[Author/submitter here] I did work in PCW's office a few times. I think it was Quark Xpress on classic MacOS. So there would be an artfully-designed template

[Author/submitter here] I did work in PCW's office a few times. I think it was Quark Xpress on classic MacOS. So there would be an artfully-designed template into which my edited copy was poured. I did like PCW's design, though. I worked for Heise for a while, and got to read and take material from Linux Magazine, both in English and German. I find German typographical design awful myself and I think most German print tech mags look really bad... But I think that to German eyes, British print material looks so glossy and (to borrow a musical term) over-produced that the instinctive response is to distrust it: it looks like advertising or "advertorial". What to me looks cheap and amateurish and ugly, I suspect to a German looks trustworthy and honest. Whereas as a Brit, American advertising looks so plastic and fake that I instinctually distrust it. It's all acres of gleaming white teeth and fake smiles, with a big glob of disclaimer squeezed in somewhere, and it makes me recoil from the product. Cf. product naming. The last motorcycle I owned was a Kawasaki ZZR-1100 (a "zed zed are eleven hundred"). To Brits, the numbers sound hi-tech and exciting. In Japan it was a ZX-11. Maybe that reminds Brits of budget Sinclair computers too much? In America it's a ZX11 Ninja. Zee ecks eleven Ninja. To a Brit that makes it sound like a childrens' toy. I wouldn't want to be seen dead on a bike called a "ninja". I'm not 11 and I do not aspire to be a turtle.