My blog posts about “Uncategorised”

• Singularity by Jon Hopkins

  A brooding backdrop of analog synthesisers and gritty sonic textures is interrupted by a beat that thumps your eardrums like a body hitting the floorboards. Hard. That sums up “Singularity”, the opening track from Jon Hopkins’ new album. Hopkins’ brand of techno blended with contemplative piano solos and synth tweaking isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but unlike a lot of electronic…

• Creative meditation

  Handmade in Japan is a quiet, minimal documentary that looks at the process by which three different traditional Japanese objects are made: samurai swords, mingei pottery, and kimonos. The viewing experience is pared back to the bare essentials (I don’t think I detected a single note of music in 60 minutes), but that spareness provides a beautiful focus on the…

• Get beatsy

  The videoclip for Sean Paul’s classic dancehall tune “Get Busy” evokes for me the atmosphere of a perfect, sweaty house party; a suburban celebration of dance and good times. However, it always lacked a little something on the bottom end that could make it a surefire dancefloor filler, so I decided to add some heavier rhythms to it for DJing…

• Human interconnectedness

  On Friday we had our quarterly “season opener” at Canva. It’s a day when the whole company gets together and talks about what they achieved in the past 3 months and what they hope to achieve for the next 3 months. It’s also a moment when we can pause and think about the bigger picture of what the company is…

• Design systems and technological disruption

  There was a controversial take on design systems earlier this week by Adam Michela in an interview on the Figma blog: Yes, design systems will replace many design jobs as we know them today — they already have. Interface development patterns, processes and tools are like interchangeable parts and factory assembly lines — tools of industrial productivity that enable fewer…

• Shiny machines & highlight reels

  There’s a saying that’s become popular in the age of social media: “Don’t compare your behind the scenes with someone else’s highlight reel.” I mostly come across this in reference to either startup journeys or to Instagram shots of someone laying on a beach at 10am on a Wednesday drinking a kombucha latte. But it’s also a big factor in…

• Using PhantomJS with PHP to screenshot webpages

  I’m working on a little project at the moment (stay tuned!) that needs to render dynamic images with text as part of a web service, so I thought I would take a look at running PhantomJS on my server. HTML works so well for text rendering and layout, so generating designs in a browser makes it easy to create arrangements…

• The third

  It’s been a while since I did creative writing (20 years, in fact). But a vivid moment from my weekend spurred me to pick it up again. I remember the day the third great war arrived, it was so innocuous. The suburbs had always been such a haven. And like any haven, living there for too long had lulled us…

• Eclipse

  I’ve had a small obsession with a simple visual symbol of late – a circle divided into two halves; black and white. In an attempt to exorcise it from my system, I decided to use it in a quick interactive experiment that I call Eclipse. Perhaps it will make you ponder the origins of the universe, or maybe it’ll just…

• Making magical moments with onboarding

  It begins with a bland brown box. If they’ve gone the extra mile it’ll be a customised bland brown box with a small logo; but it’s bland and brown because it’s been made to be barcoded, battered, stickytaped, stamped, and not stolen before arriving at your door. So keeping it low-key makes sense. Inside … inside makes me go “what…