Category Archives: AIGA

When All’s Said and Done

Despite an ugly night of non-stop rain, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk event for AIGA New York went off without a hitch this evening. In fact, it went great; Jeffrey’s always entertaining, and he gave a spirited, insightful and often hilarious talk on the nature of selling great work to clients. The subject was a perfect match for the mixed audience of Web designers and print designers, and I think everyone got a little something out of it, regardless of how they earn their design dollars.

Just how many of each kind of designer attended, it’s hard to say. During one question, Jeffrey asked for a show of hands, and it looked like most of the room was populated by designers who work primarily online. Still, this is a salient question for AIGA that I’m keen to get an answer on. As I mentioned last week when I was promoting this event, we’ll be surveying the attendees for their opinions starting tonight, so if you attended, check your email.

As promised, we’ll be giving away some prizes to randomly selected survey respondents: two copies of Jeffrey’s “Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition),” each of which have been signed and dated by Jeffrey to commemorate tonight’s talk, and a free season pass to all four of next spring’s Small Talks.

Speaking of future Small Talks, we have three more coming up before the end of the fall 2006 season: Marc Joseph in November, Peter Arkle and Amy Goldwasser in December, and Emmanuelle Linard in January. All of these events take place in the beautiful venue generously provided for us by Bumble and bumble, and all of them are not-to-be-missed if you enjoy listening to incredibly sharp people talk about design.

Continue Reading …

+

Selling Jeffrey Zeldman on Selling

Jeffrey Zeldman for AIGA NY Small TalksHere I was thinking how clever I am. I came up with this idea to conduct a brief interview with Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman to build up a little advance buzz for his Small Talks appearance next Tue 17 Oct for AIGA New York.

Since the Small Talks series is a forum for design leaders to discuss subjects close to their hearts (and not necessarily expansive career overviews) in relatively intimate surroundings (only about a hundred seats are available for each event), I figured it would be a good opportunity for Jeffrey to preview some of the things he’d be talking about, sort of whet everyone’s appetites. And, wanting to make this event as much of a success as it can be, I also thought it would be a great way to help sell some tickets, too.

I don’t know what I was thinking, because Jeffrey Zeldman, clearly, needs no additional salesmanship. Before I even had the opportunity to publish the interview I’m running here today, and just one business day after the event’s promotional poster even went out in the mail to AIGA members, the event has sold out. All the seats are filled. I should’ve known better.

Continue Reading …

+

AIGA Here and There

AIGAJust a reminder for those in the Baltimore/D.C. area: I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday night at Villa Julie College for the Baltimore chapter of AIGA. I’m going to cover a wide gamut of stuff from what happens at NYTimes.com to my extracurricular projects to my philosophy on design management to a quick tour of my thinking on using typographic grids online. It’s going to be fun; so if you can make it, please come up to introduce yourself.

In other — much bigger — AIGA news, I’m very pleased — ecstatic, actually — to announce that the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman will have a night of his own in mid-October for the New York chapter of AIGA as a part of our Small Talks series. Small Talks is a long-running tradition of the New York chapter, in which we invite a series of highly esteemed design figures to talk about subjects near and dear to their hearts in intimate settings. We purposefully limit the number of seats available to these events in order to allow the speakers to do their magic in as casual and friendly an environment as possible, so book your ticket early before they’re sold out.

Continue Reading …

+

Forest for the Banners

The Urban Forest ProjectIf you’re in the Times Square area anytime between Friday and Halloween, look upwards to the nearly two hundred colorful banners hanging from the lampposts. They’s all part of the Urban Forest Project, a collaboration between AIGA’s New York chapter, Worldstudio Foundation, and the Times Square Alliance. The public art project features visual work from one hundred and eighty-five designers, artists, photographers and illustrators, including some by friends of mine and some by area students who have been mentored by professionals like my friend and colleague on the AIGA NY board, Emma Pressler. Emma has been a major force behind AIGA New York’s mentor program, and an article in yesterday’s Times talks about the work that she and her student partner, Wednesday Trotto (real name!) did for Urban Forest. It’s an event that ties together design, New York City, AIGA, The New York Times and a friend of mine… I call that a great story.

Continue Reading …

+

AIGA Wants YOU

AIGAThings are moving quickly for me since joining the board of directors for AIGA New York. I’ve been hard at work putting together some events that I hope will spark a bit of interest from designers who, until now, might not have thought of AIGA as being the sort of organization that pays a lot of attention to their particular needs. This was the number one concern I heard when I first informally polled readers about the organization a few months ago, and I’m doing my best to fix the situation. The first of these events will take place in October and it’s going to be small yet huge; it’s too early to talk about it in any detail now, so stay tuned.

Continue Reading …

+

The AIGA and Web Design

AIGAAs of the beginning of this month, I became a member of the board of directors for the New York chapter of the AIGA. Notwithstanding the fact that I find their recent, subtle re-branding efforts confusing — mothballing the explicit translation of the organization’s acronym as “American Institute of Graphic Arts” and opting instead for a more global-minded, less literal tagline: “The Professional Association for Design” — I’ve always had great respect for the AIGA.

Over the past several years, I’ve been involved with the organization at various levels, including designing micro-sites like Gain 2.0 and helping to re-architect their Design Forum (a job that, in retrospect, I wish I’d pulled off better), and I’ve been good friends with some of the staffers at the organization’s national office.

As corny as it is, I really do believe in the AIGA’s mission: “To identify and define issues critical to its membership and the graphic design profession; to explore and clarify these issues for the purpose of helping to elevate the standards of the business of graphic design; and to create a forum for the exchange of information, views, ideas and techniques among those engaged in the profession.” In many ways, the organization is uniquely positioned to do a large amount of good for graphic designers and to create the conditions under which great design can flourish.

Continue Reading …

+

Hell Is Other Liberals

Hell Yes!If you were looking for a thought-provoking opportunity to “investigate how graphic design, visual persuasion, and the media will influence the 2004 election,” you would probably have walked away disappointed after this evening’s “Hell Yes!” event, sponsored earnestly by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

To their credit, the organization made it perfectly clear that the panel session would be biased in favor of liberal politics and, specifically, against the policies and track record of the Bush White House. So in that sense, I should have had lowered expectations for the content of the presentations, but I still felt like the whole affair had a sour taste to it.

Continue Reading …

+

Forum Follows Function

AIGA Design ForumIf you have something to say about design and you’re looking for a place to say it online, you now have the added option of saying it at the new AIGA Design Forum, which just launched today and is vastly improved and much easier to use. At least, that’s my humble opinion, as it’s yet another project from your friends over at Behavior. I first alluded to this major undertaking about a month ago, which is some indication of how long I’ve been excited about getting it launched. We actually started talking with the good folks at the AIGA about this when the weather was still warm and before the leaves completely abandoned the trees, so it has a relatively long history. A little bit of which I’ll go into here.

Continue Reading …

+

Work in Progress

AIGANon-disclosure agreements and a general respect for our clients’ privacy generally preclude any mentions of current Behavior projects here, but I’m going to make an exception of a sort for the work we’re currently doing for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Since late last summer, the AIGA has been working on a major overhaul of their core Web sites, and we’ve been privileged enough to take part in redesigning one of the major hubs of aiga.org &#40I’m not going to say exactly which one). We’ve had the pleasure collaborating with my pal Naz over at Weightshift, and to design alongside the likes of Flat, which has made for one of the most interesting design processes I’ve been through. After some hiccups, I think we’re getting close to a really sharp solution, one that draws not only on the work of our aforementioned peers, but also on some of the ideas we started playing with on Gain and the work I’ve been doing here on Subtraction.com. There’s a long way to go, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Continue Reading …

+