The Hickensian is the journal of Jon Hicks, one half of Hicksdesign. I say!

If you like lush instrumental bands like Explosions in the Sky, you should get yourself over to The Orchid’s Bandcamp page, where you can preview their debut EP ‘New Mexico’. I’ve just picked up my copy!

Little Big Planet is the video game that has it all – inventive gameplay, a truly great soundtrack, costumes, Stephen Fry narration and of course the ability to make your own games. LBP2 looks set to build on that even more, but the trouble is I haven’t finished #1 yet! (Back up your game progress folks, lest you end up like me having start all over again after a Red Screen of Death)

There’s a new Starflyer 59 album on the way, which means 3 things: I get excited, I talk about it a lot, and people ask me who they are and what they should listen to for a Starflyer introduction.

Their sound has changed a lot over the years, from the debut album Silver, and it’s My Bloody Valentine-ish droning guitars to straighter rock, via New Order and Electronica. It’s hard to pick out an introduction playlist, but I’ve had a go, and you can listen to it on Spotify.

If you do have a listen, ‘Everyone but Me’ is my favourite track of all time, and Silver is in my top 5 favourite albums of all time.

This beautiful Apple Airport Basestation was my 30th birthday present from my wife, quite possibly one of the best presents I’ve ever had. The gift of wireless. In those days it was 1mb broadband, but it was still exciting being able to work from anywhere in the house.

These days it’s been overtaken by N wireless devices, but it’s such a design classic that it has to be on display. It’s new home is the windowsill next to my desk at Webble Mill.

A recent plea on twitter for an Illustrator script has been answered! I needed to export all my artboards as 32bit PNGs (24bit + 8 bit Alpha Channel), with the artboard name as the filename, but Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in method to do this. The closest it offers is the standard export, where it can save all artboards, but it always appends the document name to the start of the filename.

Big hurrays then for Dan Smith for creating exactly the script I needed! It’s already made a big difference to my workflow. If you’d like a copy too, Download Artboards-PNG.jsx. I placed mine in Illustrators Presets/en_gb/Scripts folder to make sure it’s always loaded.