this was not designed by AI

I opened my laptop to write this post, and something felt a little… different. Odd. Off. Sure, I haven’t written a blog post on here in a while but I’m here with a clear purpose, so what feels strange? Ah. This this is the first time I’ve come here to write something since our ubiquitous side piece, AI, has been on the scene. I now use it daily to stay speedy in my job – it whispers into my emails, hums into my business updates, and mutters into my digital transformation explainers. Squarespace has just dangled that it can use “artificial intelligence to get you from blank page to first draft in a flash” but I think I’ll keep this old school. This space feels like mine – my work, my thoughts and, unfortunately for you all, my grammar.

And keeping it old school – I’ve been a Shorthand fangirl for years. With only a rusty grasp of HTML, their no-code platform was a game changer for me to be able to help my clients tell digital stories in a compelling format at an affordable cost. I loved working within the limitations of the Shorthand building blocks and testing how I could manipulate the various scrolling features to create something beautiful. In those early days, I was using it for dense chart-heavy reports, so the challenge was the bring the data to life and captivate the audience, especially those used to a PDF report format. And eight years ago, I won a Shorthand award for one of those stories.

Back to 2026 and another story that I designed won an award: Leadership for Change Prize for The Economist Educational Foundation. This one felt special.

I’ve always felt that Shorthand would be the perfect tool to help tell a story for The Foundation but there was never quite the right project (or budget). Then along came the Leadership for Change Prize with a generous partner providing the £££, an inspiring prize to promote and a phenomenal group of students enacting change in their communities.

As the pictures and videos flowed in of the winning students on their mentorship journey, it was a storytelling jackpot. A vibrant colour palette, newspaper cut out shapes to make the link to current affairs and a stencil work-in-progress typeface helped to package it all together cohesively.

And while we also made videos, social content, a shorter highlights PDF and a whole host of other touchpoints, there’s something still so satisfying about the long-form read with the whole journey brought together. Maybe I’m old school like that.*

*No AI was involved in the writing of this post or the designing of the Shorthand story. AI was involved in helping me cook dinner though.