There is something depressing about applying for a job. It’s not just the personal situation that one finds oneself in: the dissatisfaction with whatever is paying the rent at the time… The process of applying to almost any formal job involves an extended encounter with two exceedingly strange documents: namely the job description and the application form.

The job description is supposed to give a clear indication of the person that the prospective employer is looking for. We are encouraged to examine the duties that will be required of us, the skills we should possess, and the qualities that we should radiate in the working environment.

More often than not, these statments are delivered to us as a series of bullet points. These statements (or rather demands) are pitched towards us at high velocity:

• Ability to plan organise and manage priorities and workloads

• Excellent interpersonal skills

• Experienced with Microsoft Office

We are forced to respond in the same way: using bullet points like balls in a strange ping-pong; slamming return after ace return back into the body of the employer, grunting as we hit the magical Alt-8 key combination that launches our black mortars at the enemy.

” • Experienced with Microsoft Office!”

” • Three years experience using Word, Excell and Powerpoint to complete tasks and organise my workflow! Bam! Take that!”

” How about this! • Excellent interpersonal skills”

” • Five years managing large and small teams…”

…and so it goes on. These strange non-sentances, devoid of personal pronouns, are knocked around in an athletic choreography that seems less an objective search for the ‘right candidate’ and more a kind of judo. The skill demanded of us is not having the required experience or knowledge but finding the right retort, the right grip of words that balances out - or rather overbalances - the assailants demands. Using the incoming energy as weapon, we must pin the employer to the ground - at which point he or she, impressed with our strength, will concede and, weeping with admiration, will submit to giving us the interview we lust after.

A couple more Croydon drawings.

 Nothing says Easter like a robot overlord.

I’ve just finished the redesign of Paola Leonardi’s website. Paola’s a wonderful photographer working in London and needed a revamp of her existing site to promote her increasing portfolio of work. Using a Wordpress backend I created a simple but scalable site to show her photography at its best.

It occurred to me whilst reading a PDF document how different the physical process is from most other kinds of reading. In fact it confounds the ordinary bibliographic relationship of a fixed object (the book) and a scanning observer (the reader).

Instead I am presented with a stream, the flow of which I control using my hands (always at some distance from the text). Using the scroll-wheel on my mouse, or keyboard shortcuts, I activate and control the movement in an interestingly abstract way - one that is not specific to the text or the object. Each book demands a different relationship to the reader as we negotiate its weight, texture, fragility, legibility and so forth. The actions needed to view this PDF are the same as for any PDF and almost the same as those used to view a web page or a large image.

At the centre of the process is a conflict between trying to follow the flow of text from left to right and top to bottom (which is how I was taught to read) and trying to maintain a constant position for my eyes as the text moves past.

Should we start teaching children to read on screen rather that with books? After all, its probably how they will do most of their reading anyway and it would reduce some of the physical barriers that us book-taught readers encounter.