A designer friend was telling me about turning a website into a zine.

The content was already there, so he thought it would be relatively straightforward. It wasn’t. Once the scrolling disappeared, everything changed: the amount of text, the typography, the sequence, the pacing.

A pretty good example of Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.

I happened to have a 1967 copy of The Medium Is the Massage, the book McLuhan made with Quentin Fiore, so I showed him.

Even the title carries the idea. It was supposed to be The Medium Is the Message, but message arrived back from the typesetter as massage.

McLuhan kept it.

I loved being able to show him the actual thing.

That’s one of the pleasures of collecting books. Every so often a conversation comes along and you have the reference itself. Not somewhere online. Right there.

And in this case, the book was also the proof. Its typography, images and sequence are as much part of the argument as the words.

Which made me think about the medium we’re all trying to understand now.

AI is already becoming part of how we write, search, design and make.

If AI is the new medium, what will the message be?