This week I’ve been writing more about Creative Friction on our Attention Matters newsletter, and solving creative friction for one of our clients as we’re starting a new series of remotely shot video podcasts. Getting kit to contributors in places like Colombia and Indonesia is one of the problems we love solving at Storythings. If you’d like help developing and running formats with global contributors, hit reply and we’d love to talk!

💻 DATA POINT: Sometimes it feels like a race to understand the ‘tells’ of AI produced content whilst we still can. This report has a great analysis of Claude’s new Opus 5.5 model versus ChatGPT. It found that Claude’s texts are getting closer to resembling human writing, whilst ChatGPT is getting further away. HIlariously, Opus 5.5 uses em dashes 99% less often than Opus 5. As someone that likes the em dash, I hope this means humans can start using them again!

Awesome Art Prints Of Iconic Nightclubs (Poster gallery)

I Am Like You - An Essay Written By An AI Consortium (Scrollytelling essay)

The Small Ideas Initiative (Campaign for small ideas that make a big difference)

Made In State School (Blue plaque style scheme for state school alumni)

In Defense Of The Detour (Scrollytelling essay)

The Sound Of Business (4.5-min watch)

The Return Of The iPod (New Product)

Don’t Cook That! (Collection of gross or deadly recipes)

Railpass - a Youtube Train Simulator (Watch for as long as your journey)

📣 What We Can Learn About Creative Friction From Condé Nast (5-min read)📣

Awesome Art Prints Of Iconic Nightclubs (Poster gallery)
Emily from Storythings shared this in our Slack, and as she used to write for MixMag, she’s probably been to more of these than I have! I scrolled through looking for iconic Glasgow nightclubs from my time at Art School in the early 90s, and sure enough, the Volcano was there - it was the location for the nightclub scene in Trainspotting, and many very messy nights out…

I Am Like You - An Essay Written By An AI Consortium (Scrollytelling essay)
From our friends at Aboard, this is a really interesting visual essay written through a consortium of frontier models. The visual presentation of this is what makes it work, especially the personalised side notes and the way the whole thing breaks down at the end.

The Small Ideas Initiative (Campaign for small ideas that make a big difference)
From Polly Mackenzie’s excellent newsletter, this is a great idea, with the backing of the UK’s most respected public figure, Martin Lewis. It’s another sign of a return to the kind of retail politics that has worked for Mamdani in New York - politicians and society can work together to solve things that actually make a difference in our lives. Nathan J Robinson described this as ‘Richard Scarry Socialism’, and as a huge fan of Richard Scarry’s illustrated kids books, I’d vote for that every time!

Made In State School (Blue plaque style scheme for state school alumni)
On a similar note, I love this campaign from the state-school network 93% Club, asking people to vote for alumni from their state schools, so they can install a red plaque celebrating them. As a state-school kid (for our US readers - public school) who then was astonished at the number of people working in Media from private schools, I’m right behind anything we can do to celebrate the successes of kids from state schools.

In Defense Of The Detour (Scrollytelling essay)
This is a lovely essay from Giorgia Lupi, a partner at legendary design firm Pentagram. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been researching and writing a lot about three types of creative friction - good, bad and hidden. The kind of detours Lupi describes in this essay are great examples of ‘good friction’. Celebrate that, don’t outsource it AI!

The Sound Of Business (4.5-min watch)
Storythings Alumni Duncan Geere was commissoned by Sage to make a new sonic data visualisation work based on data Sage has from their customers. This great video shows how Duncan and Miriam Quick, the composer at Loud Numbers, transformed that data into a new symphony.

The Return Of The iPod (New Product)
Our audio guru Chris shared this in the Storythings Slack, which prompted instant nostalgia for the early days of the iPod. It’s a new product from a company called Sudo, and is another symptom of a trend for products that get us off smartphones. Although it’s so similar to the iPod I can’t believe it doesn’t break their patents.

Don’t Cook That! (Collection of gross or deadly recipes)
This is a fun collection of old time recipes that are weird, gross or actually deadly. We worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC a few years ago, and they were having great fun trying out recipes from their huge collection. I don’t think any of them were as deadly as these kids’ bonbons cast in lead moulds.

Railpass - a Youtube Train Simulator (Watch for as long as your journey)
This is lovely and very soothing. It’s a simple graphical interface to some of the thousands of Youtube videos shot out the window of rail journeys. When I hit random I ended up on the Gatwick to London Victoria route, which is a journey I make many times a month!

📣 What We Can Learn About Creative Friction From Condé Nast (5-min read)📣
As mentioned a few times above, I’m exploring creative friction for our Attention Matters mailing list, and this week had a great chat with Ian Edgar, who was a key part of Condé Nast’s Youtube strategy. He worked on many of their hit formats, including Autocomplete Interviews and Storythings fave 5 Levels. If you haven’t already, please take 10mins to fill out our multiple choice questionnaire on how friction affects your own creative workflow.

We’re big fans of design agency Made By Many at Storythings. Tim Malbon was very generous with his time and insights when I started Storythings 15 years ago, and Anjali used to work there! So we loved this post from Tim sharing how they have built agent-friendly playbooks for how they work at Made By Many. Well worth a read, and inspiration for creating your own playbook (something we’re doing at Storythings right now!)

READ TIM’S POST HERE>

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team