Jono Lewarne

Jono Lewarne

@cityeditionstudio.co.uk

Graphic design / web development / creative coding / typography. Working across print, pixels & places. Developing sites in Astro, Wordpress & Shopify. Based at Spike Island in Bristol, UK since 2012. Teaching type at UWE too!

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Hi and welcome to my new followers. I make websites, fun stuff with code, books (sometimes with code!) and site specific installations. Happy to have you along for the journey. I'm going to try to document my thinking and process more than I did on Twitter (😷). This is an accountability post...

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

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Low Tech Magazine, The Compressed Edition by Kris De Decker. Taken a while but I’ve really enjoyed reading this tome over the summer. It’s had a massive impact on my thinking and day to day live, hopefully lasting impacts too!

Jono Lewarne reposted

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

On a more positive note, I finally got round to setting up Navidrome to serve my music collection and it is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT. I used to use CloudBeats app hooked up to my iTunes library on my Dropbox, which was ok but had some big issues that Navidrome has cleared up beautifully. Wooooooooooooop!

Along with Studio Mothership I spent a year working on an amazing public art project in Bristol. The resulting outcome, tonnes of bespoke fabricated corten steel and custom ceramic tiles, was installed recently. The Bristol Post ran a story on the project. I hope they don't do what they always do...

...and focus on the really boring stuff, completely ignore all of the creativity and work by all the various talented local creatives who were involved and give them no mention or credit whatsoever. They wouldn't do that would they? They wouldn't focus on the drains and new bike racks, would they?

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

View full thread

Really ripping off @maxleonard.bsky.social now! The Long Deep by Des Hannigan. Lovely little book, beautifully written about lots of little hard to find spots in Cornwall, some I knew and a lot I didn’t. Loved that a lot of the stories are from the early 80s when I was growing up there

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. This is amazing, such a rich account of an insane period of music and social history in NYC. My reading is back up to speed after the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France ate up my reading time

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

View full thread

Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich (forgot to take a pic of the cover). An interesting read. Some of the ideas have aged terribly while others are more pertinent than Illich could ever have foreseen!

What is a designer by Normal Potter. Rereading this (for the 3rd time I think) after loving it as a design student. Essential reading for anyone interested in developing a healthy mindset towards design of any kind. Interesting that he mentions the last book I read a lot, which I didn’t spot before

I'm starting a radio show in a few weeks, catch it 12-2pm on the 3rd Monday of each month on www.doyou.world Hoping to drag in some artists I know who work with sound or music to talk about their work. Expect disco, boogie, Balearic and house sounds and a distinct lack of professionalism.

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My latest book project for Artica Svalbard. A series of interviews with six people from seven different countries about their time on Svalbard; how they came to Svalbard, what made them stay and why new immigration legislation might one day force them to leave.

A key aspect of the typesetting is varying width paragraphs in the dual languages (English/Norske) that make each paragraph the same amount of lines, making them equals. This reflects the ideal of giving and taking space when you need to live alongside others in the same community.

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

View full thread

Blitzed by Norman Ohler. This was ok but fairly tedious. 150 pages of “the Nazi army did awful stuff on meth” followed by 100 pages of “Hitler’s doctor gave him another injection of opiates and crushed up animal spines again and then put cocaine in his ears”

Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Ana Paula Paid & Carolyn F. Strauss. This has some great ideas and thinking. It really resonates with me. Since having kids I seem to be trying to work 3 times as quickly as I want to. This has helped me start slowing down

I'm starting a radio show in a few weeks, catch it 12-2pm on the 3rd Monday of each month on www.doyou.world Hoping to drag in some artists I know who work with sound or music to talk about their work. Expect disco, boogie, Balearic and house sounds and a distinct lack of professionalism.

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

View full thread

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

View full thread

Through Witnessing. Threading the critiquing, making, teaching of design edited by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee and Xiny Li. Exploring ways to decolonise the design curriculum through interviews and dialogues with those currently trying to do it. Really good!

Maisa in Webland. A curious and confusing book. There are some great ideas and interesting passages. The writing style is a bit off key (and riddled with errors in places). But I’m glad I read it. It also feels beautiful in the hand, as a book designer I found it weirdly satisfying to hold.

Inspired by (ripping off) @maxleonard.bsky.social here’s a thread of books I’m reading this year (it will probably total what Max reads in a week). First up: Why history matters to graphic design by Clémence Imbert. A reexamination of why the history of the field is still relevant to students.

hands on research, Harma Staal, Miriam Rasch, Jojanneke Gijsen. This reinforces the importance of getting your hands dirty (physically and metaphorically), making, prototyping and doing

In Search of Berlin, John Kampfner (dust jacket lost somewhere). A beautiful, meandering book about the city, its history, people and psyche. Thoroughly recommend for my fellow Berlin fans

I wonder how many more layers of “yes we’re deliberately ruining your lives” everyone will need shovelling on top of their heads by the worst fucks on the planet before they understand it? Tune in today for more endless horrors that fail to hit home…

My final act of 2025: taking out double top in the family doubles darts tournament. My wife set me up by hitting the bullseye before me. This is pretty much the same as renewing our vows and cancels out all the evils of the proceeding year. May your 2026 be as glorious

Squeezed in one last personal project; it syncs data from Rekordbox into a little web app, improving the filtering so I can browse what records are in the same rack, plan mixes etc away from my computer. Yes it's a WCAG nightmare but it's just for me so I can wallow in my pastel neon squinty world