I’m not going to talk about Brexit. It’s utterly depressing and I’ve been trying to distract myself from it all week to varying success. Circles of concern, and all that.

This week has been a heads-down sort of week after my couple of weeks travel just gone, and another couple of coming up. I wish it were a pause, but it isn’t really. I complained on Twitter a little about how everything on a website looked the same.

There were some interesting responses. As usual, Twitter isn’t really the place for anything other than verbal drive-bys (I’m talking about me, there). The comments that got me thinking were about how designers today are less focussed on look and more focussed on scale. We’re increasingly building the machinery of the web which is run by robots. We’re the conductors of the choir.

Things have been quiet at home. The usual: school, dog walking, trying to cope with a building site next to our house. I mentioned last week we got a new fridge freezer and I’m still enjoying that. Had some lovely news from my Dad that he is in the clear following two years of complications with Pancreatitis.

A few things caught my eye on the web this week:

Ping is a lovely looking geometric sans-serif typeface. Look at that dot above the ‘i’!

Barnardo’s has an open intranet! What a great idea. Intranet’s are the most awful places. Hidden behind closed doors they reveal themselves to you when you’re at a moment of crisis: ‘I need to book holiday’, ‘Where is that form I need?’. Having this open means you need to, well, actually do the work of designing for user need. Not only that, but it’s a great hiring tool. To get to see how an organisation works, look at its intranet.

This is what got me upset. Convergence of design might not be the worst thing to happen if it means faster, accessible, easy to use (and trust) tech products. I know the conflict in me is irrational. They all look the same. Why is this a good thing?

Like many designers who went to school in the 80’s and 90’s in the UK, The Face magazine was held up as defining a generation of editorial designers and their work. Along with David Carson, Neville Brody is someone whose work I have burnt into my typographic design vocabulary. To read The Face is making a return put a big smile on my, er, face.