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Ideas for being a good strategist
A big shout out first of all to Rob Estreitinho who inspired this post full of ideas for strategists. I have built on his work. Some of the suggestions are what works for me or Rob and may not work for you – but give them a try.

Ideas
1. Read widely – thank goodness my Irish emigrant parents instilled in me the Irish love of reading. My Dad was an apprentice at 14, but has never given up a love of books if he had the chance. My Mum reads less with the lethargy of age creeping up on her, but they both seeded the idea of reading widely to me.
2. Get an RSS reader – find middle-aged people who used the net back in the early 2000s to early 2010s seriously and mention Google Reader to them and watch them go misty-eyed longing for forgotten online halcyon days. It didn’t make you depressed or hate yourself. While Google Reader is long gone, the underlying technology that enabled it is very much alive. It’s called RSS and Atom – same, same but different. All the RSS readers work along similar ideas; over time you find good sites, you follow them and get more good content from as they update. My tool of choice is Newsblur. But if you want to continue to rely TikTok, Twitter and Truth Social – you do you.
3. Your bookmarks are gold – on the bookmark bar of my browser I have a range of tools. I use Pinboard to keep every bookmark I have used in my work life for a long time. I go back through them to find quality content to start from for insights when kicking off a project. Anything you get elsewhere will be filtered through context and algorithm rather than quality. I also have a hard drive of old reports that I can go through and over-stuffed bookshelves.
4. Read weirdly – As a child I read everything in my Uncle’s farm house from the Connacht Tribune , Irish Farmers Journal to Old Moore’s Almanac and Ireland’s Own. Later on, one of the great privileges for me of going to college and then going to university, was the opportunity pick up odd books that would never have otherwise read. I would also browse County Books – a discount book store which allowed me to pick up unrelated academic books like Paul Stoneman’s Handbook of the Economics of Innovation and Technological Change – which is still invaluable today. Using an RSS reader and following other’s recommendations provides a similar opportunity. Finally, subscribe to Matt Muir’s Web Curios to get the edges of the web.
5. Make your arguments simple. – Going through this filtration process helps make ideas stronger as well as more accessible. My Myer-Briggs type is apparently INTJ ‘the architect’ – I have a clear vision of the thing. But going simpler allows you take stakeholders with you. Ideas only gain power as they pass from person-to-person.
6. Now make them simpler than that. When I thought about this, it reminded me of Matt Holt, who talked about good strategy being pain. This squeezing process is more than an expression, but a process that forms the quality of an idea.
7. Use simple words your mum would understand, or use simple words your mum’s mum would understand – as suggestions go were curiously Ogilvian in nature. However I when thought it, they were less helpful pieces of advice than they appear. Older people tend to be more articulate and may have more arcane terms. One thing generative AI does allow us to do is test how an idea would be expressed based on a notional character. So think about simplicity, through the lens of possible audiences.
8. Always start with a written document – I have found the notes.app on my Mac liberating. I can take my notes with me on my iPhone. I dump in links, language, ideas in to be played with and moved around. Insights and ideation become hybridised as a process.
9. Know a good meme account for the category you work with. If you don’t know one start with Reddit threads and you start to get a good feel for the themes and memes coming through.
10. Know a really good podcast your audience would listen to. Searching for podcast recommendations and listening to them can help you get into the right headspace for a given project.
11. Assume every problem has a fascinating side to it. If you work in strategy there are a few parts of the job to inspire your love of it. The ability to read around a subject, discover the problem at the centre of the challenge you are working, wrestle with that kernel of truth to give creatives something to work with. The process of wrestling the problem usually unearths the fascination at the centre.
12. Start your presentations with a twist. If you don’t have audience interested at the beginning, you won’t hold it until the end of your presentation. In terms of my personal writing, I use the background behind the number marking the edition of the newsletter to engage the curiosity of the reader.
13. End your presentations with a lesson. I like this as it reminds me of the old presentation training maxim: tell’em what you are going to tell’em, tell’em it, tell’em what you just told them. Ideas like advertising get better through repetition. The end summary can be just verbal, it doesn’t need to be in slideware.
14. If you’re feeling spicy, end your presentations with a cautionary note. Being provocative and interesting is good, BUT know your audience before attempting this.
15. Don’t obsess with strategy frameworks. Strategy frameworks have their place. They are great for establishing a common language – the classic example being the marketing funnel. They’re also good at dealing with the mental blankness that comes from an empty page or screen. But they can also be modified, built-upon or thrown away depending on what solving the problem needs.
16. Don’t bore your client with strategy frameworks. I’d argue, don’t bore your client. Their problems should be interesting, otherwise why would they get someone like you or me to try and solve them? If we are boring the client, there’s one of three things happening: you’re not solving their problem, you’ve gone off-mission away from the problem and the likely solution or the solution doesn’t solve the problem.
17. Remember the audience will never read your strategy. The only exception to this is the occasional Venn diagram-based advert creative.
18. Don’t interrupt people, especially when they’re demonstrating passion. Do remember to record it, otherwise you might be lost in the flow and lose the insights.
19. Notice what people say and play it back to them. This is a classic technique that is taught to salespeople and was in Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. It provides a number of benefits:
  - Ensures that you’ve understood what they wanted to say and you’re clear about it. It’s easier to get an explanation now, rather than later on.
  - Carnegie liked it because he recognised that people liked to be understood.
  - Allows you to build a common vocabulary with the other person.
20. Start sentences with “I wonder if”. Use this sparingly, but at the right time it is a powerful way of testing ideas and directions.
21. Observe people, but do so discreetly and don’t weird them out:
  - In coffee shops
  - At a greasy spoon cafe or the Motorway services station
  - On public transport
  - At trade shows. What stuff gets dumped from the collection of brochures they have. What way to people navigate a client’s stand. What seems to be attracting the most attention and the least? .
22. Say “I don’t know yet” when you don’t know… yet.
23. Don’t worry about memorising everything you read. If you can retain it all brilliant, but it’s not an exam, you can go back and check references if you are unsure. Instead it’s much more important to understand the topology of the problem and the direction that a solution would need to take.
24. Do use index cards – one of my favourite things on Amazon is sets of index cards and steel rings to hold them together in one corner. I use this to build my written memory on a clients business and products. I find the act of writing it down helps to build memory structures. I was inspired in this by Umberto Eco’s How To Write A Thesis.
25. Study ways to find out about things. I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to tools, reports etc – as are other people I know. One of the areas that strategists have been ignoring up until now, but could learn a lot on in the hobbyist world of OSINT and your local library.
26. Use Claude AI to explain your own argument back to you – was a recommendation of Rob, I am using Gemini at the moment and it performs a similar role. However I do see the benefit of getting a couple of sets of viewpoints to pressure test your thinking. Previously, I would have done this with colleagues like Rob Fuller or Zoe Healey – generative AI kind of fills the gap and has some serendipity in its inherent weirdness. Whatever way you do it, stress-test your ideas.
27. Believe people when they say you did great, if it’s written down keep a record of it for your appraisal. But don’t let your personal sense of worth be defined by your career – you are more than your job.
28. Write with a thicker pen – it forces your handwriting to be clearer, letter shapes better defined. But use a thinner pen when thinking about structure and interconnections. I am a great believer when listening to talks or thinking about presenting a subject to mind map it out on engineering squared paper first. From the flow of interconnections, a natural order emerges.
29. Write with a bigger typeface – I would focus on legibility rather than size. And no comic sans – not even in irony.
30. Always change to 1.5 line spacing.
31. Don’t cheat on your one-pagers by making the typeface smaller. With generative AI now, why would you even do this?
32. Have strategy pals – but not to the exclusion of types of people. Try and have a diverse social network. It’s very easy to live in an advertising and media industry eco-system and out of touch with the general public.
33. Cmd+S every other minute. It’s a good idea to build this up as muscle memory, even if unnecessary in services like Google Docs and Office 365. Latency rather than a software crash are the most likely killer of documents nowadays.
34. Take care to manage your browser tabs, if you use a social bookmarking service, you can always go back to them later.
35. Buy a random magazine. Your clients might be all about social platforms but magazines, have been, and still are great windows into culture. I have a stack of Japanese style magazines for inspiration and try and buy a local magazine to leaf through when travelling. They are a fountain of future ideas.
36. Do a walking meeting. I miss doing walking meetings, at the time I had a colleague that lived within walking distance which made the process ideal. I also realise that this is often hard to do, when your project manager has filled you up on back-to-back calls. One thing I remember doing at Unilever was dialling into conference calls on my phone and listening in while walking around my office floor at 100 Victoria Embankment. Admittedly it’s not practical to do when presentations are being shared, or when your contribution is required to be engaged as a note taker.
37. Breathe while you talk. You have nervous energy, you want to get it all out. Breathing slows your thinking down so those finer elements won’t slip out of your grasp. I know people who swear by Toastmasters as a help to master this.
38. Daydream for no good reason. We live by the tyranny of the calendar on our phones or laptops and have lost sight of the time needed to think and let ideas worm their way out of our subconscious to the conscious mind at the front of our thoughts.
39. Have the basics of understanding wetware. The currency of being a strategist is people. We are the voice of the customer (people), clients (who also happen to be people) rely on us to solve problems, creatives rely on our translation of noise into something they, as people, can relate to. We don’t do all that alone, so thank people who’ve helped you and be generous with compliments. It won’t kill you, generally others won’t remember what you’ve done as much as how you made them feel.
40. Be specific. This manifests itself in lots of ways from reflecting the client’s problem back to being single-minded in a brief given to creatives. Specificity is its own form of clarity.
41. Listen more than you speak. Good advice for life, not just strategy.
42. Write a list. Lists are useful brainstorming device, but they are also really useful for self-organisation. Post-it notes are your friends.
43. Write a stream of consciousness and be prepared to cut and paste it around to organise your thoughts rather like ‘fridge magnet poetry’.
44. Give yourself 10 minutes to write the clearest answer you can think of. Simplify it in a few seconds with generative AI. Then feel ok that you’ll probably need time to get to a simpler one and remain better when the obvious simplification comes from colleagues.
45. If it feels obvious, stick with it. This reminded me of Dieter Rams principles of design which extend well beyond design and into problem solving and life in general:
  - Good design is innovative
  - Good design makes a product useful
  - Good design is aesthetic
  - Good design makes a product understandable
  - Good design is unobtrusive
  - Good design is honest
  - Good design is long-lasting
  - Good design is thorough down to the last detail
  - Good design is as little design as possible
46. Say your argument out loud. This is part of pressure-testing your own thinking. It’s also something that generative AI services can help with as both devil’s advocate and to ‘steel man’ your own ideas.
47. Admit when you are wrong. Being wrong isn’t bad, it’s part of the learning process and will help you get to better ideas. A former colleague of mine used to talk about being interesting as more important than being right – there are traps in that statement but also something powerful in it.
48. Say “sorry” when you have to. Sorry is a powerful disarming tool. It helps you get to both interesting and right faster.
49. Assume the work has been thought through. Just because you don’t get it, it doesn’t mean that others haven’t come up with some interesting ideas. And even if it hasn’t been thought through quite as well as you like, what’s the lesson that can be derived from it all?
50. Ask questions without judgement. There are no dumb questions, just people who are left dumber due to unanswered questions.
51. Find reasons to build on things. I found this a bit weird when I first entered agency life. Previously I had worked in the chemical industry, which was regimented and compartmentalised in the way work was done. College was very much about individual effort to complete assignments and essays. Build on this was something that I found female colleagues used to do really well. I remember being sat in a meeting and watch each person play a reverse ‘pass the parcel’ game with an idea. When it came to say their bit in a ‘brainstorm’ they would acknowledge what had been previously said and provide their own innovation as an additional wrapper. It won pitches and increased group cohesion.
52. Focus on agreeing a direction, not winning arguments. While you were winning the argument, you could have been getting insights to help set that direction in the ideas.
53. Build a robust strategy rather than a perfect strategy. A strategy that isn’t implemented for a client, may as well not exist. A robust strategy can be optimised based on what happens in the market. The perfect strategy may not even get to market.
54. Be useful. If a meeting needs coffee or printing off handouts and you can do them. People may not remember what you’ve done but how you make them feel and putting them at ease when hellsapoppin’.
55. Say you have a clash – leave it at that. Much of what happens inside agencies runs on implicit guilt. Avoid that guilt by saying less, being prepared to not fill silences and don’t explain diary clashes.
56. When you have nothing to do, read. Well learn at the very least, our world and what’s demanded of us is always changing. Do a course read an article, a book chapter or listen to an audio book.
57. If you’re tired of reading, write. I find writing very powerful. The process of writing helps me work things out from opinions to problem solving.
58. If you’re tired of writing, go for a walk. I was working on a brief prior to writing this post and walked from Whitechapel station home. I let my mind wander and I got the central concept of the insight by not thinking about it during that hour’s walk.
59. If you’re tired of walking, take a nap. Burn out is real, it’s got even worse with project management tools that overburden strategy teams.
60. If in doubt, try out the Oblique Strategies. Back in 1975, electronic musician Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt came up with what we’d call in advertising provocations. They are particularly useful in trying to break through a mental block. You have a 100 cards about the size of a playing card in a box. Read it, think about it, have a break and come back to it and ask how it can be applied to your problem. There is also an iPhone version of it, but there is something about the tactility of the cards.
61. Have a healthy snack of choice – our changing workloads chained to messaging apps rather than getting out and interviewing people in focus groups has amplified the need for this advice. I would go further and say avoid the ‘pitch pizza’ – the lowest common denominator selections provided by agencies to fuel the late night efforts of its pitch teams. I have turned to trail mix, zero sugar energy drinks and even Huel at a push instead.
62. Break your own rules. A former colleague that I worked with at Yahoo! used to talk about ‘guidelines, not tramlines’. Breaking your own rules is about understanding why you have the rule and making a creative choice. Usually rules speed up decision-making.
63. Make different mistakes. We learn from mistakes, there is a value in them if you think about things in terms of a scientific methodology. But, there is nothing to be gained from making the same mistakes.
64. Interesting is more important than right, I alluded to this earlier but it deserves its own explanation. Interesting sparks discussions that help get to further insights. This comes from remaining constantly curious and holding a strong point-of-view. As for views, hold on tightly unless there is good evidence to the contrary and then be prepared to let go lightly. This is where I again tell you are more than your job, one of the main ideas it is important to convey in a list like this.
65. Have a copywriter as an ally. Working on my last brief I had got to the the human insight, but I couldn’t land the concept in a sufficiently resonant way. Going back-and-forth with the copywriter got us there.
66. Have other strategists as allies. They have walked similar journeys to you and might see things that you are too close on to notice. One of the greatest aspects of working with great strategists is the collegiate attitude to ideas and generosity of thoughts.
67. Network internally. You would think that work would shine through, but the reality is most people won’t remember what you did. Secondly, that internal networking helps understand the context that your work exists within. Finally, the internal network you have will eventually become scattered across the industry and even client side, opening up potential future opportunities.
68. Develop an aesthetic. I was fortunate to grow up in a house that wasn’t wealthy in terms of money, but was wealthy in terms of ideas. Part of it was down to reading and part of it was down my Dad’s deep sense of quality. I would love to say that we had less but better in terms of consumption, but we didn’t – there are no Vitra or Eames designed furnishings at my parents house. The closest I have to it is the refurbished first generation Herman Miller Aeron chair I am sitting on and vintage Ikea birch bookcase – rather than their more commonplace MDF pieces. Much of my furniture is gifted or upcycled. My sofa, was originally from the 1970s, my Dad reupholstered it and rebuilt the frame based on materials he had left over from doing his own motor caravan conversion of a Volkswagen (Typ 28) LT-35 van. The sense of quality gave me the confidence to explore my own taste in design, art, literature and cinema. Taste and a sense of what’s important is becoming more important in strategy and the creative industries.
August 16, 2025
July 2025 newsletter
July 2025 introduction – two-dozen (24) edition

What a scorcher of month it turned out to be. This edition marks the second anniversary of Strategic Outcomes.

24 or two dozen as they call it in the bingo halls, is considered be unlucky in Cantonese because it sounds like ‘easy die’. All of which made the number symbolizing a violent political thriller TV series all the more appropriate.

24 was the name of a must-see action drama that launched in the aftermath of 9/11. The show was quite prophetic in some ways given that the pilot was shot in March 2001 and production began in earnest in July that year.

Jack Bauer fought terrorist and drug cartel attacks over nine seasons and sold countless DVD boxsets outselling Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. Bauer’s ‘the ends justify the means’ approach caught the zeitgeist of enhanced interrogation and the real-time plot with political intrigue kept audiences hooked.

Much of this month for me has been dominated by generative AI in terms of the projects that I have been working on and what I have been learning on Coursera.

This month’s summery soundtrack for the newsletter comes from French DJ Folamour playing joyful house music that would be very on-point for the early to mid-1990s sets I used to play during the mid-week at the long-gone and largely unlamented Sherlocks bar and Bonkers night club in Merseyside.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- I have been thinking a good deal about business cards and their relevance in 2025, there maybe some reasons for optimism given wider trends happening at the moment.
- Apple developer focus given last year’s problematic pivot to go big on AI.
- The Hong Kong government banned a Taiwanese game Reversed Front: Bonfire. The game portrayed the Hong Kong government in a poor light alongside their Beijing counterparts. But gaming and politics aren’t as bizarre bedfellows as it would seem on the surface.
- Optimising my video calling experience took me back through my past life as a DJ to find an appropriate headphone and mic solution for long work calls.
- Design collaborations and other things including philosophical approaches to building machine learning systems and early smartphone demos.
Books that I have read.
- I read Charles Beaumont’s A Spy At War, the follow-on to A Spy Alone which I read earlier on in the year. Beaumont’s story moves from the UK to Ukraine, tracking the lines between Russian corruption and what the Russian intelligence services would call the ‘useful idiots’ of right leaning populist politics. Beaumont doesn’t disappoint with this second story related to his Oxford spy ring, the unnerving aspect of it all is how similar many of the characters seem to public figures. I will let you draw your own conclusions on that.
Things I have been inspired by.

Cartier exhibition

I got to go to the Cartier exhibition at the V&A museum. At first I was thinking about passing it by when I looked at the exhibition catalogue. The photography seemed flat and lacking in lustrousness. The exhibition needed to be seen in person to appreciate the art of the jeweller and gemologist respectively.

Mid-year trends

Dan Frommer and the team at The New Consumer & consumer goods focused investor Coefficient Capital dropped their mid year trends presentation which is free to download.

There were a number of outtakes for me
- Economics
  - US consumer spending held steady, even as consumer sentiment fluctuated – this might be due to inflation, but you didn’t see a corresponding dip. This was also mirrored in steadily life satisfaction statistics.
  - Consumer price elasticity for ‘Made in America’ products is low.
- Marketing
  - 97% of US consumers surveyed knew it was Amazon Prime day before shopping – which is a phenomenal level of awareness.
  - 98% of US consumers are aware of AI. Which adds more credence that AI’s place in culture is similar to that of the web and the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s – even amongst people who aren’t actually using it. It is consistently in 0.25% of news coverage since the launch of ChatGPT.
  - Awareness of Ozempic was at 58%, Viagra was at 62% – which says a lot about the power of long-term brand building.
- Pets
  - Pets are 40 percent of male respondents best friend, but 40% of women view pets as their child.
Chart of the month.

Smart Communications released a report looking at health CX and patient attitudes. There was a considerable variation between consumers by age on trust in AI across both concerns about data privacy and the overall ethics involved. But a majority of consumers in every age group thought that AI would maintain or improve health communications channels.

Things I have watched.

Network as a 1976 film was quite prescient. It covers the tension between network television’s quest for eyeballs and the ‘just the facts’ era of Walter Cronkite and his team at CBS Evening News. We have a network executive who sees views in the breakdown of a news reader at the twilight of his career. It also feels like an allegory on modern day influencers and the tyranny of slavishly following the algorithm.

Inspired by an article in the Financial Times, I rewatched Barry Lyndon for the first time in years. The first time I watched it was out of curiosity for a few reasons
- It’s based on the 19th century novel of an Irish hero who bounces through various adventures and eventually dies in a debtors prison.
- It was a Stanley Kubrick film. Barry Lyndon was made in 1975, after A Clockwork Orange and prior to The Shining.
- It was similar in concept, if not in execution to the ‘cinéma du look’ movement that I have watched and written about previously in this newsletter. Conceptually ‘‘cinéma du look’ and Barry Lyndon share a common concept, both were looking to replicate an aesthetic. ‘Cinéma du look’ was inspired by the golden age of TV advertising and music videos, Barry Lyndon was inspired by 18th century art.
Barry Lyndon like the later cinéma du look films were critiqued for putting style over plot lines. And like cinéma du look, Barry Lyndon has become more appreciated with age. The stylistic aspects of Barry Lyndon have appealed to TikTokers and gained new life. I hope the same happens for cinéma du look works that equally deserve the exposure.

When I was a child, my time was spent split between living on my uncle’s farm in Ireland and the Mersey basin which was a thriving petrochemical hub with giant silver cathedrals to human ingenuity and process engineering. Climate change wasn’t in the public zeitgeist. You would see the stack flares as you drove past plants at night and the mercury discharge lamps dotted along inspection walkways.

Friends Dad’s worked abroad in the petrochemical industry or in the north sea. It was adventure, it had a hint of danger. That was solidified in my mind when I saw Hellfighters, where John Wayne cosplayed as an analogue of Red Adair. The film is basically an oilfield western BUT to six year old me – giant oil fires seemed cool. Wayne’s character Chance Buckman was an undisguised portrayal of Red Adair and Red Adair Co. Inc even down to Adair’s signature red overalls.

Yes its got misogny and it’s exactly the same as every other John Wayne film from the 1960s in terms of plot and pacing. Wayne even used many of the same co-stars over-and-over again.

To my more practiced eye as a former plant process operator turned ad man; parts of oilfield scenarios are a bit hokey. However, the modernist design aesthetic, spectacle and the fire portrayed in the film continues to impress all these years later. The engineering and plant portrayed in the film means that it’s one of those movies my Dad and I watch together, most of the time talking about the equipment used and other minutiae of the film.

As a film it also does a good job of documenting the oil infrastructure of the Texas panhandle in the 1960s.

If I had any criticism it is that the film needs a good reprint with a 4K re-scan. I can also recommend Red Adair: An American Hero which was his authorised biography – we had a well-thumbed copy in control room of plant I briefly worked in prior to college.

Useful tools.

Image format conversion

For long time Mac users the go to tool for image conversion is Lemke Software‘s GraphicConvertor. Thorsten Lemke is a legend in the Mac software community, supporting his application since the mid-1990s; back when being a Mac user was an endangered species. I remember first getting a copy on a Mac computer magazine disc in college and found it invaluable ever since. Even now it supports obscure image formats that you won’t have seen in decades like PICT. However if you don’t have access to your own machine and software, a couple of online web services I can recommend at a pinch are SVG to PNG and CloudConvert.

Visualisation tool

I have just started playing with MyLens AI and it’s conceptually interesting enough for me to recommend experimenting with it yourself.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my July 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for the rest of the dog days of summer.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch
July 30, 2025
Sennheiser HD 25 Light

The Sennheiser HD 25 Light is a modern marvel of design that can trace its history back as far as 1968. German headphone company Sennheiser started making a range of headphones that would become iconic.

How we got the Sennheiser HD 25 light

Founded in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, Sennheiser quickly built up a reputation in professional broadcast and recording circles with its microphones. In 1968 Sennheiser launched the HD 414, which was made sturdy plastic mouldings and a highly adjustable headband , attached to light on-ear headphones. The HD 414 set a design philosophy that the Sennheiser HD 25 Light continues on.

This was back when most headphones were bulky ‘cans’ a la vintage Koss models. They would weigh on the listener during a long listening session. The Sennheiser HD 414 by comparison was light and easy to wear while providing an open accurate sound.

My first foray into hi-fi as a teenager was buying a pair of HD 414s from Richer Sounds. By that time Sennheiser had a full range of headphones, many of which were lighter and more modern looking than anything else on the market, especially when compared to AKG, Beyerdynamic or Sony.

Sennheiser had started making pilot headsets for Lufthansa in 1980 and had developed a good understanding of sound isolation.

Sony MDR-V6 and MDR-7500 series.

When I started DJing, I aspired to own a pair of Sony MDR-V6 launched in 1985 and only discontinued in 2020. These live on through the Sony MDR-7500 series.

These had a reputation for sound quality, good sound isolation, were robust and less bulky than their European rivals. They still weighed in at 230+ grams which could be a bit wearing after several hours. This was the rival that Sennheiser had to beat, and when they were launched Japan and Sony were at their peak.

However, the things hi-fi and sound recording magazines don’t tell you about them

Over the longer term, the vinyl trim on the Sony headphones would start to flake and they weren’t designed to be user-serviceable. Finally, even if you were inclined to repair and maintain them, Sony wouldn’t sell you the parts (in the UK at least.) 12 months of regularly DJing with them and they were needed new ear pads and a headband.

Later on I would go to video shoots and see sound recordists with Sonys which had gaffer-taped headbands and ear pads that looked rat bitten.

1988

1988 was a pivotal year, Mr and Mrs Danny Rampling were running Shoom out of a gym in Southwark, Paul Oakenfold was running similar nights in the backroom of Richard Branson‘s Heaven nightclub underneath Charing Cross station. Up North, the Hacienda was hosting the Zumbar and Hot.

All of which were pivotal in the rise of house music and nightlife culture for the following four decades. This in turn drove sales of professional DJ equipment including the Made 2 Fade family of mixers and Technics SL-1200 series turntables. Record shops sprang up on the high street catering to this audience, the kind of frequency only seen with Turkish barber shops now.

What was lost in all that cultural change was the launch of the Sennheiser HD 25. The Sennheiser HD 25 (1) when it was released was aimed at broadcast users in outdoor settings and sound recorders on a film, TV or advertising shoot.

It had the robust build quality and lightness of the HD 414, and sat on the ear in a similar manner which allowed for hours of very comfortable listening. There was a split head rest which helped keep the head ventilated while listening and spread the load. It had clutter free cabling which borrowed from Sennheiser’s experience making headsets for pilots, along with good sound isolation.

The frame had a special bracket that allowed an ear cup to be pivoted off your ear, making them ideal for DJs.

Finally it was easy to power as a headset thanks to aluminium voice coils that drew on Sennheiser’s heritage making professional microphones for broadcast and studio usage.

The Sennheiser HD 25 (1) when it was released was aimed at broadcast users in outdoor settings and sound recorders on a film, TV or advertising shoot and it took a while for DJs to discover it.

Being aimed at professional users Sennheiser designed them to be user serviceable. You can still buy all the parts AND there is a good third party community making parts for them as well.

Concorde

By the early 1990s, the Sennheiser HD 25 family of headphones comprised of the Sennheiser HD-25 (1) and the Sennheiser HD 25 SP – which is the direct forerunner of the Sennheiser HD 25 Light.

The headphones caught the attention of British Airways who were looking for passenger headphones that matched the noisy but premium experience of flying on Concorde. Sennheiser built a simplified version with adaptions to match the onboard audio system drawing from the HD 25 and the vintage HD 414 headband design known as the HD 25 BA.

This then set the foundation for Sennheiser to design the HD 25 SP as a simplified version of the HD 25. The HD 25 SP didn’t need to have a high level of impedance match the aircraft audio system, so it could be a lot easier to power.

What’s impressive about the Sennheiser HD 25 range is how little they’ve changed over the four decades they’ve been in production. There has been a slight improvement with the HD 25 (2) and the HD 25 Pro – which gave users a coiled cable and optional velour ear pads (recommended). Most of the other variants have been either limited editions more about marketing than sound, and some brand collaborations notably an adidas edition with three stripes and blue ear pads.

The Sennheiser HD 25 Light was a revamp of the HD 25 SP. The differences were:

A different headband design that modernised the vintage HD 414 inspired headband design. It connects to the back of the earphone the same as the HD 25, allowing it to use the same drivers as its big brother.

Sennheiser HD 25 Light

So what are they like and why am I talking about them? I got a pair of the Sennheiser HD 25 Light because I was doing more video calls in crowded spaces and wanted an on ear headphone that would work. It wasn’t hard to know what I wanted. If am listening to music or an audiobook in bed I use a pair of HD 25 headphones. They are very detailed even on low volume and ideal because falling off the bed does no damage to them at all.

I could have gone with a pair of gamer headphones, but they are overly bulky and their sound is tuned for Call of Duty rather than than video calls, podcasts and electronica. I found that they tend to get warm when you’re wearing them on two back-to-back calls and a three-hour virtual workshop. Lastly they come with LED lighting and controls that I don’t need.

So my solution was simple a pair of HD 25 Lights and a third party cable that had a built-in microphone. They sound similar to the the HD 25 like you would expect, the slight differences I think are down to the slightly different fit of the headband affecting they way they sit against my ear and the third party audio cable.

Calls are clear and detailed as is most type of music with more detail than the Shure IEMs that I previously wore all the time. I have a few hacks planned for the headset:

A hard case cover to keep all my audio bits together lint and dust-free in my bag as much as protect the headphones

A smidge of Sugru as reinforcement at the joint between the headphone jack and the cable to reinforce it. I do the same on the power cable for my laptop where the cable meets the MagSafe adapter. It’s less hassle to deal with than the blocks of epoxy putty that plumbers use and comes in more manageable amounts.

The Shure IEMs are still fine for talking calls on the move and listening to podcasts on the tube, while the Sennheiser HD 25 Light headphones take over my office work.

July 27, 2025
Designer collaboration + more stuff
Designer collaboration with brands

I have a couple of great designer collaboration profiles. The first designer collaboration is Susan Kare. Kare reflects on how she started at Apple and her work on designing the graphic elements of the original Macintosh operating system.

Her work as a designer collaboration with Apple’s engineering team, still echoes down through Apple lore and in the work of user experience (UX) specialists to this day

A second interview on Sarah’s designer collaboration with the Mac development team is equally illuminating.

Nike produced documentary on Tom Sachs on his relationship with Nike, the eventual designer collaboration on the Mars Yard series of shoes and the development of Nike Common Craft series of shoes. The childhood joy of the project Apollo era space programme shines through in Sachs’ thinking.

Manga Video

Andy Frain and an oral history of Manga Video, which as the video company responsible for my love of anime as an art form. Akira, Fist of The North Star, Legend of the Overfield and Ghost In The Shell were all out on video from Manga Video.

The philosophy of AI opportunity

Ben Thompson on the philosophy of different technology firms and their approach to AI. The commentary on both Apple and Google are fascinating, in particular the discussion about vintage Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.

Contrast Ben Thompson’s video with Benedict Evans on AI. I like the idea of Benedict’s that ‘AI’ is effectively a synonym for ‘magic’.

Marketing effectiveness

The Media Leader had a great interview with Les Binet at Cannes Festival of Creativity. The result is 27 minutes of marketing effectiveness gold.

Andy Hertzfeld smartphone demo

Andy Hertzfeld is famous amongst the veteran Apple Mac community for being the software architect who built most of the key parts of the original Macintosh operating system. Hertzfeld’s business card at Apple was ‘Software wizard’ – so can be partly to blame for all those people who had wizard, guru and ninja in their LinkedIn job title decades later. After Apple, Hertzfeld went on to found three companies:
- Radius who made Mac accessories from monitors to high end video cards
- General Magic who designed productivity devices and software that were the ancestors of PDAs (personal digital assistants), smartphones and tablets. It then pivoted to voice based computing that supported General Motors OnStar system. General Magic got so much right about technology but was far too early and featured in its own documentary on what went right and wrong.
- Eazel who developed the Nautilus file system for Linux, which preceded the use of cloud computing storage like Google Drive and Box.net.
Hertzfeld captured the most complete version of the Apple Mac’s history in his blog folklore.org and the accompanying book Revolution in the Valley.

This smartphone prototype demo comes from his time at General Magic, was recorded in 1995.
July 24, 2025
Gaming as politics

This post on gaming as politics was inspired by a Taiwanese adventure game played on mobile phones. The game in question is considered a national security risk by the Hong Kong government. (In China, it wouldn’t be able to be downloaded anyway).

Reversed Front: Bonfire – banned in Hong Kong

Chris Tang, the current secretary of security for the Hong Kong government said that having the game on your phone or playing it was a national security law offence. The game was an act of ‘soft resistance’ designed to corrupt Hong Kong’s youth.

According to a statement by the National Security Department (NSD) of the Hong Kong Police Force, Reversed Front: Bonfire is

…a game with the aim of promoting secessionist agendas such as “Taiwan independence” and “Hong Kong independence”, advocating armed revolution and the overthrow of the fundamental system of the People’s Republic of China established by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. It also has an intention to provoke hatred towards the Central Authorities and the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Imagine an anti-communist version of Myst that’s more text driven, built by diesel punk anime and waifu fans and you have a good idea of what Reversed Front: Bonfire is.

The developers at ESC Taiwan do not hide their views. It is a great example of ‘gaming as politics’ with gameplay referencing key slogans of the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

The Hong Kong government is probably sensitive about dissent through gaming when protests went virtual on Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons – when COVID restrictions made real-world protests impractical.

Gaming as politics beyond Hong Kong

Gaming as politics in Hong Kong is only the latest place where the medium as been used to press a political ideology.

As video game graphics have improved video game footage or machinima have been used to create footage that has been passed off as war footage. As it has got better, it has been easier to convince the casual observer on social media. Examples include HAMAS and Israel, Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine and Russia in Syria.

A Ukrainian research paper Video Games As Deep Media: challenges during the Russian-Ukraine war outlines how both sides have used video games as a propaganda channel. Ukrainians have skilfully used tools like customised gaming maps and conversations on online games to directly address Russians about the truth of the war. Gaming provided a space largely unmediated by the Russian government, at least at the beginning of the war.

On the flip side, Russia has pumped propaganda efforts into platforms like Minecraft and Roblox.

Political satire in games

Gaming as politics lent itself well to political satire. These are usually developed by independent software companies. For instance Bundesfighter II Turbo was based on caricatures of candidates in the 2017 German federal election. Hong Kong 1997 was a Japanese developed game based in a fantastical version of Hong Kong SAR – it also has the distinction of being considered one of the worst games ever.

Gaming as politics and as a political culture

Online radicalisation of gamers has become prevalent and the International Centre for Counter Terrorism provides advice for games design teams.

One issue that I have with the ICCT is that there is a lack of proportionality in what they talk about. I can understand that this is partly because even a small percentage of people can cause a lot of carnage. And like other emotive issues being absolutist tells a great story, which will help with everything from grants to getting meetings with politicians. One assertion they make is quite interesting:

…the relative opaqueness of video game spaces provides an attractive opportunity to meet online and outside the watchful eye of law enforcement. Moreover, the presence of many young people who may be vulnerable to extremist messaging efforts creates ideal circumstances for exposure to extremist viewpoints. However, we argue that particular aspects of gaming culture may also have a hand in the proliferation of extremist beliefs. In the study by Kowert, Martel, and Swann, “[identity] fusion with gaming culture is uniquely predictive of a host of socially pernicious outcomes, including racism, sexism, and endorsement of extreme behaviors.” Examples of how such tendencies surface from time to time are numerous.

Their view is supported by academics, Political Psychology published a research paper on how far right organisations use online gaming as a pipeline to grow their numbers.

The example provided by ICCT is the Gamergate scandal. I would argue that Gamergate is part of a longitudinal trend amongst a proportion of young men towards social conservatism including ongoing misognystic expressions of their beliefs. Do I approve of Gamergate – no, do I believe that the blame is purely around the medium of gaming – also no.

KZ manager

Gaming as politics is a concept that predates the internet. KZ manager was a series of games with an anti-semitic theme. It was first published in 1988 for the Commodore 64 alongside other home computer platforms at the time. it was distributed from player to player by disc or dial-up bulletin boards. By 1989 it was banned in Germany, but kept being maintained and republished up until 2000.

Nihilism and gaming as politics

Nihilistic terrorism has now become enmeshed in gaming as politics. Nihilism implies the act for its own sake, without any ideology challenges the political nature of terrorism as a concept. Alex in A Clockwork Orange fits this nihilistic definition to a tee. The medium for living out the nihilistic fantasies has changed over time. From books, to exploitation films, shockumentaries such as Faces of Death. Connecting with other ‘like-minded’ individuals was transformed in online spaces. Gaming was just another media form adopted by the nihilists. It is still only a very small number of them that put their fantasies into any form of action.

More related Hong Kong stories here, and more on gaming here.

July 19, 2025