As someone who never bought into the javascript-centric method of building websites, and the insistence on building everything as an SPAs, I’m surprised but delighted to see that industry seems to finally be bucking the trend and coming around to the idea that this might not be the best way to build most websites.

Not only are new services being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, existing experiences are pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks.

Alvin Chang with a beautiful interactive explainer of the Yard Sale Model and why our economic model can only result in a huge, and increasingly growing, gap between the rich and poor.

Many of us assume it’s because some people make better financial decisions. But what if this isn’t true? What if the economy – our economy – is designed to create a few super rich people?

Even the fact that the number one spot is filled by a Harry Styles song — albeit a great one — doesn’t put me off spending a day listening through this compilation of the top 100 songs of 2022 by Said the Gramophone.

Craig Mod doing what Craig Mod does, putting words to the performance of an activity that many thousands of people do, in a way that makes it sound like the most extraordinary thing in the world. His ode to drumming couldn’t be a greater siren song for returning to a hobby you love.

Friend and former colleague Jordan Harper has recently begun documenting his visit to Japan exactly one year after the event. He’s chosen to sift through the 2000+ photographs he took throughout the trip and pick one to publish each day exactly a year after it was taken, together with a brief account of what he was doing at the time.

I’m hoping these self-imposed restrictions will mean I try to pick more interesting shots, rather than just posting a parade of pictures of weird looking buildings, amazing landscapes and happy accidents. I’m hoping someone finds this interesting.

Photographer Paul Trevor is currently exhibiting a collection of photographs that remained forgotten in a drawer for 35 years. The project is a heartwarming portrayal of children living and playing in some of Liverpool’s poorest areas.

Children … are the first line of defence of every community … they’re quite tough and they give you a really hard time. When you enter into a neighbourhood they’re there.

Photographer Jonathan Blaustein takes issue with the glamourising of food through packaging and context by stripping everything away; the packaging, the labels and the processed photography. The results are a fascinating gallery of exactly what a dollar will buy you to eat.

I’m interested in the way photography is used to deceive. Millions, if not billions of advertising dollars are spent annually photographing food and obfuscating reality. Fast food conglomerates are certainly the worst culprits, but everywhere we see glamorized versions of what we eat.

An old but fascinating article from Information Architects on how contrasts in culture between Japan and the West are exhibited in Apple’s Get A Mac advertising campaign.

Last Sunday, they started airing the […] ads here in Japan. And here’s a surprise: they’re different. The Mac guy isn’t particularly cool and the PC guy is a real “salary man” type. The ads aren’t as obvious as the Western originals. In Japan, you need to be more subtle.

The Whale Hunt, the latest creation of Jonathan Harris, is an experiment in how to display a large number of images related specifically to one particular event, in this case living and hunting with Inupiat Eskimos in Alaska. In his own words:

The Whale Hunt website was developed as an experimental interface for storytelling. Given an epic real world story, with lots of content and lots of metadata, how can the narrative be faithfully retold?

Unlogo is a piece of software that allows computers to identify corporate logos, (and I assume, any simple shapes) in video, and manipulate them within the context of the footage.

“I thought if I could train a computer to recognise logos for the sake of making a brand more ubiquitous, why not not train it to erase them completely?” Crouse explains in the below video. “We’re trying to get people interested in this idea of controlling the presence of corporate messages…They represent an intrusion.”