The constant barrage of creativity and beauty at the Design Indaba conference, held for three days every February in Cape Town, is exhausting. Halfway through, it’s easy to reach saturation point. “Oh God, not another perfect, glorious idea translated into another perfect, glorious chair/light/table … ” But then flashes of genius burst out, breaking all […]
Anne Taylor
Anne has 17 years experience as a journalist, mainly spent working for newspapers in Joburg before she joined the start-up team of Independent Online way back in 1999. She has been hooked to all things digital ever since. Now based in Grahamstown, she works part time as a freelance writer and editor. She is also the fulltime mother to two young children.
Posted inLifestyle
‘The hard part is getting the idea’
Small white dots, each with a single letter from the words “Issey Miyake”, reconfigure themselves on a black background, transforming unmistakably into a model marching down the catwalk. They multiply, alter and seemingly simple changes in position turns them into other figures and forms. The drumbeat of the soundtrack stopped our hearts and the cleverness […]
Posted inLifestyle
Masters of unreality get real
Reality and humanity strode on to the stage at this year’s Design Indaba, responding perhaps to the wake-up call offered by the global economic crisis. As Canadian designer and change activist Bruce Mau pointed out on day one of this most chichi of conferences, the current crisis shows us that what we are currently doing […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Media gives Michelle Obama a dressing down
Will the world ever be ready for a female American president? Especially, God forbid, one with bad fashion sense? Look, I love Obama as much as the next South African. It was a thrilling election night: we were collectively moved and touched when Barak Obama took to the stage to acknowledge victory. It was exciting, […]
Posted inLifestyle
How Dick and Fanny became Rick and Frannie
I am discovering that I am increasingly grateful for political correctness. Despite my childhood addiction to anything written by Enid Blyton, I find I am unable to read any of my old Noddy collection to my children. It’s not just the absurd and depressingly weak storylines or the whole lot of spanking that goes on […]
Posted inLifestyle
Can Mom and Dad ever be equal?
Last night I hemmed a pair of my son’s pants. The only thing that qualifies me for that is my gender. Why should I know how to hem a pair of trousers? Why is it that I sat, bent over a pair of bright red corduroys, while my husband watched rugby on Supersport? The answer […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Touch me, feel me: The internet as sensory organ
The Internet is a global stethoscope that allows us to listen in to the world’s most intimate secrets. It is an extension of our nervous system, the thing that connects one of us to the other, allowing us to experience the world and transform our emotional responses. And the ways in which Professor Shinichi Takemura, […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
An idea so good you can eat it
Anne Taylor blogs for Thought Leader from the Design Indaba in Cape Town. Dutch designer Marije Vogelzang laid out a feast of delicious ideas that the audience gobbled up at this year’s Design Indaba, now on in Cape Town: tablecloths of dough draped over shapes so it dries into edible bowls, revolvers made out of […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Playing designer dot-to-dot at the Indaba
Anne Taylor blogs for Thought Leader from the Design Indaba in Cape Town When you’re knee-deep in all that’s trendy and chic at the Design Indaba, there’s something deeply reassuring about a man who is totally unpretentious. Especially if he’s a world-class, world-famous designer. Ivan Chermayeff is clear and simple — and witty in an […]
Posted inMedia
What readers really, truly want
Grumpy old media critic Jack Shafer has accused online news media of turning their sites into “virtual tabloids by peppering their home pages with the most sordid and bizarre stories that can be culled from the world’s news wires”. Shafer says website tabloids, such as CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Foxnews.com, celebrate and rely on stories that […]
Posted inMedia
News companies are paddling without a compass
In the week that a South African journalist was fired for moaning about his employer on a competitor’s website, the Los Angeles Times launched a spectacular new blog, called the Readers’ Representative Journal. It is a thing of beauty, I tell ya. Clear, lovely and as well put together as only an American news organisation […]
Posted inMedia
You were wrong. Admit it!
Newspapers often get it wrong. These days, journalism faces as much of a threat from a lack of credibility as it does from a digital transformation. And, frankly, the way South African news operations handle their errors creates a gap of trust between them and their readers. Take the Sunday Times‘s recent story about Christine […]