Despite what we all know about bidding sites, Fiverr has outdone itself in building an unethical platform that punishes designers and customers.
In 2019, it was estimated that Fiverr is worth almost $1 billion dollars. Impressive for a gig platform ostensibly offering services for as little as five dollars, no? But look just beneath the surface and one finds that Fiverr, like most multi-million dollar enterprises, is a platform built upon the…
On seeing a company you admire exclude disabled people.
Being disabled is hard. In the UK, a criminal low level of social care is killing us by the tens of thousands while we also make up 60% of COVID-19 deaths. Consider also that 1 in 10 suicides in England are linked to chronic illness, and it all looks a…
Informed that such a monumental task was impossible, Ernest Cox managed to raise thirty-five of the fifty-two German ships scuttled at Scapa Flow.
No one noticed that Rear Admiral von Reuter was in full battle dress. Yet on the 21st June 1919, he pinned his medals to his chest and stepped onto the deck of the Emden. His orders had been carried to the other seventy-three ships by the Royal Mail — the…
The disability welfare system under the Conservative government has accounted for more than 100,000 deaths.
I’m sitting in my car and watching maskless people filter in and out of the local shop. They arrive alone and somehow emerge in groups of two or three; standing in the doorway and patting each other as if they’ve not touched another person for weeks. I have five pounds…
Chirp is a readability and accessibility nightmare
While any change on the internet encourages pushback, Twitter’s soft rebrand appears to have ruffled a lot of users in a visceral way. A major reduction in colour highlights has made the site harder to parse for many. …
The women of the United States Radium Corporation were misled and left to die by a system that viewed them as unimportant — but these women fought back.
Discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, radium is an element that is extracted in trace amounts from uranium ore that, despite being radioactive, quickly became a sensation. America in particular adopted radium as a premium product of its day — a single gram could cost as much as…
Clients often avoid revealing their budget to freelancers, but there are good reasons why we ask.
Is there any exchange between freelancer and client more ingrained than the dance around the subject of budget? A creative has asked how much you can spend on a project, what do you do? You don’t tell them, of course. Instead, you request their rates. Once they tell you, you…
Clients are changing the ways they try to make creatives work for free.
We’ve all done it. Desperate, naive, or insecure — we’ve all worked for free. On occasion it’s a charitable endeavour; a positive experience. Others it’s a mistake. But at some point in our careers, all of us have waived our fees for some reason.
Kindle’s new service, Vella, aims to capture the mobile market with serialised stories, but is it sustainable, and does Amazon actually care?
A few days ago, Amazon debuted its new service, Kindle Vella. A program by which users post 500–6000 word stories in “episodes.” It’s heralded in the community as a way to capitalise on serialised stories and short fiction in real time, rather than as complete releases. On the face of…
Persona 5, Noise, and the accessibility of beauty
In 2016, Persona 5 exploded onto the PlayStation 4 in such a way that you might think the colour red hadn’t existed before. In its insatiable visual language and its defiance of the quotidian standards of Japanese role-playing games, there was hope the era of flicking through boring menus…
Geoffrey Bunting
Designer, writer, and historian. Founder of Geoffrey Bunting Graphic Design (geoffreybunting.co.uk).
