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Hello!

The thing about having a lot of clients in the US is that Thanksgiving gives us a little break, but then there’s a headlong rush to get things done before xmas. But don’t worry - we’re nearly there! If you’re in the buying/giving mode, two Brighton based arts organisations currently have campaigns running that could do with your support. Our lovely landlords Lighthouse are hosting a gala auction with lots of great items, including unique artworks, signed Brighton shirts and a stay in an actual Lighthouse. And our friends at Little Green Pig have a fundraising campaign to support their work with young people and creative writing, with every bid getting match funding. We support both organisations at Storythings, so please help out if you can!

RIght then. On to the stories!

Matt

How Manchester’s Design Past is Informing its Present (5-minute read)

How Tall is Bono? (pretty large rabbit hole)

Famous Logos Drawn From Memory (5-minute read)

52 things I Learned in 2024 (7-minute read)

The UX of Lego Interface Panels (12-minute read)

Your Audience Team is Now Your Creator Team (3-minute read)

Using Notebook LLM to create AI Political Podcasts (15-minute read/listen)

How Youtube Ate Podcasting (2-minute read)

Radiohead’s Creep sung with Indian Raag (3-minute watch)

Three Tips for Buying Great Gifts (1-minute read)

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How Manchester’s Design Past is Informing its Present (5-minute read)
Manchester’s creative community is full of iconic design legends, but the shift from regeneration to gentrification is causing rifts between the old guard and the new guard. Mike Emerson, who designed the Joy Division-inspired Tote bag above, says he wants designers to be part of the resistance to commercialisation - “not commenting from a place of long lost nostalgia, but from a belief that things could, and should, be a lot better than they are.”

How Tall is Bono? (Bono-sized rabbit hole)
Earlier this week I googled, for reasons I won’t explain, ‘how tall is Bono?’ and ended up on this remarkable site. I can’t believe I’ve never seen it before, and there’s something mesmerising and compelling about the design and layout. If you ever need to know the precise dimensions of something - from Baby Yoda to a private jet - this is the rabbit hole you need.

Famous Logos Drawn From Memory (10-minute read)
We’ve posted a lot recently in Attention Matters about brand marketing and metrics, and this is a brilliant illustration of how powerful brands really are (or aren’t). Signs.com asked 156 Americans to draw 10 famous brand logos from memory, and the results are, well, mixed. I’m pretty sure one of the Dominos attempts is a Pizza Hut logo. That’s gotta hurt.

52 things I Learned in 2024 (7-minute read)
It’s that time of year again when Tom Whitwell shares his epic and beautifully curated list of surprising facts he learned over the last 12 months. It’s a great format, and over the years it’s developed into not just a fun list, but a testament to Tom’s research and curiosity. That’s the power of a great archive - over time, it helps you understand more about the people who curate it.

The UX of Lego Interface Panels (12-minute read)
There’s nothing better than someone going deep down a rabbit hole, and this is a great example from 2020. UX designer George Cave analyses the tiny visual displays from various Lego sets, and with the help of detours into Soviet control room architecture, finds out how easy it would be for minifigs to actually use them.

Your Audience Team is Now Your Creator Team (3-minute read)
The NiemanLab annual predictions are always a great source of short, sharp takes on the future of news and media. We loved this one from Ryan Kellet, who argues that as journalists spin out to run their own niche media brands, audience teams will want to do the same, building a new ecosystem of creator-led media: “Each of these roles can move fully independent themselves as well. These are flexible, worthy careers for talented humans who want to work outside the corporate hierarchy.”

Using Notebook LLM to create AI Political Podcasts (15-minute read/listen)
A few months ago, Notebook LLM’s AI podcast creation function created a huge stir online, with its uncanny ability to generate human sounding audio from a curated list of resources. The Columbia Tow Center have used it for an excellent research project, creating podcasts about the nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. They created different versions trained on mainstream or conservative media, and with prompts to either include or exclude references to Gaetz’s sex trafficking accusations. The results were then uploaded to podcast platforms for distribution, testing not only the ability to produce AI political podcasts, but whether the platforms would do anything to prevent purely AI podcasts being uploaded. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

How Youtube Ate Podcasting (5-minute read)
Talking of podcast platforms, podcasts have long had a discovery problem, but this is now being solved via video, first as clips on TikTok, then clicking through to Youtube for the whole podcast. Although this might sound like a positive step, it is a sign that the open and democratic world of podcasting is finally submitting to domination by the major tech platforms: “Podcasting’s shift to video is interesting and broadly significant, but the most important change, as far as the industry is concerned, is probably the corresponding and slightly lagging shift to centrally controlled platforms like YouTube and Spotify.”

Radiohead’s Creep sung with Indian Raag (3-minute watch)
Thanks to Ash Mann for including this in his excellent weekly newsletter of interesting things. Musician Avie Sheck asked his mum, a classically trained Indian singer, to accompany him on a cover of Radiohead’s Creep. Her harmonies and added Indian Raag (a format for melodic improvisation) take the emo classic into a beautiful new dimension.

Three Tips for Buying Great Gifts (1-minute read)
We don’t do gift guides at Storythings. But we loved these three short principles for how to approach gifting. Read these and remember them before you brave the shops (or browser tabs) this weekend.

And that’s it for this week. As always, if you like the newsletter, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you have ideas of how we can improve it, we’d always love to hear from you!

Have a great weekend!

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the rest of Team Storythings