Blog

Mind

How the mind learns to spin

Pattern, memory, and the hidden architecture of how your mind actually works

The human mind's most remarkable ability isn't calculation or memory — it's pattern recognition. Rather than storing a perfect record of every experience, the mind extracts what matters and builds a general model from it: the idea of a chair that includes thousands of different chairs, the sense of a familiar situation that lets you anticipate what happens next. Scientists call these "invariant representations."

We exchange perfect detail for something far more useful: flexibility. It lets us navigate unfamiliar places, read a stranger's mood, recognise something we've never seen before, and learn from surprisingly few examples. What we call intuition is often simply pattern recognition working quietly in the background.

What keeps this system developing is new information. When reality differs from what we expected, the mind pays closer attention. It updates its models, adds detail, and creates richer patterns — which is one reason unusual experiences can remain so vivid. Familiarity gives us efficiency; novelty gives us new material. The two work beautifully together.

Books outside your field, conversations with people who think differently, unfamiliar places, and new kinds of problems all give the mind more patterns to work with. The effect becomes even more interesting when different fields begin to overlap. An idea from biology can change how you think about business; architecture can change how you think about organisations. Intelligence grows not only from collecting more patterns, but from connecting patterns that previously seemed unrelated. A mind that keeps encountering new perspectives keeps expanding its model of the world — and every new connection creates another way of understanding it.

Strategy

About competition

Do the things others don't, won't, or can't

I don't think much about competition.

If you want to find your place in a crowded field, don't try to do what everyone else is doing slightly better. Find the difficult problems that others don't want to deal with — and learn to solve them.

Do the things others don't, won't, or can't.

Your particular combination of experience, curiosity and skills gives you a different set of problems you can tackle. Some things that seem impossibly difficult to someone else might simply be difficult but interesting to you.

That's where the opportunity is.

Instead of competing for the same easy problems, move toward the harder ones. The work becomes more difficult, but also more distinctive. And when you solve something that few people know how to solve, there is much less competition.

So my strategy is simple:

Find the hard problem.
Figure it out.
Make something good.

Difficult problems also make you better. They force you to learn, connect things, experiment and develop capabilities that you wouldn't develop by doing only what comes easily.

So when I see something that looks complicated, unclear or difficult, I don't necessarily see a reason to stay away.

I see something worth figuring out.

Business

Business as a simple value game (1–2–3)

Value proposition, real context, and decision — the three-step system behind every deal

Business can be reduced to three things: value, context, and decision. Start with value. Someone is in one state, and you offer a credible path to a better one. That improvement might save time, increase revenue, create certainty, unlock a capability, create status, or simply make something easier or more enjoyable. People don't buy only because they need something solved; they also buy because they want something better.

The first job, then, is to make that improvement obvious. A good value proposition should be understandable in a single sentence: what becomes better, for whom, and why. The clearer that improvement is, the easier it becomes for someone to understand why it matters.

The second step is making that value real. General claims become meaningful when they're connected to the person's actual situation: companies like yours, circumstances like yours, results that matter to you, within a timeframe you can believe. This is where examples, evidence, numbers, demonstrations, and comparisons matter. They turn an attractive idea into something concrete.

The third step is the decision. Once value is understood and made tangible, the question becomes simple: does this improvement justify acting? Good business makes that decision easier rather than relying on persuasion. When all three elements work together, the value is clear, its relevance is visible, and the evidence makes it believable. The result is a surprisingly simple structure behind almost every good business exchange: make the value understandable, make it real, and make the decision easy to see.

Time

Made of time

The quiet architecture of a life

A life is made from two resources that are easy to overlook: time and energy. Neither is particularly visible. We experience them through what they make possible — an hour of concentration, an afternoon with people we care about, a morning spent creating something, a day that somehow feels complete. A schedule gives these invisible resources a visible form. It turns time into space and allows us to decide what that space will contain.

Most of us already know how powerful this can be. For more than a decade, school gave us a timetable that organised days, balanced different subjects, and created a rhythm for learning, work, play, and rest. But while we learned to follow schedules, almost nobody taught us how to design one. Deciding what matters, estimating how much time it deserves, making room for different kinds of energy, and keeping commitments that nobody else is checking — those skills were largely left for us to discover ourselves. We became fluent readers of timetables without really learning how to write our own.

Adulthood gives us the opportunity to do exactly that. Meetings, appointments, calls, and deadlines naturally find their way onto a calendar, while exercise, deep work, relationships, rest, learning, and long-term projects enter only when we deliberately make room for them. A schedule can give those things a place. Used forward, it becomes a design tool: a block on the calendar is a decision made in advance about something deserving part of your life. Read backward, it becomes something equally interesting — a portrait of where your attention has been placed: the people you kept seeing, the work you pursued, the subjects you returned to, the places you travelled, and the interests that gradually became part of who you are.

The system itself can remain simple: a recurring structure that makes room for the essentials, a weekly plan that turns a few meaningful intentions into actual time, and a short review that lets one week inform the next. In the end, scheduling isn't really about efficiency, or even about fitting more into a day. It's about giving shape to time while leaving room for all the different kinds of hours a life needs. If time is the material a life is made of, the calendar is simply one way of choosing what we make from it.

Story

Where does my story want to go next?

Reading the arc of your own life

There is a useful way to think about where your life might go next: step back and read it as if it were a novel. From inside everyday life, experiences can seem separate — a job, a place, a relationship, an interest, a project, a decision. But viewed across years, patterns begin to emerge. You notice which choices opened new chapters, which experiences changed your direction, which interests kept returning, and which people or places brought out something new in you. You see abilities developing, interests becoming deeper, and seemingly unrelated experiences beginning to connect.

Every good story has this kind of shape beneath its individual events. A character becomes who they are gradually, through everything they encounter. Your own life works in much the same way. What feels like a collection of separate chapters while you are living them can look remarkably coherent when viewed from a distance.

This doesn't require believing that your life has a predetermined destination. It is simply pattern recognition applied to the richest set of information you have about yourself: your own lived experience. A simple timeline can make it visible — the important periods, places, relationships, projects, discoveries, achievements, interests, and turning points. Then read it almost as if it belonged to someone else. What themes keep returning? What has grown stronger with time? What seems to connect one chapter to another? What would feel like an interesting and natural continuation?

From there, "Where does my story want to go next?" becomes a practical question. You are not trying to predict the ending; you are looking at the arc and imagining what chapter could follow. Sometimes the answer is a clear decision. More often it is a direction worth exploring — something to build, learn, experience, or finally give more space to. The story so far gives you clues. What happens next is still yours to write.

Self

Stepping outside the ego

Your story is useful. So is stepping outside it.

We all have a narrative of life — a story about who we are, where we came from, what we know, what we want and where we are going. Like a novel, it has a timeline: chapters, characters, events, turning points and plans for what comes next. Over time, the story becomes so familiar that we simply experience it as me.

This is the ego: our sense of being a particular person inside a particular story. It is useful. But we can also step outside the character and observe the story itself.

From there, we can zoom in and out. Zoom in on a thought, emotion, conversation or decision. Then zoom out and see the larger situation, the longer timeline, the relationships between things and where the current moment fits into the whole.

That movement between micro and macro creates perspective. We can see our own thinking while also seeing the world around it. We can notice assumptions, explore other possibilities and understand what is actually important in the bigger picture.

This is useful in life, creative work and business. It helps with communication, decision-making, planning and making things. A situation can be examined closely without losing sight of where it is going.

We don't need to step out of the story permanently. We simply need to remember that we can.

We are living the novel — and we can occasionally step back, look at the page, and see the whole story.

Self

What you think about

The mind tends to move in the direction you keep giving it.

A large part of life begins as an idea.

Before something becomes an action, a decision, a habit, a project or a direction, it usually exists in the mind first. What we repeatedly think about gradually becomes familiar, and what becomes familiar can influence what we notice, what we choose and what we do.

We are not simply thinking machines running a fixed program, though. We can choose where to place our attention.

Think of the mind as a field of possibilities. Whatever you keep returning to receives attention, becomes clearer, and has a greater chance of becoming part of your behaviour and your life.

This makes the quality and direction of your thinking surprisingly important.

If you want to change where your life is going, it can be useful to first look at where your mind is going every day.

What do you repeatedly imagine? What possibilities occupy your attention? What kind of future are you mentally rehearsing?

You don't have to pretend that everything will work exactly as imagined. The point is to give your mind a direction worth exploring.

Thought becomes attention.
Attention influences action.
Action creates experience.
Experience becomes part of the story of your life.

The interesting part is that you can enter this process consciously.

You can choose what deserves more of your attention, develop the ideas you want to explore, and gradually give your actions a direction.

Your thoughts are not your destiny. But they are one of the places where your future begins.

Design

The web looks the same

The web is not a magazine. It doesn't need to look like one.

There are thousands upon thousands of typefaces, endless layouts, animations, effects and visual styles. Yet open ten websites on your phone and they will probably look surprisingly similar: a menu, an image, some text, buttons, cards and a vertical scroll.

Desktop gives us more space, but the basic vocabulary is still familiar. And that's not a failure of web design. These patterns exist because they work. People know how to navigate them.

This is very different from a magazine.

A magazine had a physical page. Every spread was a designed composition. Typography, photography, columns, headlines, paper and sequence could create a visual world that belonged entirely to that publication. The design itself could become part of the identity.

A website is something different. It is an interface, a tool for accessing information and experiences. Especially on a phone, there is only so much room to reinvent the basic structure without making the experience worse.

So trying to make a website look completely unique can become a strange obsession. A different font, unusual animation or clever layout might make it visually distinctive, but being different is not automatically valuable.

The real difference is what the website contains.

The same familiar screen can present something boring or something fascinating. The quality of the information, photography, writing, ideas, editing and experience can make a website memorable without inventing a new way to arrange a screen.

The web already has its visual language.

You don't have to reinvent the language. You have to have something worth saying.

Media

The world through a screen

From paper pages to pixels, we are still deciding what deserves to become visible.

From curated pages to endless scroll

For a long time, magazines were one of the main ways people encountered a curated version of the world. Someone decided what was worth photographing, writing about or placing on the cover, and what did not deserve a page at all. This selection was the magazine's real value. It did not merely deliver information; it gave it order, scale and a point of view. The result was more than a collection of articles and images. It was a picture of reality shaped by editorial judgment.

Then the web arrived. Magazines moved onto screens, newspapers became websites, photography became video, and articles gained animation, sound, interaction and links. A website could be updated immediately, combine text with photography, video, maps and data, and reach an audience anywhere without printing or shipping. The web made distribution easier and expanded what a publication could contain, but it also weakened the limits that had made editorial choice necessary.

A printed magazine had a fixed number of pages. Space had to be earned, and every image, headline and paragraph competed for a limited place. The web appears limitless, so almost anything can be published, repeated and kept available indefinitely. This creates abundance, but abundance does not automatically create value. It creates a greater need for selection.

What people are actually looking for

People still need a reason to look.

We read because we are curious, want to understand something, seek inspiration or information, need entertainment, or simply want something interesting to spend a few minutes with. The medium changed. Attention did not.

The original promise of the web was instant access to information everywhere. But without meaningful editorial choice, abundance easily becomes noise: advertising systems, tracking, recommendations, recycled stories and endless variations of the same thing, all competing for another click. The problem is not only that there is too much information, but that too little of it has been meaningfully selected, developed or shaped.

Quantity became easy. Quality remained difficult.

Why the old questions still matter

A magazine's limitations once forced someone to ask: Why this story? Why now? Why this image? What does it add? Digital media removed many of those constraints, but not the need for those questions. In fact, it made them more important.

AI makes this distinction even clearer. It is now possible to produce enormous amounts of perfectly readable content without having anything meaningful to say. Words can be generated almost without limit, but information is not valuable simply because it exists, and content is not valuable simply because it is polished. Without editorial intention, AI can turn abundance into an imitation of publishing: content producing more content, with no clear reason for any of it to exist.

Publishing versus filling space

A magazine article, photograph, film, website or book can take a position, reveal something, connect ideas, document reality or make us see something differently. That requires substance and choice. Someone must decide what matters, what belongs together, what can be left out and what deserves the reader's limited attention. This is what separates publishing from filling space.

The advertising networks that dominate much of the web operate according to a different logic. They do not primarily ask whether something is useful, beautiful, accurate or worth remembering. They ask whether it can attract attention, generate data and produce another commercial interaction. Under that system, the reader becomes less a person than a measurable opportunity. The result is a media environment full of material designed to be consumed, but not necessarily experienced, remembered or valued. It is optimized for circulation rather than meaning.

Choosing what deserves attention

Perhaps the future of media is therefore not about producing more. There is already more than enough. It is about restoring the importance of editorial judgment: choosing better stories, information, images, ideas and ways of putting them together.

The web gives us extraordinary tools. It allows media to be immediate, global, interactive, ecological and multimedia. But tools do not decide what is worth making. Screens can deliver almost anything; they cannot tell us what deserves our attention.

That remains the work of people who are willing to choose.

The technology keeps changing. The central responsibility remains simple:

Do not merely add to the abundance. Make something worth looking at.

Process

How I solve problems

I tend to examine situations the way I examine a movie, a novel or a game.

When something needs to be solved, I don't necessarily stay inside the situation and try to figure it out from there. I mentally pull it apart and look at how it works.

I follow the timeline. I look at the people involved, their relationships, intentions and actions. I look at what caused what, what is happening now and what could happen next. Then I zoom out and examine the larger context in which all of this is happening.

It's similar to watching a movie. While following the story, you can also see the characters, their relationships, the sequence of events, the setting and the larger world around them. Or like examining a video game: you can look beyond what the player is doing and see the rules and systems underneath it.

The same way of looking can be applied to real situations.

There is a scene in Pulp Fiction where The Wolf arrives after Jules and Vincent have created a mess. They are inside the situation; he isn't. He looks at the whole thing and starts dealing with it as a sequence of practical steps. What seemed complicated from inside suddenly becomes almost ridiculously obvious from outside.

That is an important part of this way of thinking. When you're immersed in something, even obvious things can disappear from view. Distance and structure can make them visible again.

It also takes mental bandwidth. You need enough room to hold the details while simultaneously keeping track of the timeline, relationships, causes, consequences and larger context.

I don't just try to solve the situation. I try to understand the situation as a whole — and from there, work out how it works.

Self

Filtering reality

What we allow into our minds becomes part of the world we experience.

Bruce Lee was a Hong Kong–American martial artist, actor and philosopher. Although best known for his films and martial arts, his thinking extended well beyond fighting. He was interested in how people learn, adapt, think and live, and developed his own philosophy from different traditions and experiences.

One of his most famous principles was:

"Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."

It wasn't simply about martial arts. It was a way of approaching life: don't blindly accept a system just because it already exists. Take what is useful, discard what isn't, and develop something that is your own.

That principle feels particularly relevant in a world where we are surrounded by more information than we could ever consume.

Social networks, news websites, television, advertising, videos, notifications, opinions and recommendations are constantly competing for our attention. Most of it has little to do with what we actually want to do with our lives.

And some of it is almost absurd when you look at it from a distance. We can spend hours watching fictional characters live their lives on a television screen instead of living our own. We can endlessly scroll through trivial social media posts like consumers in an attention machine, or click one sensational headline after another simply because they were designed to make us curious.

We have a limited amount of actual life, yet an enormous amount of it can be spent watching other people, consuming manufactured information and reacting to things we never needed to know about in the first place.

The problem isn't that information exists. The problem is allowing everything to enter.

We experience reality through filters. We decide what to look at, what to listen to, who to talk to, what to read and what to spend time doing. Those choices gradually shape the small part of reality that we actually experience.

This makes filtering an important part of living.

Some information helps us understand something. Some gives us an idea, teaches us something, connects us with someone or simply gives us a good experience. Other information is repetitive, distracting, irrelevant or designed primarily to capture attention.

We don't need to consume everything simply because it is available.

We can ask: Is this useful? Is it interesting in a meaningful way? Does it contribute to the experience I want to have?

If not, we can reject it.

This doesn't mean avoiding the world. It means choosing which parts of the enormous world we allow to occupy our limited attention.

Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is your own.

Time

Designing your life

We are all designers of the experience we call life.

Designers work with limited space, time and resources. Life is no different.

A week is a useful place to start because it is a cycle. Seven days contain everything that keeps life moving. A day gives us 24 hours. A week gives us 168.

Consider a simple example: someone who works a regular job and has no other major obligations. Their week might look roughly like this:

Look at what this means. In this simplified example, half of the entire week is spent maintaining the organism itself: 56 hours sleeping and another 28 hours eating, exercising, washing, grooming and taking care of basic needs.

Then comes the other major commitment: working to obtain the resources that allow the organism and its life to continue. Forty hours of the week are exchanged for income.

So before we even start thinking about what we want to experience, much of the 168-hour cycle has already been allocated to staying alive and maintaining the conditions of life.

That makes the remaining time particularly interesting.

Being the designer of your own life does not mean controlling everything that happens. It means becoming more conscious of how you use the time and attention that you actually have.

Who do you spend time with? What do you look at and listen to? Where do you go? What do you eat? What do you learn? What do you make? What do you give your attention to? What do you keep doing simply because you have always done it?

You can observe the current design, decide what works, remove what doesn't, introduce something new and try again.

And perhaps the simplest measure of the result is also the most important one: how does it feel to actually live it?

A well-designed life should give us time in places we enjoy, with people we enjoy being around, doing things that feel worthwhile. The details will be different for everyone, but the principle is simple: if life is the experience happening every day, then the quality of that experience matters.

A life is not designed once. It is a repeating cycle. Every week gives you another version of the same basic canvas.

You live it, observe it, and redesign it as you go.

You only get so many hours. Where you spend them, and with whom, largely determines what your life feels like.

Time

Life is good and simple

There are only 16 waking hours in a day.

The day

Life can seem like a very complicated thing when we look at it as a whole. But we don't actually live our whole life at once. We live one day at a time.

A day has 24 hours. About eight are for sleep, leaving roughly sixteen hours to be awake and experience life. Those sixteen hours are the actual medium of our existence.

We work, eat, move, talk to people, go places, make things, learn, rest and enjoy ourselves. It is quite a simple system, and within those hours there is an enormous amount of life.

Filtering reality

A good life is largely about what we allow into those hours: the people we spend time with, the places we go, the things we do, the things we learn and the experiences we create.

It is also about what we choose to leave out. Hours in front of television. Endless social-network streams made to serve ads. Pointless behaviour and conversations with nonsense people. Radio commercials. Trash-portal news. Dead-end jobs. Traffic jams. Fast food. Dwelling on the past. Endless streams of fiction created by other people in the form of music, movies and books.

There is only so much actual life available to us, so it is worth being selective about what we give our time and attention to.

The experience

In that sense, we are all designing the experience of our own lives. We don't have to design everything at once. We have today.

Take care of yourself. Do useful work. Spend time with people you like. Go somewhere. Experience something. Make something. Enjoy the world.

Then tomorrow, you get another 24 hours.

Life is a huge thing when you look at it from a distance. Up close, it is simply a collection of days.

And perhaps that is what makes it so beautiful: sixteen waking hours, every day, to experience this strange and wonderful thing called life.

People

How to deal with difficult people

Don't get pulled into someone else's ego stream.

Difficult people are often heavily identified with their ego. Their thoughts, emotions, desires, fears, opinions and personal story become the centre of their experience, so ordinary situations can quickly become personal.

It helps to recognize this, because people can operate at very different levels of emotional and psychological development.

One way to picture it is as a scale between Star Trek and a telenovela.

In a Star Trek universe, characters generally operate within a larger context. They have personalities and disagreements, but there is a mission, a problem and a reality bigger than any individual character. People can disagree, exchange information, consider another perspective and still continue working together.

A telenovela operates much more through personal drama. Characters are immersed in their relationships, emotions, pride, jealousy, status and desires. Everything becomes part of their personal story. One emotional reaction produces another, which produces another, and the characters become caught in a continuous stream of reactions.

Real people can be anywhere on that scale.

Understanding where someone is operating from can help explain their behaviour, but it doesn't solve the situation. The important part is not to get pulled into the same stream.

When someone becomes emotional, remain outside the emotion. When they make something personal, keep looking at the actual subject. When they try to provoke a reaction, don't automatically provide one. Separate what is actually happening from the story being built around it.

Then deal with the situation directly.

Say what needs to be said. Clarify expectations. Correct misunderstandings. Set boundaries. If necessary, change the way the interaction happens or limit the person's access to you. If the behaviour continues and the relationship or situation is not necessary, disengage.

There is no requirement to convince a difficult person that they are being difficult. There is no requirement to win an argument. And there is no requirement to participate in somebody else's drama simply because they have invited you into it.

The useful skill is staying sufficiently outside the situation to choose your response instead of being pulled into an automatic reaction.

And sometimes the biggest improvement is simply to create more clarity: understand what is actually happening, what you want, what the other person wants, what matters and what doesn't.

Understand the pattern. Stay outside it. Deal with reality. Create clarity.

Self

How to create clarity

What you put into your mind affects how clearly you can see.

Clarity is not simply a matter of thinking harder. Your mental environment matters.

Some things make you clearer. Others make you confused, scattered or distracted. People can have that effect. So can information, entertainment, constant web surfing, social media, news, unhealthy habits and too many things competing for your attention.

You can consume more and more information and still understand less.

So start by noticing what increases clarity and what reduces it.

These aren't absolute rules. The useful question is: what happens to your clarity when you increase or decrease these things?

Look at your own life. Think about periods when you felt particularly clear. What were you doing? Who were you around? What were you consuming? How were you spending your time?

Then compare that with periods when you felt scattered or directionless.

There is often a pattern.

Once the noise is reduced, look at what actually matters. What do you want? What don't you want? What deserves your attention?

Put it into words.

A vague idea such as "I want a better life" doesn't give you much to work with. Make it specific. What does that life actually look like? Where are you? What are you doing? Who is around you? How do you spend an ordinary day?

You don't need the perfect answer. You need enough clarity to choose a direction.

And sometimes clarity cannot be found by thinking. You have to experience something. Start the project. Change the routine. Go somewhere. Talk to someone. Try it and see what happens.

Experience gives you information that thinking alone cannot.

You may discover that something you thought you wanted isn't actually what you want. Or that something you had never considered turns out to be important. Both are useful information.

Clarity is therefore not a final state. It is an ongoing process of reducing noise, understanding what matters, making it specific, acting, observing and adjusting.

Remove what creates confusion. Increase what creates clarity. Then act and see what happens.

Design

The art of magazines

What art directors and graphic editors actually do, and why no template can do it for you.

Why magazines exist

A magazine takes a subject — a place, an industry, a lifestyle, a moment — and turns it into something a reader actually wants to spend time with. Not just information delivered, but information made worth the attention. That's the whole point of the format. A press release states facts. A magazine makes you want to read them.

What an art director actually does

The job isn't decorating pages. It's understanding what the story is actually about, what matters in it, what the reader needs to feel or understand, and then finding the visual form that carries that content in a way that's interesting and valuable to read. Typography, image sizing, pacing across a spread, where the eye goes first — none of that is the goal. It's the toolkit used to serve the content. The content is the job. The layout is how you do it. Done well, that toolkit does one specific thing: it helps a reader take in more of a story in less time and less space — not draw attention to itself.

The particular skill I value most in a graphic editor isn't a layout skill at all. It's understanding the content: who it's for, how it's being communicated, what the actual experience is for the reader, whether it's valuable, whether it's interesting, whether it immerses someone or just gets flipped past. A high-level graphic editor was never really about the layout. It's about understanding content and communication — the layout is just where that understanding becomes visible.

The sequence that sells a magazine

A cover works through a sequence: get seen, get picked up, get flipped through, get bought. The visual is usually what a reader recognizes first, often ahead of the title itself, especially when the magazine is new. From the cover through the table of contents, everything has to consistently deliver on what it promised, because readers flip through specifically to check that promise before deciding whether to buy. If what's inside doesn't match what the cover implied, the sale doesn't happen — no matter how good the cover looked getting them there.

What a magazine page is actually made of

Strip a spread down and there are only three ingredients: images (or infographics), text, and white space. That's it. How those three are proportioned against each other on a given page is most of what the job actually is — not which typeface, not how many columns, but how much of each of those three things a story earns and where.

Every image needs its own decisions: the crop, and whether it carries a caption or a piece of content alongside it. A badly cropped photo can undercut a strong image just as easily as a weak photo can. The title, subtitle, and leads have one job each: pull the reader in, bring enough clarity that they know what they're about to read, and carry just enough intrigue to make that worth doing. Not decoration — a bridge between the image that stopped the flip and the text that has to hold the reader once they're in.

The text itself has changed in what it needs to prove. These days, AI can polish prose for anyone — clean sentences are no longer scarce. What actually separates good text now isn't writing style at all. It's whether it brings something fresh: real information, a real perspective, something the reader didn't already know or hadn't already considered. Style used to be a differentiator. It no longer is.

Design sells it once. Content sells it twice.

When someone flips through a magazine, they see the image first. That's not a design theory, it's just how eyes work. If the image doesn't stop the flip, nothing after it gets read. The title gets the next half-second. The lead gets the next few seconds, if the title earned it.

Design's job and content's job aren't the same job. On a newsstand, a reader gives a magazine somewhere around two or three seconds to earn a second look — that window is design's entire responsibility. It has to jump out, get picked up, get opened. But getting picked up once is a different problem from getting bought again next month, and that second problem belongs entirely to what was actually inside the issue. Readers are consistently far more forgiving of a rough layout than of weak content. Nobody puts a magazine back down because a column ran two millimeters too wide. They put it down because there was nothing worth reading inside.

Looking across why new magazines survive or fail, design keeps appearing as one contributing factor — but it consistently sits near the bottom of that list, not the top. It's genuinely hard to name a magazine that succeeded or failed purely because of its design. No magazine survives solely or even mostly on the strength of its design, and none fails purely because of it either. Success and failure trace back to something underneath the design, not the design itself.

Layout still has to be professional, readable, done properly — that's non-negotiable. But it's not where the difference is. Anyone can copy a grid. A competitor can study your column widths and your type system in an afternoon and reproduce them.

What they can't copy is the input. The photography that was actually commissioned. The writing that was actually good. The story that was actually worth telling. That's why premium magazines are premium — not because their layout is clever, but because the material underneath it is expensive and hard to get.

No template makes a great magazine

A template applies structure without understanding content. It doesn't know which image in a shoot should run huge and which should run small. It doesn't know where a story needs room to breathe and where it needs to move fast. It doesn't know what to cut. Those decisions, made well, spread after spread, are the actual craft — and no template makes them for you, because a template doesn't know what the story is.

My value was never the grid. It's the judgment — knowing which image, which story, which material is actually worth building a page around in the first place.

One story, four channels

Video is the fourth piece now, alongside print, web, and social — the same story told as something you watch instead of read. As technology kept advancing, the lines between all of these blurred. A magazine today isn't really "print that also has a website." It's one editorial operation producing across all of it at once, print and digital genuinely mixed together rather than one being a copy of the other.

But underneath all four channels, what people are actually searching for hasn't changed: useful information, or inspiration. Something that gives them a real sense of value — whether that's genuinely useful, genuinely inspiring, or just genuinely interesting enough to be worth the ten minutes spent waiting at the hairdresser. All three of those count. None of them are lesser than the others.

That's harder to deliver now than it used to be, because the volume of media — much of it AI-produced, all of it competing for the same attention — has made it genuinely difficult to tell what's actually worth your time at first glance. Information overload is real.

But that's not entirely bad. It raises the bar. When producing content is easy and nearly free, the advantage shifts to whoever is still willing to do the harder thing — actual editorial judgment, real curation, a real point of view — precisely because most producers, human or AI, default to whatever's fastest and easiest to make. The channel doesn't matter. Print, web, social, or video — the same scarce skill decides whether any of it is worth anyone's attention.

So what actually makes a good magazine

I've been in media and publishing since 1999, working across nearly every niche category — from small regional titles to global names like National Geographic and Men's Health.

Strip it down and it's really just good text and good images. Those two things can be arranged in a thousand different ways, and any of those arrangements will work as long as they respect the standards of good visual communication — a title that does its job, a subtitle that does its job, leads and section titles that do theirs. That's the formula. It's not fixed in one shape.

Each niche develops its own style, and that's not arbitrary — it's the style matching the audience. Luxury tends toward sophisticated, generous white space. Something built around adrenaline reaches for bolder, more distinctive elements. Neither is more "designed" than the other. They're both correct, for who they're actually for.

It's a bit like looking at a magazine the way you'd look at a website. There's content and structure and images — the substance — and then there's the skin: layout, design, typography, the visual system wrapped around that substance. Good content stays good content whatever skin is applied to it. National Geographic isn't National Geographic because of a particular font or grid — even its own logo has changed over the years. It's the images and the text. And images and text come from individual people, not from a style guide.

So what a magazine actually needs, underneath all of it, is people: someone with an eye for a photograph worth running, someone who can actually write, and — more than either of those — someone with the judgment to decide what the story should even be about in the first place. Content that's relevant, informational, and genuinely interesting to whoever the intended reader is, whether that's a teenager, a scuba diver, a fashion enthusiast, or a business owner. A publication has to give its reader a consistent sense of value, issue after issue, or that reader stops showing up.

Then there's the part of the business that rarely gets said out loud: advertisers, not newsstand sales, are usually what actually keeps a magazine alive. Every niche builds its own ecosystem of advertisers around it, and that changes the real question a magazine has to answer. It's not only "what does the audience want" — it's also "what do advertisers find compelling." And what advertisers find compelling turns out to be the same handful of things: authenticity, relevance, consistency, and a sense of real perceived value. Which loops right back to the audience anyway — an advertiser only cares because real people are actually reading, which only happens because the content was worth their time in the first place.

So a good magazine needs curious, professional people who can produce content that's valuable — not just informationally, but distinctively and genuinely interesting. Without that, a magazine is just a nice printed object. It can look good. But it has no essence, no emotion attached to it, nothing valuable inside, and nothing that inspires anyone to come back for the next issue.

AI

AI and creative work

AI makes production faster. Deciding what to make is still the hard part.

Everything got faster.

Writing, design, image-making, video, coding. Things that used to take days, teams and specialised skills can now be produced by one person in hours, sometimes minutes.

That changes the economics of creative work. When execution becomes dramatically cheaper, you don't need as many people to execute it.

But something didn't become cheaper.

Knowing what to make.

AI can produce an image. It can write an article. It can build a website. It can generate a video, compose music or write the code for an application.

None of that answers the more important question:

Should this exist?

And if it should, what should it be?

AI is extraordinarily good at producing possibilities. It is much less useful at deciding which possibility is worth pursuing.

Give it a vague problem and you can get an impressive amount of output very quickly. But output isn't the same thing as a solution. A perfectly generated image can still be pointless. A beautifully written article can still have nothing to say. A working website can still solve the wrong problem.

A new creative toolbox

The tools are already spreading across almost every part of creative work.

For thinking and research, there are general-purpose systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, alongside research-focused tools such as Perplexity.

For images, Midjourney has become a major tool for visual exploration and art direction, while Adobe Firefly, FLUX and Ideogram cover different parts of the image-generation and production workflow.

For video, tools such as Runway, Google Veo, Kling and Pika can generate and transform moving images in ways that would previously have required considerably more production work.

For voice and music, ElevenLabs handles remarkably capable synthetic voices, while Suno and Udio approach music from a similar generative direction.

For design and interfaces, Figma, Canva and the increasingly AI-powered Adobe Creative Cloud bring generation and automation directly into familiar design workflows.

And for code and websites, Cursor, Claude Code and Replit can turn natural-language instructions into working software and help developers work with existing codebases.

The interesting thing isn't that one of these tools can do everything.

It's that they can be combined.

A designer might use ChatGPT to develop an idea, Midjourney to explore the visual territory, Photoshop and Firefly to construct the final image, Runway or Veo to animate it, ElevenLabs to create the voice and Premiere to finish the piece.

The toolbox is getting bigger while the distance between an idea and a finished thing is getting smaller.

So what becomes valuable?

This is why I don't think the most important creative skill in the AI era is learning how to operate AI.

It's learning how to direct it.

Knowing what matters. Knowing what doesn't. Having enough understanding of a subject to recognise a good idea. Knowing when something is finished, when it needs another ten minutes, and when it needs to be thrown away completely.

The tools changed.

The amount of execution one person can handle changed dramatically.

But the fundamental creative problem remains the same:

Figure out what is worth making, and then make it real.

Design

Adobe and Affinity

Three applications built an industry. One application is now challenging the model.

For decades, professional graphic design has had a familiar software trio: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Photoshop handles photographs and pixel-based work. Illustrator handles vectors, illustration, logos and graphics. InDesign handles pages, typography and publications.

It is a division of labour that became so normal that most designers stopped questioning it. You edit an image in Photoshop, draw something in Illustrator, then place everything into InDesign.

Adobe has built an enormous creative ecosystem around this model. The three applications are deeply embedded in professional studios, publishing, advertising, education and production workflows.

And I don't think that is going away anytime soon.

There is simply too much accumulated knowledge, infrastructure, existing work and professional workflow around Adobe. In highly specialised fields, compatibility and established production processes can matter just as much as the features of the software itself.

Then there was Affinity

Affinity originally approached the same territory with separate applications: Designer, Photo and Publisher.

But in 2025, after becoming part of Canva, Affinity changed considerably. The new Affinity brought vector design, photo editing and page layout together into a single application — and made it free.

That changes the comparison.

Instead of having three applications with clearly separated purposes, you can work on a document and simply use whatever tools you need.

This is one of the things I particularly like about it.

If I'm designing a page and decide that an image needs editing, I don't necessarily have to leave the layout, open another application, edit the image and return to the document. I can work on the image inside the same environment.

It sounds like a small thing.

It isn't.

The less you have to think about the software itself, the more you can think about the thing you're making.

Not necessarily an Adobe replacement

I don't see Affinity as something that simply makes Adobe obsolete.

Adobe remains the established standard in many highly professional creative fields, and there are workflows where its ecosystem, specialised tools and compatibility are important.

Affinity is also simpler in some respects. That's not necessarily a criticism. Sometimes simpler is exactly what you want.

For a lot of graphic design, publishing, illustration, image editing and everyday creative work, you don't necessarily need the enormous ecosystem around Adobe. You need good tools that let you make the thing.

And Affinity is very good at that.

It can replace many Adobe workflows, particularly for an independent designer, small studio or anyone who doesn't need every specialised feature in Creative Cloud.

And then there is the rather remarkable part:

It's free.

That makes it much easier to recommend, experiment with and learn.

Adobe built the dominant professional design environment around three powerful applications.

Affinity is asking a different question:

What if most of the things a graphic designer does could simply happen in one place?

I like that idea.

Not because I think everyone should abandon Adobe, but because good software should serve the work rather than make the work serve the software.