Tag Archives: Creativity

The mystery of the covered-up book cover …

Posted on 9 March 2013 by Propagandum

Wandering into my local bookshop the other day, I was shocked to see this: W – as some people say in cyberspace – TF? What’s going on here? How can you buy a book if you can’t read what it … Continue reading →

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‘Only superficial people do not judge by appearances’: type, design and the spirit of the age #2

Posted on 6 March 2013 by Propagandum

What do commercial or designed things tell us about the age we live in? And how do they do this? Writers and artists have brilliantly created a reality distortion field where we expect them to give us the benefit of … Continue reading →

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Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist (exhibition review) #1

Posted on 17 September 2012 by Propagandum

This is an unusual start to any review, but the gallery’s beautifully panelled and French-polished rosewood doors and postmodern urinal dividers in the spotless toilets were so unusual in their generosity to the possibility of civilized public behaviour that I … Continue reading →

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Inventing the future – the earliest mention of the word ‘wordpress’?

Posted on 31 July 2012 by Propagandum

Two ifs: if there was a search engine that filtered on the earliest mention of, and if we then looked up ‘WordPress’, we would find this, by James Joyce, from 1939: A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap … Continue reading →

Posted in Words, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Page against the machine 3 – less transparent books?

Posted on 29 November 2011 by Propagandum

How can publishers create radically new products if their management structures and internal power relations remain the same? I can’t remember seeing any discussion of this in the trade press – Tim Oliver’s post in The Bookseller’s Futurebook web spinout is the exception … Continue reading →

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Page against the machine 2 – a sledgehammer without a nut

Posted on 26 November 2011 by Propagandum

In my previous post, I suggested that some multifactorial analysis of previous technological innovations would suggest what is going to happen when publishing companies bang up against the digital content agenda driven by the powerful US techno-behemoths. ‘Multifactorial’ here simply … Continue reading →

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The power of words #1: words of power

Posted on 12 September 2011 by Propagandum

We cannot understand a word unless we know what it means, but our familiarity with it also wears away the meaning. This is the motor that drives the ceaseless creativity of our speech-acts. I started off making a selection of … Continue reading →

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Towards a sustainably commercial future

Posted on 7 August 2011 by Propagandum

Following on from my previous thoughts I’ve been thinking some more about sustainable commercial messages. (By ‘sustainable’ I don’t intend a paraphrase for ‘ecological’, though that might also be a consequence.) What I mean is this: how do commercial organizations find … Continue reading →

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‘Explicit to the idiot …’

Posted on 30 July 2011 by Propagandum

Today, two things in my mind. One, William Blake’s extraordinary letter to the Reverend Dr Trusler (23 August 1799). For background, Blake was always very short of money; Trusler was offering to become a patron of Blake’s printed illustrations and … Continue reading →

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