Heimtextil 2025 expands its Carpets & Rugs segment with new halls and over 300 exhibitors, featuring a Belgian Textiles area by Fedustria. Highlights include a Carpet Lounge by Cover Magazine, expert talks on trends, AI in design, and sustainability, plus guided tours. The event, showcasing global innovations and partnerships, runs from 14-17 January, 2025, in Frankfurt.

TESTEX has launched the TESTEX MICROPLASTIC label, setting a new standard for reducing textile microplastic emissions. Using advanced LDIR technology, the label certifies textiles tested for particle emissions per ISO standards. As a member of The Microfibre Consortium, TESTEX collaborates on reducing fibre fragmentation, sharing data to support sustainability goals by 2030.

ITMA ASIA + CITME 2025, set for October in Singapore, has nearly sold out its 60,000 sqm exhibition space with strong interest from 731 global tech providers. The event, supported by CEMATEX and CTMA, will showcase innovations tailored for Asia’s growing textile hubs. Key sectors include finishing, spinning, and knitting, highlighting sustainable tech and automation trends.

October US container imports were 2,494,635 TEUs, marking the fourth month in a row of volumes exceeding 2.4 million TEUs, a threshold that has historically strained US maritime logistics, the November Global Shipping Report by Descartes Systems Group noted. For the first ten months of 2024, volumes grew by 13.1 per cent YoY. At seven of the top 10 US ports, transit time delays rose in October.

China’s latest fiscal announcements seem aimed at addressing medium-term structural impediments to economic growth from strained local government finances, but are unlikely to immediately boost or offset deflationary risk, Fitch Ratings said. It expects a budget deficit of 7.1 per cent of GDP this year. It believes fiscal stimulus will remain incremental and responsive to downside risks.

Suominen Corporation has reported Q3 2024 net sales of €111.6 million (~$120.53 million), up from €106.4 million YoY. The company suffered a net loss of €3.2 million (~$3.4 million) due to operational challenges. YTD sales reached €343.8 million (~$370.9 million), and the company expects a full-year EBITDA increase. Sustainability efforts earned Suominen a Gold Medal from EcoVadis.

Global cotton markets saw slight declines and stabilisation in recent weeks, with NY/ICE December futures trading between 67–75 cents/lb since June, now at 71 cents/lb. The global A Index dipped from 85 to 83 cents, while China's index dropped from 101 to 97 cents due to a weaker yuan. Indian and Pakistani spot prices also declined, but both rupees remained stable against the dollar.

The 2024 Laureus Sport for Good Index honours brands advancing the 17 SDGs through sport, highlighting impactful initiatives that address key social and ecological issues. Head of Partnerships Astin Ewington emphasises the Index’s role in showcasing sport's power to drive positive change, inspiring more brands to use sport as a platform for meaningful, sustainable impact.

Valmet has expanded its IQ Quality Control System by launching four new measurements for raw material components, colour, and ash content. These innovations help optimise resource usage, reduce carbon footprints, and improve product quality. The new measurements include IQ Transmission Spectrum, IQ Reflection Spectrum, IQ Color, and IQ Total X-ray.

Web Industries will showcase its nonwoven materials solutions for medical, personal care, and home care markets at Hygienix 2024, held November 18-21 in Nashville. The company will highlight its slitting, spooling, printing, and modular converting capabilities, offering precision converting for flexible packaging, films, and medical-grade materials.

Wacoal Holdings has reported revenue of ¥90,167 million (~$586.1 million) in H1 2024, down by 5.2 per cent YoY. Gross profit fell 4.9 per cent to ¥51,056 million (~$331.86 million). Domestic revenue dipped 4.8 per cent to ¥45,006 million, while overseas revenue declined 1.4 per cent to ¥34,549 million. The company’s business profit was ¥2,304 million, down 39.6 per cent YoY in its overseas segment.

Gokaldas Exports has reported an 85 per cent YoY revenue increase in Q2 FY25, with total income reaching ₹941.8 crore (~$111.6 million) and PAT at ₹28.2 crore, a 19 per cent rise. EBITDA grew 48 per cent to ₹82.4 crore (~$9.77 million), though margins declined by 222 bps to 8.7 per cent. H1 FY25 revenue surged 82 per cent to ₹1,881.5 crore (~$223.0 million), with PAT slightly down by 2 per cent YoY.

Parallels RAS Now extends the integration and delivery of applications from Azure Virtual Desktop to application delivery on Windows 365 Cloud PCs

Look at your organization and consider the unstructured text or audio data you gather and the possible revelations it may hold. That data reflects the voices of those you serve and holds the potential to help you deliver better experiences, improve quality of care and enrich human engagement. There are powerful stories to be told from your unstructured text data. And the best way for you to find them is with natural language processing.

I'm entranced by old technologies being rediscovered, repurposed, and reinvented. Just think, the term artificial intelligence (AI) entered the language in 1956 and you can trace natural language processing (NLP) back to Alan Turing's work starting in 1950. Text analytics has its antecedents in data mining. Data mining itself has a long history, all the way back to Thomas Bayes, who died in 1761, and his eponymous theorem that still informs algorithms regarding inference, probability, and predictions.

Text analytics and natural language processing are not new concepts. Most knowledge management professionals have been grappling with these technologies for years. From the KM perspective, these technologies share the same fundamental purpose: They help get the right information to employees at the right time.

I am a firm believer in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. If you've not read this book, it is worth the time. I mention this because my focus at BA Insight is around Covey's second habit, which is, "Begin with the end in mind." Seems simple, right? Well it is, but it's also quite rare. When approaching any enterprise search project, at any phase, I always try to come back to this idea. What is success? When are we done? What does finished look like? These are all different ways of saying, "Make sure you have goals!"

Enterprise search projects start with intentions to provide ?Google for our organization' but too often fail to deliver on that promise. In our experience, these projects fail due to a lack of sustained effort and governance. The commercialization of next-generation search technologies allows you to fulfill this promise if you take a systematic approach to implementation.

The data, information, and analytics economy runs on well-curated, structured data. No matter your industry?having good curated data and content is critical. It's increasingly important as more data and content are generated. Intelligent tools to sift through content are more robust and at the same time, more "needy." That means modern technology platforms, systems, and even content consumers require well-structured data and content to perform well. As most artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners state?"nothing starts without good data."

Unstructured data, which comprises almost 80% of any enterprise's data, holds untapped value when it comes to addressing challenges and embracing opportunities.

AI-Powered Search Engines?referred to as "Insight Engines" by Gartner and "Cognitive Search" by Forrester?can deliver significant value to organizations these days, provided certain risks are avoided.

For decades, organizations have tried to unlock the collective knowledge contained within their people and systems. And the challenge is getting harder, since every year, massive amounts of additional information are created for people to share. We've reached a point at which individuals are unable consume, understand, or even find half the information that is available to them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one?if not the?key technology of our decade. Technological advances in this field are not only fundamentally changing our economies, industries and markets, but are also exerting enormous influence on traditional business practices, many of which will disappear, while others will be transformed or completely reinvented.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of a wide variety of businesses. I have this image of CEOs in boardrooms around the globe declaring, "We must have AI! Our competitors use AI! We can't be left behind!" There might be some table-pounding associated with this scenario. There will certainly be corporate minions scurrying around to fulfill the AI dreams of their CEO.

A New York appellate court ruled that a worker injured in an accident caused by a falling pipe should have been granted summary judgment on his Labor Law claim. Case: Jara-Salazar…

West Virginia’s Supreme Court upheld a finding of compensability for a worker with a knee injury. Case: P&G Tabler Station v. Hiett, No. 23-703, 10/30/2024, published. Facts: David Hiett worked for P&G Tabler…

The Missouri Court of Appeals upheld a determination that a worker was not entitled to underinsured motorist benefits for an on-the-job injury caused by an inattentive driver. Case: Preston v. Progressive…

The Workers Compensation Research Institute is holding a webinar on Nov. 21 to discuss findings from a recent study of the impact of attorney representation on claim payments. Bogdan Sayvch The…

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed Heather Jordan as the new director of the Workers' Compensation Administration, effective immediately. Heather Jordan Jordan succeeds Robert Doucette, who will serve as cabinet…

An Ohio appellate court upheld an enhanced award of benefits to an injured roofing worker for his employer’s violation of a specific safety requirement. Mauricio Rivera worked for Prime Roof Solutions…

Ganezza’s Visual Identity: A Dynamic Branding Journey

Bien-Être Simple’s Vibrant Branding and Web Design by Impulso

Wildlife photography fans now have a unique opportunity to own a true collector’s piece from renowned wildlife photographer David Lloyd. For the first time, David...

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We have teamed up with three amazing brands, Accsoon, Saramonic, and SmallRig, to give a lucky winner a break into the filmmaking world. A complete...

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Starting an online art photography business is a huge milestone in your career. As photographers, it’s all too easy to collect hundreds, if not thousands,...

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If you’re looking for a tried-and-true lighting technique, then it doesn’t come much more stress-tested than this one. In fact, this is a lighting technique...

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For many of us creative folks, periods of low inspiration and creative block are inevitable. Max Kent also felt disconnected from his craft, but found...

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Yesterday, Cameron Koczon shared a link to the dingbat font, Pictos, by the talented, Drew Wilson. Cameron predicted that dingbats will soon be everywhere. Symbol fonts, yes, I thought. Dingbats? No, thanks. Jason Santa Maria replied:

@FictiveCameron I hope not, dingbat fonts sort of spit in the face of accessibility and semantics at the moment. We need better options.

Jason rightly pointed out the accessibility and semantic problems with dingbats. By mapping icons to letters or numbers in the character map, they are represented on the page by that icon. That’s what Pictos does. For example, by typing an ‘a’ on your keyboard, and setting Pictos as the font-face for that letter, the Pictos anchor icon is displayed.

Other folks suggested SVG and JS might be better, and other more novel workarounds to hide content from assistive technology like screen readers. All interesting, but either not workable in my view, or just a bit awkward.

Falling down with CSS text-replacement

A CSS solution in an article from Pictos creator, Drew Wilson, relies on the fact that most of his icons are mapped to a character that forms part of the common name for that symbol. The article uses the delete icon as an example which is mapped to ‘d’. Using :before and :after pseudo-elements, Drew suggests you can kind-of wrangle the markup into something sort-of semantic. However, it starts to fall down fast. For example, a check mark (tick) is mapped to ‘3’. There’s nothing semantic about that. Clever replacement techniques just hide the evidence. It’s a hack. There’s nothing wrong with a hack here and there (as box model veterans well know) but the ends have to justify the means. The end of this story is not good as a VoiceOver test by Scott at Filament Group shows. In fairness to Drew Wilson, though, he goes on to say if in doubt, do it the old way, using his font to create a background image and deploy with a negative text-indent.

I agreed with Jason, and mentioned a half-formed idea:

@jasonsantamaria that’s exactly what I was thinking. Proper unicode mapping if possible, perhaps?

The conversation continued, and thanks to Jason, helped me refine the idea into this post.

Jon Hicks flagged a common problem for some Windows users where certain Unicode characters are displayed as ‘missing character’ glyphs depending on what character it is. I think most of the problems with dingbats or missing Unicode characters can be solved with web fonts and Unicode.

Rising with Unicode and web fonts

I’d love to be able to use custom icons via optimised web fonts. I want to do so accessibly and semantically, and have optimised font files. This is how it could be done:

1. Map the icons in the font to the existing Unicode code points for those symbols wherever possible.

   Unicode code points already exist for many common symbols. Fonts could be tiny, fast, stand-alone symbol fonts. Existing typefaces could also be extended to contain symbols that match the style of individual widths, variants, slopes, and weights. Imagine a set of Clarendon or Gotham symbols for a moment. Wouldn’t that be a joy to behold?

   There may be a possibility that private code points could be used if a code-point does not exist for a symbol we need. Type designers, iconographers, and foundries might agree a common set of extended symbols. Alternatively, they could be proposed for inclusion in Unicode.

2. Include the font with font-face.

   This assumes ubiquitous support (as any use of dingbats does) — we’re very nearly there. WOFF is coming to Safari and with a bit more campaigning we may even see WOFF on iPad soon.

3. In HTML, reference the Unicode code points in UTF-8 using numeric character references.

   Unicode characters have corresponding numerical references. Named entities may not be rendered by XML parsers. Sean Coates reminded me that in many Cocoa apps in OS X the character map is accessible via a simple CMD+ALT+t shortcut. Ralf Herrmann mentioned that unicode characters ‘…have “speaking” descriptions (like Leftwards Arrow) and fall back nicely to system fonts.’

Limitations

1. Accessibility: Limited Unicode / entity support in assistive devices.

   My friend and colleague, Jon Gibbins’s old tests in JAWS 7 show some of the inconsistencies. It seems some characters are read out, some ignored completely, and some read as a question mark. Not great, but perhaps Jon will post more about this in the future.

   Elizabeth Pyatt at Penn State university did some dingbat tests in screen readers. For real Unicode symbols, there are pronunciation files that increase the character repertoire of screen readers, like this file for phonetic characters. Symbols would benefit from one.

2. Web fonts: font-face not supported.

   If font-face is not supported on certain devices like mobile phones, falling back to system fonts is problematic. Unicode symbols may not be present in any system fonts. If they are, for many designers, they will almost certainly be stylistically suboptimal. It is possible to detect font-face using the Paul Irish technique. Perhaps there could be a way to swap Unicode for images if font-face is not present.

Now, next, and a caveat

I can’t recommend using dingbats like Pictos, but the icons sure are useful as images. Beautifully crafted icon sets as carefully crafted fonts could be very useful for rapidly creating image icons for different resolution devices like the iPhone 4, and iPad.

Perhaps we could try and formulate a standard set of commonly used icons using the Unicode symbols range as a starting point. I’ve struggled to find a better visual list of the existing symbols than this Unicode symbol chart from Johannes Knabe.

Icons in fonts as Unicode symbols needs further testing in assistive devices and using font-face.

Last, but not least, I feel a bit cheeky making these suggestions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Combine it with a bit of imagination, and it can be lethal. I have a limited knowledge about how fonts are created, and about Unicode. The real work would be done by others with deeper knowledge than I. I’d be fascinated to hear from Unicode, accessibility, or font experts to see if this is possible. I hope so. It feels to me like a much more elegant and sustainable solution for scalable icons than dingbat fonts.

For more on Unicode, read this long, but excellent, article recommended by my colleague, Andrei, the architect of Unicode and internationalization support in PHP 6: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets.

Analog, Mapalong, more tries at trans-Atlantic sleep, Cuba, Fontdeck, and my youngest son entering school; it all happened in the last year. At the end of 2007, I wrote up the year very differently. After skipping a couple of years, this is a different wrap-up. To tell the truth I put this together for me, being the very worst of diarists. It meant searching through calendars, Aperture, and elsewhere. I hope it prompts me to keep a better diary. I give you: 2010 in pictures and words:

Analog.coop is still fresh after launching in December. We’re still a bit blown away by the response but decide not to do client work, but to make Mapalong instead. We jump through all kinds of hoops trying to make it happen, but ultimately it comes down to our friend and colleague, Chris Shiflett. He gets us going. It snows a lot in Bristol. The snow turns to ice. I slip around, occasionally grumpy, but mostly grinning like an idiot.

My family and I go to Cuba on our first ever all inclusive ‘package’ holiday. It’s a wonderful escape from winter, tempered by surreptitious trips out of the surreal, tourist-only island, to the other Cuba with an unofficial local guide. My boys love the jacuzzi, and sneaking into the gym. Z shoots his first arrow. Just after we return, he turns 4 years old. Now, he wants to go back.

I visit Chris in Brooklyn to work on Mapalong. We play football. Well, Chris plays. I cripple myself, and limp around a lot. At the same time I meet the irrepressible, Cameron Koczon. We all get drunk on good beer at Beer Table. Life is good. Cameron comes up with the Brooklyn Beta name. It starts to move from idea to action.

Just before Brooklyn, a discussion about First Things First opens during a talk at BathCamp. The follow-ups become passionate with posts like this straw man argument and a vociferous rejoinder.

The sun comes out. The garden becomes the new studio. Alan Colville and Jon Gibbins stop by as we work on Mapalong. The hunt starts for a co-working space in Bristol. I write pieces about self-promotion and reversed type. Worn out from the sudden burst, I go quiet again.

We find a place for our Bristol co-working studio studio. Mild Bunch HQ is born! I design desks for the first time. Our first co-workers are Adam Robertson, Kester Limb, Eugene Getov, and Ben Coleman. Chris and I meet again across the Atlantic; he makes a flying visit to Bristol. The gentle pressure mounts on fellow Analogger, Jon Gibbins to come to Bristol, too. Something special begins. Beer Fridays have started.

Fontdeck comes out of private beta! Almost 17 months after Rich Rutter and I talked about a web fonts service in Brighton for the first time, the site was live thanks to the hard work of Clearleft and OmniTI. Now it features thousands of fonts prepared for the Web, and many of the best type designers and foundries in the world.

For the first time in around 15 years I visit Belfast. At the invitation of the Standardistas, Chris and Nik, Elliot Stocks and I talk typography at the Ulster Festival of Art and Design. We’re working on the Brooklyn Beta branding, so talk about that with a bit of neuroscience thrown in as food for thought. Belfast truly is a wonderful place with fantastic people. It made it hard to miss Build for the second time later in the year.

June was busier than it felt. :)

Summer arrived in earnest. X has a blast at his school sports day. I do, too. Mild Bunch HQ is liberally dosed with shared lunches from Herbert’s bakery and Licata’s deli, and beers on balmy evenings outside The Canteen with friends. That’s all the Mild Bunch is, a group of friends with a name that made us laugh; everyone of friendly disposition is welcome!

8 Faces number 1 is published and sells out in a couple of hours. I was lucky enough to be interviewed, and to sweat over trying to narrow my choices. The .Net interview was me answering a few questions thrown my way from folks on Twitter. Great fun. Elliot, Samantha Cliffe, and I had spent a great day wandering around Montpelier taking pictures in the sun earlier in the year. One of her portraits of me appeared in both magazines. Later that month, I write about Web Fonts, Dingbats, Icons, and Unicode. It’s only my fourth post of the year.

Sometimes, some things strip me of words. Thank you.

The whole of Analog heads to Brooklyn for a Mapalong hack week with the Fictive Kin guys. We start to show it to friends and Brooklyn studio mates like Tina (Swiss Miss) who help us heaps. It’s a frantic week. I get to spend a bit of time with my Analog friend Andrei Zmievski who I haven’t seen in the flesh since 2009. Everyone works and plays hard, and we stay in some fantastic places thanks to Cameron and AirBnB.

Just before I head to NY, Z starts big school. He looks too small to start. He’s 4. How did time pass so fast? I’m still wondering that after I get back.

The whole of Analog, the Mild Bunch HQ and many others from Bristol, and as far away as Australia and India, head to New York for Brooklyn Beta! A poster whipped together my me, printed in a rush by Rik at Ripe, and transported to NY by Adam Robertson, is given as one of the souvenirs to everyone who comes.

Meanwhile, Jon Gibbins works frantically to get Mapalong ready to give BB an early glimpse of what we’re up to. Two thousand people reserve their usernames before we even go to private beta!

Chris and Cameron work tirelessly. Many, many fine people lend a hand. We add some last minute touches to the site, like listing all the crew and attendees as well as the speakers. Cameron shows off Gimme Bar with an hilarious voice-over from Bedrich Rios. Alan narrates Mapalong and we introduce our mapping app to our peers and friends!

It’s something we hoped, but never expected: Brooklyn Beta goes down as one of the best conferences ever in the eyes of veteran conference speakers and attendees. ‘Are you sure you’ve not done this before?’ I hear Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler Frere-Jones ask Cameron. It makes me smile. The fact one of our sponsors asked this question in admiration of Chris and Cameron’s work meant a lot to me. I was proud of them, and grateful to everyone who helped it be something truly friendly, open, smart, and special.

The BB Flickr group has a lot of pictures and links to blog posts. Brooklyn Beta will return again in 2011!

X turns 7. I realise he really isn’t such a toddler anymore. It took me a while even though he amazes me constantly with his vocabulary and eloquence. His birthday party ensues with a trip to Legoland on the last weekend of the season to watch fireworks and get into trouble. Fun times finding Yoda and the rest of the Star Wars posse battling each other below the Space Shuttle exhibit.

8 Faces number two is published after being announced at Build. Much of the month was spent juggling Mapalong work, and having a great time typesetting the selections spreads for each of the eight faces chosen by the interviewees. That, and worrying with Elliot how it might print with litho. It all turned out OK. I think.

The .Net Awards take place in London. Christened the ‘nutmeg’ awards thanks to iPhone auto-correction, I’m one of millions of judges. We use it as an excuse for a party. At the end of the month, lots of the Mild Bunch go to see Caribou at The Thekla. Good times.

Mapalong goes into private beta! We start inviting many of the Brooklyn Beta folks, and others who’ve reserved their usernames. Lots of placemarks get added. Lots of feedback comes our way. Bug hunting starts. Next design steps start. We push frequently and add people as we go. Big things are planned for the new year!

The Mild Bunch Christmas do goes off with a bang thanks to Adam Robertson making sure it happened. Folks come from far and wide for a great party in The Big Chill Bar in Bristol. Lowri sneaks shots of Sambuca for the girls onto my tab, and we drink all the Innis and Gunn they have.

A few parties later, and the year draws to a close with a very traditional family Christmas in our house. Wood fires, music, the Christmas tree, and two small boys doing what kids do at Christmas. It’s just about perfect; A tonic to the background strife of the month, with a personal tragedy for me, and illness in my close family. Everything worked out OK. Steam-powered fairground rides, dressing up as dinosaurs, and detox follows with a bit of reflection. New Year’s Eve probably means staying in. Babysitters are like gold dust, but I just found we have one for tonight, so it looks like our celebration is coming early!

In the new year, I’ll be mostly trying to do the best I can for my family, my colleagues, and myself. The only goals I have are to help my children be everything they can be, make Mapalong everything we wish it to be, and feel that calm, quiet sense of peace in the evening that only comes from a day well done. Other than that I’ll keep my mind open to serendipity. (…and do something about some bits of my site and the typesetting that’s bugging me after writing this. :)

If you made it this far, thank you, and here’s to you and yours in 2011; may the best of your past be the worst of your future!

Wow, this has been a busy period. I’m just back from the Ampersand web typography conference in Brighton, and having a catch-up day in Mild Bunch HQ. Just before that I’ve been working flat out. First on Mapalong which was a grass-roots sponsor of Ampersand, and is going great guns. Then on an article for The Manual which is being published soon, and on 8 Faces #3 which is in progress right now. Not to mention the new talk for Ampersand which left me scratching my head and wondering if I was making any sense at all. More on that in a subsequent post.

In the meantime two previous events deserve a mention. (This is me starting more of a journalistic blog. :)

First of all, an interview with Simon Pascal Klien, the typographer and designer who’s curating the Design Festival podcast at the moment. We talked about all things web typography. Pascal cheekily left in a bit of noise from me in the prelude, and that rant pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. Thanks for your time, Pascal! If anyone reading this would care to listen in, the podcast can be downloaded or played from here:

Secondly, Daniel Bogan of The Setup sent me a few questions about my own tools. My answers are pretty clipped because of time, but you may find it interesting to compare this designer’s setup with your own:

I should note that in the meantime I’ve started writing with Writer, and discovered the great joy of keeping a journal and notes with a Midori Traveler’s Notebook. The latter is part of an on-going search I’m having to find Tools for Life. More on that, too at some point. Here’s my current list of topics I want to write about shortly:

• Ampersand, the aftermath
• Marrying a FujiFilm X100
• No-www
• Tools for life
• Paper versus pixels

There, I’ve written it!

I’m pleased to be able to say that Analog is joining forces with Fictive Kin! We already work together on Brooklyn Beta and other projects. We share the same ethics and ambitions. We have fun together. We’re good friends, and often old friends, too. They asked, we said yes. We had a beer. That’s pretty much how it went.

The Analog adventure that started in 2009 continues, just bigger, and hopefully better, with more fun, inspiration, and collaboration. I like to think of it like assembling Dai-X from Star Fleet but Voltron may serve if that’s more familiar to you.

It think Cameron came up with the word ‘Anakin’ from our two brands in 2010. It’s been used by us ever since whenever we get together to work or celebrate. It made me smile at the time, and even more so now, just like the echoes of the Analog identity in the lovely new Fictive Kin logo.

If you fancy keeping an eye on what we’re up to, follow @fictivekin. There’s more on the Fictive Kin blog, and in a post by Chris. Thanks for reading. Onwards!

I like the philosophy behind shooting with primes; that a photographer shouldn’t stand still but instead, continuously move closer, further, lower, or higher relative to his/her subject as a means of establishing a deeper connection. ????????
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Save 50% on my custom Lightroom presets with HOLIDAY50. Link in profile. (at Toronto, Ontario)

Missing Berlin’s gorgeous buildings again. ???? (at Berlin, Germany)

And while we’re in the process of missing European architecture… ????
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4 more days left to catch my Lightroom presets for 50% off! ⌛️ (at Copenhagen, Denmark)

Trying to straighten all the lines on this shot is a sure fire way to go blind. ???? (at London, United Kingdom)

I’ve gone subway hopping for photos in every city I’ve been to except the one I live in. ???? (at Toronto, Ontario)

This trip solidified my conviction to learning photography. A lot has happened since this shot was taken.
Can you pinpoint the moment you decided to pursue photography? (at Toronto, Ontario)

A lot to look forward to in 2017. How did 2016 treat you: ???? or ????? (at San Francisco, California)

Four days from now I’ll be boarding a one way flight to San Francisco to take on the next evolution of my role at @shopify. Leaving the city that I’ve called home my entire life and the people who have defined everything I am was one of the most uncomfortable decisions I’ve ever had to make. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve chased discomfort in my career.
.
I wrote about my ongoing pursuit for discomfort this morning in hopes of inspiring others to do the things that scare and challenge them this year. You can find the link in my profile.
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Happy 2017! ????
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????: @jonasll (at San Francisco, California)

I had a fantastic conversation with Jem Sophia today (our first actual conversation after years of talking online!) who pointed me in the direction of this fantastic article. I love the sentiment and the metaphor. Creating software to scratch an itch without any ambitions of ScAlInG and turning it into a capitalistic enterprise.