictures of The Guideline. They’re fun things, full of blowy intention and contorted neologisms fronting up a series of Rules about what you may and may not do […]

Well, we have a new leader over here in the United Kingdom. In what seems like only minutes ago, and the er, fourth (I think) we’ve had in ten years. The corporation running the county changes the CEO more frequently than a West Coast Startup. But it’s ok, because now we only ever need to live (or […]

You’ll like hear people, exasperatedly, exclaim that they’re ‘lost for words’. That the lexicon failed them. Which is a strange thing isn’t it? They just used… three words in a short phrase that perfectly captures a complex set of emotions. It’s a weird thing, to blame language for a failure to be able to communicate, […]

A long while back a bunch of studio’s in The London used to organise a weeknight booze-up and in an analogue anticipation of a billion WhatsApp groups, invitations would be sent to specific people. By fax. And ‘Bladdered By Fax’ became a pre-internet meme (sort of -ish.) The nostalgic memory rush that triggered this was […]

Excuse the poor-quality dad-pun, and it’s not a typo. Learning something ‘by rote’ is to tackle it by mechanical or habitual repetition. Sometimes it’s a really good way to drum things in. The reason I can still type that 8 times 8 is 64 without a second thought is that times-tables were taught me in […]