About

Hi, I'm Niall. I write essays about marketing, technology, and AI - and the places where those things collide with culture, communication, and how organisations actually work.

I've been writing online for a few years, first on Medium, now here. Something about writing on someone else's platform eventually starts to feel off - you're writing for an algorithm, against a clock that measures success in minutes read rather than ideas landed. So I built this instead: my own corner of the internet, no engagement metrics, just essays at whatever pace feels right.

What I write about

AI as a practical tool, not a news story. I'm less interested in whether AI will take jobs than in what it actually does when you put it to work - building things with it, running analysis that wouldn't otherwise be possible, and understanding where it genuinely helps versus where it flatters to deceive.

How organisations communicate. I've spent most of my career in higher education and the public sector - places where communication often looks like it's working while quietly failing. That gap between intent and reception is endlessly interesting to me.

The craft of making things. Writing, design, building - the process of taking something from idea to finished thing. Not productivity advice. The actual texture of it.

Why manual mode

Manual mode on a camera gives you a worse photo in some situations and a much better one in others. The difference is whether you know what you're doing and what you're trying to say. That tension - between automation and intention, between efficiency and craft - shows up everywhere I'm interested in. It seemed like a good name for a place that tries to think that through.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is by email: niall@manualmode.xyz. I read everything and reply to most things, eventually.

The site

Built with Astro, written in Markdown, hosted as static HTML. Analytics via Cloudflare Web Analytics - privacy-friendly, no cookies, no personal data collected.

The typefaces are Playfair Display for display headings, Lora for body text, and Inter for UI elements. The design draws loosely on the editorial aesthetic of the Harvard Film Archive - sparse, typographically bold, content-first.

Each post has an accompanying image generated with AI. The visual style is inspired by the 1950s–60s film poster work of Saul Bass and Robert Brownjohn - flat geometry, limited palettes, a single photographic fragment, and a strong sense of directional tension.

There's an RSS feed if you'd like to follow along without the social media overhead.