The new 6'5'' version of Skelly has digital eyeballs, audio options, and a motion sensor. It’s available to buy starting today.

Plus: Fascinating insights into employee retention at Nintendo and sales numbers for (some rather pricey) Switch 2 peripherals.

The studio says it's sunsetting Splitgate in order to defer server costs and 'retain as many team members as possible.'

By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Chocolate Tribe. Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO, Chocolate Tribe After initially pursuing a career as an attorney, Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt discovered her true calling was to apply her legal knowledge in a more artistic endeavor with her husband, Rob Van den Bragt, who had forged a career as a visual effects supervisor. The couple co-founded Chocolate Tribe, the Johannesburg and Cape Town-based visual effects and animation studio that has done work for Netflix, BBC, Disney and Voltage Pictures. “It was following my passion and my passion finding me,” observes Maketo-van den Bragt, Owner and CEO of Chocolate Tribe and Founder of AVIJOZI. “I grew up in Soweto, South Africa, and we had this old-fashioned television. I was always fascinated by how those people got in there to perform and entertain us. Living in the townships, you become the funnel for your parents’ aspirations and dreams. My dad was a judge’s registrar, so he was writing all of the court cases coming up for a judge. My dad would come home and tell us stories of what happened in court. I found this enthralling, funny and sometimes painful because it was about people’s lives. I did law and to some extent still practice it. My legal career and entertainment media careers merged because I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of it all. There are those who say that lawyers are failed actors!” Chocolate Tribe hosts what has become the annual AVIJOZI festival with Netflix. AVIJOZI is a two-day, free-access event in Johannesburg focused on Animation/Film, Visual Effects and Interactive Technology. This year’s AVIJOZI is scheduled for September 13-14 in Johannesburg. Photo: Casting Director and Actor Spaces Founder Ayanda Sithebe (center in black T-shirt) and friends at AVIJOZI 2024. A personal ambition was to find a way to merge married life into a professional partnership. “I never thought that a lawyer and a creative would work together,” admits Maketo-van den Bragt. “However, Rob and I had this great love for watching films together and music; entertainment was the core fabric of our relationship. That was my first gentle schooling into the visual effects and animation content development space. Starting the company was due to both of us being out of work. I had quit my job without any sort of plan B. I actually incorporated Chocolate Tribe as a company without knowing what we would do with it. As time went on, there was a project that we were asked to come to do. The relationship didn’t work out, so Rob and I decided, ‘Okay, it seems like we can do this on our own.’ I’ve read many books about visual effects and animation, and I still do. I attend a lot of festivals. I am connected with a lot of the guys who work in different visual effects spaces because it is all about understanding how it works and, from a business side, how can we leverage all of that information?” Chocolate Tribe provided VFX and post-production for Checkers supermarket’s “Planet” ad promoting environmental sustainability. The Chocolate Tribe team pushed photorealism for the ad, creating three fully CG creatures: a polar bear, orangutan and sea turtle. With a population of 1.5 billion, there is no shortage of consumers and content creators in Africa. “Nollywood is great because it shows us that even with minimal resources, you can create a whole movement and ecosystem,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “Maybe the question around Nollywood is making sure that the caliber and quality of work is high end and speaks to a global audience. South Africa has the same dynamics. It’s a vibrant traditional film and animation industry that grows in leaps and bounds every year. More and more animation houses are being incorporated or started with CEOs or managing directors in their 20s. There’s also an eagerness to look for different stories which haven’t been told. Africa gives that opportunity to tell stories that ordinary people, for example, in America, have not heard or don’t know about. There’s a huge rise in animation, visual effects and content in general.” Rob van den Bragt served as Creative Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as Studio Executive for the “Surf Sangoma” episode of the Disney+ series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire. Rob van den Bragt, CCO, and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt, CEO, Co-Founders of Chocolate Tribe, in an AVIJOZI planning meeting. Stella Gono, Software Developer, working on the Chocolate Tribe website. Family photo of the Maketos. Maketo-van de Bragt has two siblings. Film tax credits have contributed to The Woman King, Dredd, Safe House, Black Sails and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning shooting in South Africa. “People understand principal photography, but there is confusion about animation and visual effects,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Rebates pose a challenge because now you have to go above and beyond to explain what you are selling. It’s taken time for the government to realize this is a viable career.” The streamers have had a positive impact. “For the most part, Netflix localizes, and that’s been quite a big hit because it speaks to the demographics and local representation and uplifts talent within those geographical spaces. We did one of the shorts for Disney’s Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, and there was huge global excitement to that kind of anthology coming from Africa. We’ve worked on a number of collaborations with the U.K., and often that melding of different partners creates a fusion of universality. We need to tell authentic stories, and that authenticity will be dictated by the voices in the writing room.” AVIJOZI was established to support the development of local talent in animation, visual effects, film production and gaming. “AVIJOZI stands for Animation Visual Effects Interactive in JOZI [nickname for Johannesburg],” Maketo-van den Bragt explains. “It is a conference as well as a festival. The conference part is where we have networking sessions, panel discussions and behind-the-scenes presentations to draw the curtain back and show what happens when people create avatars. We want to show the next generation that there is a way to do this magical craft. The festival part is people have film screenings and music as well. We’ve brought in gaming as an integral aspect, which attracts many young people because that’s something they do at an early age. Gaming has become the common sport. AVIJOVI is in its fourth year now. It started when I got irritated by people constantly complaining, ‘Nothing ever happens in Johannesburg in terms of animation and visual effects.’ Nobody wanted to do it. So, I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and four years later I have lots of gray hair!” Rob van den Bragt served as Animation Supervisor/Visual Effects Supervisor and Nosipho Maketo-van den Bragt as an Executive Producer on iNumber Number: Jozi Gold (2023) for Netflix. (Image courtesy of Chocolate Tribe and Netflix) Mentorship and internship programs have been established with various academic institutions, and while there are times when specific skills are being sought, like rigging, the field of view tends to be much wider. “What we are finding is that the people who have done other disciplines are much more vibrant,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “Artists don’t always know how to communicate because it’s all in their heads. Sometimes, somebody with a different background can articulate that vision a bit better because they have those other skills. We also find with those who have gone to art school that the range within their artistry and craftsmanship has become a ‘thing.’ When you have mentally traveled where you have done other things, it allows you to be a more well-rounded artist because you can pull references from different walks of life and engage with different topics without being constrained to one thing. We look for people with a plethora of skills and diverse backgrounds. It’s a lot richer as a Chocolate Tribe. There are multiple flavors.” South African director/producer/cinematographer and drone cinemtography specialist FC Hamman, Founder of FC Hamman Films, at AVIJOZI 2024. There is a particular driving force when it comes to mentoring. “I want to be the mentor I hoped for,” Maketo-van den Bragt remarks. “I have silent mentors in that we didn’t formalize the relationship, but I knew they were my mentors because every time I would encounter an issue, I would be able to call them. One of the people who not only mentored but pushed me into different spaces is Jinko Gotoh, who is part of Women in Animation. She brought me into Women in Animation, and I had never mentored anybody. Here I was, sitting with six women who wanted to know how I was able to build up Chocolate Tribe. I didn’t know how to structure a presentation to tell them about the journey because I had been so focused on the journey. It’s a sense of grit and feeling that I cannot fail because I have a whole community that believes in me. Even when I felt my shoulders sagging, they would be there to say, ‘We need this. Keep it moving.’ This isn’t just about me. I have a whole stream of people who want this to work.” Netflix VFX Manager Ben Perry, who oversees Netflix’s VFX strategy across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, at AVIJOZI 2024. Netflix was a partner in AVIJOZI with Chocolate Tribe for three years. Zama Mfusi, Founder of IndiLang, and Isabelle Rorke, CEO of Dreamforge Creative and Deputy Chair of Animation SA, at AVIJOZI 2024. Numerous unknown factors had to be accounted for, which made predicting how the journey would unfold extremely difficult. “What it looks like and what I expected it to be, you don’t have the full sense of what it would lead to in this situation,” Maketo-van den Bragt states. “I can tell you that there have been moments of absolute joy where I was so excited we got this project or won that award. There are other moments where you feel completely lost and ask yourself, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ The journey is to have the highs, lows and moments of confusion. I go through it and accept that not every day will be an award-winning day. For the most part, I love this journey. I wanted to be somewhere where there was a purpose. What has been a big highlight is when I’m signing a contract for new employees who are excited about being part of Chocolate Tribe. Also, when you get a new project and it’s exciting, especially from a service or visual effects perspective, we’re constantly looking for that dragon or big creature. It’s about being mesmerizing, epic and awesome.” Maketo-van den Bragt has two major career-defining ambitions. “Fostering the next generation of talent and making sure that they are ready to create these amazing stories properly – that is my life work, and relating the African narrative to let the world see the human aspect of who we are because for the longest time we’ve been written out of the stories and narratives.”

It's time we settle an age-old debate: Where should your living room television *actually* go? There's no hard-and-fast rule, but designers have opinions on the best way to keep your family entertaining space functional and stylish. And sometimes, those opinions isn't always based on aesthetics! "I don't always want to fight the 'TV over the fireplace' battle," admits designer Annie Downing. So, where should it go? Below, I dive into designers' best stylish solutions. Related StoriesGo Over the MantelSometimes, the path of least resistance is ultimately the correct one, and all of the designers I spoke to had no real issue with putting a television over the fireplace or mantel. "As long as the design is intentional and well-executed regarding the placement, I think we live in a time where we have to embrace the technology," says designer Amanda Lantz. Just be sure that the technology you're embracing is primed for a little designer upgrade. "The TV doesn't have to be a giant black box," says Annie, who recommends homeowners opt for sleeker options, such as Samsung's Frame TV, which can be easily integrated. "It’s not about hiding it completely," she says, "it’s about treating it like a design element instead of an afterthought." To give the TV a more intentional feel, Annie recommends pairing a frame television with custom or pre-fabricated trim packages. A simple tile surround also works if you want a more integrated look. Hide It—But Do It CleverlyIf mounting a television over your fireplace is an absolute no-go for you, either because you hate the way it looks or because the angle or height of the television makes viewing uncomfortable, there are still plenty of places to put or hide it. Tuck Into An Adjacent Book CaseEarlier this year, I visited a home where the fireplace was flanked on either side by built-in shelving that spanned the length of the wall. Instead of placing the television over the (admittedly too-high) mantel, the owners tucked it neatly into the right side of the bookcase, surrounding it with books and other collected objet. This approach, which works well in living rooms with vaulted ceilings, easily fosters a cozy, gather-round atmosphere. Pair It With Greenery Stacy Zarin GoldbergThis cabin makes expert use of freshly foraged greens. Try camouflaging your television—literally. Fresh, seasonal greens go a long way in adding visual intrigue and casual, lived-in charm. Choose fluffy, loose flowers or greenery to balance the structured, technical feel of the television. Cover It With ArtIn designer Christina Salway's Brooklyn home, the television is hidden by a large painting hung on cleats. "When we watch TV, we take the painting down, and when we’re finished, we put it back up," she says. "This is probably unimaginable to most people, but I hated the prospect of having a television so visibly positioned in our living room." It's best to avoid art with high sentimental value or that is irreplaceable if you go this route. Instead, opt for inexpensive vintage art or a print that you don't mind handling regularly. Related StoryHide It With MillworkMy personal favorite way to hide a television in a living room involves a clever bit of carpentry. I first came across this idea while admiring (read: drooling over) @MyMulberryHouse on Instagram. In her post, homeowner Leah Lane walks her followers through the process of building a concertina TV screen fabricated with piano hinges—which are key to its seamless, lie-flat appearance. The screen is cleverly disguised as a set of antique botanical prints. If you're willing to put a little extra elbow grease and manpower behind hiding your television, this is a stunning, design-editor-approved method.Related StoriesAnna LoganSenior Homes & Style EditorAnna Logan is the Senior Homes & Style Editor at Country Living, where she has been covering all things home design, including sharing exclusive looks at beautifully designed country kitchens, producing home features, writing everything from timely trend reports on the latest viral aesthetic to expert-driven explainers on must-read topics, and rounding up pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted to know about paint, since 2021. Anna has spent the last seven years covering every aspect of the design industry, previously having written for Traditional Home, One Kings Lane, House Beautiful, and Frederic. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia. When she’s not working, Anna can either be found digging around her flower garden or through the dusty shelves of an antique shop. Follow her adventures, or, more importantly, those of her three-year-old Maltese and official Country Living Pet Lab tester, Teddy, on Instagram.  

FORM Brands Studio has given London’s Air Ambulance Charity a new look. Rather than transporting patients to hospital, the charity’s doctors and paramedics treat seriously injured people at the scene from its two helicopters and eight cars. It is the only organisation performing this role in London. Established in 1989, it is called to a rising number of patients across the capital every year, helping more than 2,000 people in 2024. London’s Air Ambulance Charity (LAAC) needs £17m a year to operate, 96% which comes from donations. “But 60% of Londoners don’t know we’re a charity,” says LAAC’s director of fundraising and marketing, Jayne Clarke. FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in OOH posters Its new organisational strategy is about raising awareness, enhancing fundraising efforts and strengthening its connection with London’s communities. “We’re trying to make sure the strategy is about hope and looking forward to the future,” Clarke says. To accompany this new strategy, the charity also decided to change up its visual identity. “Our previous branding was very corporate,” Clarke admits.FORM Brands Studio won the job after a pitch. Strategy director Beth Andlaw set up the east London agency in 2022 with creative director Alex Andlaw. Before that she had been in comms and PR, and had worked with LAAC on and off for about 20 years. FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity on stage FORM introduced a new wordmark, colour palette, typeface, icons, motion, creative copy, messaging, fundraising memorabilia and photography. However, the existing helicopter icon was retained. “It has a lot of love and legacy,” says Clarke. The agency’s brand idea, Propelling Promise, was inspired by the urgent, intense nature of the work carried out by LAAC’s clinical and operational crews. That was used to give structure to creative copy lines and the new tone of voice. Each lead line includes an element of “propelling” to imply urgency and momentum, and “promise” to imply warmth and hope. That resulted in lines including “Trauma doesn’t stop. Neither do we” and “Here for London. Today, tomorrow, always.” FORM brought in Peggy Nyamekye to work on the copywriting. Meanwhile, the visual identity, developed with designer Mayan Mistry, comprises a gradient design system, drawing on the rotational motion of helicopter blades. Borough names are repeated in radiating patterns and overlaid with the gradient. Red is still central to the charity’s identity, but FORM introduced the vivid orange worn by medics on-scene. “These colours blend in the gradient, creating a visual signature that speaks to urgency, action, optimism and hope,” says Alex Andlaw. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/06/LAA_OOH_TUBE_1920x1080.mp4 With the help of motion graphics designer Matt Fowler, the agency introduced movement to the branding, to reflect the aircraft’s blades in flight. The logo’s new wordmark is in Barlow, inspired by the existing big white lettering on the helicopter tail booms. Before, the charity’s name was written lower case in a thinner font. “Now it’s bigger, bolder and more impactful,” says Alex Andlaw. FORM also redesigned the icons to have more personality but still be functional. “The icons help the team talk about quite hard subjects,” he says, such as casualties, and the designs had to balance warmth and realism. “We did quite a few hearts, some look too detailed and some too basic,” he explains. The agency also created a series of collectible badges, inspired by the embroidered badges worn by the charity’s doctors and pilots.FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in Instagram posts Meanwhile, photographer James Pearson-Howes was briefed to capture real people, places and moments from across London. The new branding had to resonate with very different types of donors, from the charity’s collection buckets to seven-figure corporate donations, says Clarke. “And the doctors wearing the brand have very strong opinions, as do the pilots. FORM took in all these views and managed to make all those people happy.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/06/LAA_OOH_BILLBOARD_1920x1080.mp4 FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity FORM Brands Studio identity for London’s Air Ambulance Charity in OOH posters

Reddit is accusing Anthropic of building its Claude AI models on the back of Reddit’s users, without permission and without paying for it.Anyone who uses Reddit, even a web-crawling bot, agrees to the site’s user agreement. That agreement is clear: you cannot just take content from the site and use it for your own commercial products without a written deal. Reddit claims Anthropic’s bots have been doing exactly that for years, scraping massive amounts of conversations and posts to train and improve Claude.What makes this lawsuit particularly spicy is the way it goes after Anthropic’s reputation. Anthropic has worked hard to brand itself as the ethical, trustworthy AI company, the “white knight” of the industry. The lawsuit, however, calls these claims nothing more than “empty marketing gimmicks”.For instance, Reddit points to a statement from July 2024 where Anthropic claimed it had stopped its bots from crawling Reddit. The lawsuit says this was “false”, alleging that its logs caught Anthropic’s bots trying to access the site more than one hundred thousand times in the following months.But this isn’t just about corporate squabbles; it directly involves user privacy. When you delete a post or a comment on Reddit, you expect it to be gone. Reddit has official licensing deals with other big AI players like Google and OpenAI, and these deals include technical measures to ensure that when a user deletes content, the AI company does too.According to Reddit’s lawsuit, Anthropic has no such deal and has refused to enter one. This means if their AI was trained on a post you later deleted, that content could still be baked into Claude’s knowledge base, effectively ignoring your choice to remove it. The lawsuit even includes a screenshot where Claude itself admits it has no real way of knowing if the Reddit data it was trained on was later deleted by a user:So, what does Reddit want? It’s not just about money, although they are asking for damages for things like increased server costs and lost licensing fees. They are asking the court for an injunction to force Anthropic to stop using any Reddit data immediately.Furthermore, Reddit wants to prohibit Anthropic from selling or licensing any product that was built using that data. That means they’re asking a judge to effectively take Claude off the market.This case forces a tough question: Does being “publicly available” on the internet mean content is free for any corporation to take and monetise? Reddit is arguing a firm “no,” and the outcome could change the rules for how AI is developed from here on out.(Photo by Brett Jordan)Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Type foundry F37 has launched a new typeface inspired by one of Manchester’s last wooden street signs. And they worked with designer Craig Oldham and copywriter Ellen Ling to bring it to life on a series of billboards celebrating the city’s particular brand of pride. F37 Mancunio is based on the typeface on the sign underneath the railway in St Michael’s Place. F37 founder Rick Banks was drawn to the uneven stroke endings on the ‘C’ and the ‘S’ and designer Rodrigo Fuenzalida worked it into a full typeface with nine weights and “a width axis for flexibility.” Mancunio is named after the Roman fort that once stood in present-day Castlefield. “Rick found the reference ages ago and always wanted to turn it into a font,” says F37’s Keelin Wright. “We wanted to take something from the city, and create a font that represents the history of Manchester, but still feels quite modern as well.” The sign in St Michael’s Place that inspired F37’s Mancunio typeface Wright explains that although there are a lot grotesque sans serif fonts in the F37 library, the “quirky” letter endings and old-style numerals create “ a more human type of grotesque.” When it came to launching the typeface, Wright says they wanted to celebrate its connection to Manchester – where F37 is based – in the right way. “We thought because we’ve taken something physical from the city in terms of the sign, we want to give something physical back,” she explains. “We felt that the billboards would give something typographic to the city, especially around springtime, when Manchester is coming out of the gloom.” F37’s Mancunio typeface Banks and Oldham had worked together on several previous projects and bought in Ling to develop the copy-led campaign. She admits it was a daunting brief in some ways, given some high-profile misfires with localised campaigns in Manchester in recent years. In 2022, locals ridiculed a Magnum advert which misrepresented one of the city’s more insalubrious squares, while a recent Adidas billboard for Manchester United proclaiming that “Manneh is Red” was equally derided. Writing on LinkedIn, designer and United fan Andrew Whitehead said he had never once heard the club referred to as Manneh. “It’s not a nickname. It’s not Manchester United. It’s just… off,” he wrote. “This is what fake authenticity looks like.” “There is all this localised stuff that just bombs,” Ling says. “The pressure is on not to do something that feels tired and out of touch.” F37’s Mancunio typeface The team all felt it was important to steer away from many of the well-worn Manchester motifs, which many people feel have been co-opted by commercial interests looking to exploit the city’s creative soul. “When we were putting the brief together, we found pages and pages of reference for things that we didn’t want,” Wright says. “It was much harder to find things that showed what we actually wanted.” “A lot of this stuff feels like it was made by outsiders,” Oldham says. “History didn’t start here in the 1980s – there’s a wealth of culture and community spirit.” It was exciting, he says, to avoid cliches around Tony Wilson, the Hacienda stripes, and the city’s bee symbol and try and capture “the stoicism, the acerbic wit and the self-deprecating pride.” Some of the posters do take familiar topics – like the city’s famously bad weather or Ian Brown’s quote that Manchester has “Everything but a beach” – but Ling says they worked hard to find “a sting in the tail” and “reclaim” these tropes. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Other references are extremely local and deliberately perplexing to outsiders, such as the celebration of Boombox Barry, an iconic local personality. “He’s part of our everyday experience of being in Manchester,” Ling says. “It was nice to give him his flowers in terms of the joy that he brings, and the enigma that he is.” One poster even references the Magnum-advert debacle, celebrating “alfresco tinnies on a piss-soaked Piccadilly G.” For the design, they tried several approaches, including using acid colours, but Oldham says he and Banks realised at one point they were “trying too hard.” The stark white text on black background was the perfect way to showcase the typeface, Oldham says, and stands out in the cityscape. “This dense spot of black cuts through this ocean of visual clutter,” he explains. “It confronts people, and forces them to read the words.” Ling adds that the design works perfectly to communicate the deadpan tone of her copy lines. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Manchester’s creative scene has been struggling with the changes wrought by the city’s rapid growth and development in recent years. Designers have even taken to remixing the city’s famous visual language to protest against “incessant gentrification.” Oldham recognises the tension, although he thinks it’s happening in many cities. “I think as cities grow and change rapidly, you get to a crossroads,” he says. “What are we going to change into? What are we going to take with us? And what have we got to leave behind? “I think that’s a universal worry, but Manchester’s very much at that point in its life cycle right now.” Ling agrees. “It’s not that the city’s independent spirit is being crushed, it’s more like it’s being Last Of Us fungi-d,” she says, in reference to the hit HBO show. “It does feel that everything that you know in your bones makes Manchester great is being commoditised.” F37’s Mancunio typeface Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair. Ellen Ling and Craig Oldham’s posters to launch F37’s Mancunio typeface. Photo by Tim Sinclair.