Links

A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.

  • In Defense of the Detour

     № 147
    A hand-painted map of looping arrows from “a brief” to “the kind of thing that people remember”, via detours like “take the wrong direction”, “sleep on it” and “happy accidents”
    Illustration by Giorgia Lupi

    Giorgia Lupi, whose 1,374 Days I shared last year, is back in The New York Times with a visual essay on craft and AI. AI is useful when the problem is well-defined, but design and art are about getting lost along the way.

    You immerse yourself in the world of the people you’re designing for, look for visual metaphors, stumble onto something unexpected, and push things around until they break, or until they make sense.

    Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving. No shortcut gets you there: the process leaves a trace.

    She doesn’t dismiss the tools; her team uses AI too, but only once the design is done, to help carry it out at scale. The design is in the detour.

  • The Making of Cursor’s Icons

     № 146
    A grid of Cursor’s new line icons, from a car and binoculars to a bell and a speaker
    Images courtesy of Marek Minor

    I’ve worked with Marek for years, on projects for IKEA and AutoStore among others, and have always admired his system-level thinking, his craft, and his attention to detail. This project for Cursor is the perfect showcase for all of those abilities. The case study is lengthy, but anything shorter wouldn’t do the work justice.

    At 1px the icons felt too thin next to text. It’s hard to say exactly why – they just didn’t hold their own. At 1.5px they felt too heavy. At 1.25px a 16px icon sits beside 16px Cursor Gothic, their custom typeface, and looks just right. You follow your eye on decisions like this. At some point the number is a record of a decision the eye already made.

    Cursor’s icons set inline with words in Cursor Gothic: click, talk, learn, store, record, mention, snap, upload, like and more
    The icons set inline with Cursor Gothic

    The icons sit perfectly next to Cursor Gothic, and I love seeing this level of craft get prioritised in a product and company like theirs.

    Marek walks through the explorations, the dead ends and the reasoning behind every decision, and with this case study he’s created a generous resource for anyone learning the craft.

    A context menu in Cursor with icons for split, pin, rename, mark as unread, copy, export, fork, move and archive
    The icons in one of Cursor’s context menus

  • Agentic Systems Are the Future of Brands

     № 145
    Diagram of the Agentic Brand System: ten inputs, from strategy to examples, flow into one folder that feeds decks, websites, products, campaigns, emails and social posts, with Claude, Codex, a designer and a marketer each working on one piece
    Image courtesy of Little Plains

    Little Plains makes the case for Agentic Brand Systems: kits of visual rules, voice guidelines and working code that guide people and agents alike, so a brand doesn’t drift as it spreads across more tools and teams.

    Give the same assignment to an agent and it guesses at a much higher rate. The result may look completely competent. However, each unsupported choice moves the work a little closer to what a generic product would do. It’s not slop, it’s just…mid.

    Interesting times for brand studios, and for those commissioning them. Scaling a (re)brand is becoming (unavoidably) more agentic. Rolling out and levelling up a company’s brand expression is technically easier than ever, but the surface area you need to cover has grown quite a bit. We’re going to need to grow a few extra pairs of eyes.

  • McLaren. Our brand world.

     № 144

    McLaren revealed an evolved identity this month, the road cars and the racing team now sharing the same voice.

    The Speedmark stays, and so does the Papaya colour. What’s new is the wordmark, sourced from the service station that Bruce McLaren’s parents, Les and Ruth, ran in Remuera, Auckland. That’s where Bruce McLaren built the car that won him his first race.

    The McLaren family service station at night in black and white, the McLaren’s sign lit above a row of petrol pumps
    The new McLaren Racing lockup in white over a motion-blurred pit stop, the crew in papaya overalls lifting a tyre
    The service station in Remuera, and the new McLaren Racing lockup, images courtesy of McLaren

    I’m not sure how I feel about the new McLaren Racing lockup—the previous logo, still featured in the navigation bar on the McLaren Racing website, felt more… race-y? The production quality of the film itself, though, is extraordinary. The storytelling is very well done. Restrained, but crackling.

  • Apple opens Apple Music Hall in London

     № 143
    Battersea Power Station seen from across the Thames, its four white chimneys against a cloudy sky

    Apple opened a 600-capacity venue inside Battersea Power Station yesterday. The room borrows from the power station it sits in—heritage brickwork, fluted arches, bronze balconies. In an age where concert venues are usually not much more than a black box with a logo over its door, this looks beautifully done.

    The hall seen from the side, with bronze balconies cantilevered over the floor
    A greenroom in the Apple Music Radio studios: red sofas on a red rug, brick walls, a turntable on the sideboard
    The foyer of Apple Music Hall: a red velvet sofa and a staircase under exposed brick and steel
    Apple Music Hall and the new Apple Music Radio studios, images courtesy of Apple

    There are two mix studios, a 48-speaker spatial system around the audience, and sixteen-odd hardwired cameras feeding a broadcast control room. An artist can play one intimate show and leave with a finished Spatial Audio recording, a broadcast mix and multicamera video.

    Very clever, and a very expensive way of funneling listeners to an Apple Music subscription. (I guess this explains the push notification I received for a new two-month trial.)

  • Nicholas Payton + Butcher Brown: Resolution

     № 142

    “Resolution” is the second movement of A Love Supreme, the 1965 Coltrane album, and Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown make playing their rendition look like a walk in the park.

    This one’s taken from A Supreme Blue, a reimagining of that album alongside Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. The first five tracks follow the Davis album in order, then come Coltrane’s four parts.

    As Jack Kenny puts it on All About Jazz:

    A Supreme Blue is not a museum piece but a translation. It reframes two landmark statements through a contemporary sonic language that privileges groove, texture, and atmosphere. House rhythms, electric keyboards, and layered production reshape the modal and spiritual frameworks of the originals, rendering them less austere and more rhythmically grounded.

  • Butterick’s Practical Typography

     № 141

    Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography—reader-supported, ad-free, and still one of the most useful things to read on typography I know. Published on the web since 2013.

    Start with “Typography in ten minutes”, five rules that will, as he puts it, make you “a better typographer than nearly every writer—and even most graphic designers”.

    My personal favourites to nerd out on: straight and curly quotes, ampersands, paragraph and section marks.

  • 95 reasons for having your own website

     № 140

    My favourites? Too many.

    Related reading from 2018, Laurel Schwulst’s “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?”.

  • The Dying Art of Hand-Made Restaurant Signs

     № 139

    A 26-minute documentary by NYT Cooking on what makes a good restaurant sign, and what they mean to a business. They look at New York City’s iconic lettering with the artists behind Noble Signs, who hand-painted signs all over the city. Wonderful work.

  • McLaren M6GT

     № 138

    The Special Operations team at McLaren restored the McLaren M6GT, a car designed in 1967 by Bruce McLaren, yet never made it past the prototype phase.

    (The rear of the McLaren M6GT)
    (The engine of the McLaren M6GT)
    (The speedometer of the McLaren M6GT)
    (The dashboard of the McLaren M6GT)
    Details of the McLaren M6GT

    This was never going to be a simple rebuild. We took it as an act of custodianship, with an immense responsibility to stay true to the original vision. The goal wasn’t merely to imitate the M6GT, but to bring it back. Honestly. Faithfully. With the same obsession that Bruce channelled into the original.

    There’s a short video of it on YouTube, too. Gorgeous machinery.