Category Archives: Behavior

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.

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Good Day for Muléh

MuléhNew work from Behavior: this evening we launched a redesign for Muléh, (pronounced moo-lay) a D.C.-area retailer specializing in imported, high-end furniture. It’s certainly not the largest scale site we’ve ever done, but it’s a lot of fun launching smaller sites as well — the path from concept to completion is much less circuitous. Muleh.com is almost 100% XHTML Transitional 1.0-compliant, relying entirely on a simple CSS file for layout; we’ll be tweaking things here and there over the next several days to get it up to code. The site is also driven by the endlessly handy Movable Type, which was the perfect light-weight content publisher for a do-it-yourself kind of client who didn’t want to learn a complex CMS. Now I go to sleep.

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Night of the Living Intern

Three of my partners at Behavior are due to make a huge pitch for a new project to our biggest client tomorrow morning. To do my part, I played the part of the production lackey this evening. This entailed not even typing a single paragraph of the proposal nor laying out a single spread in the elaborate leave-behind book they prepared for the client.

Rather, my duties included making a run to two paper stores, two art supply stores and a visit to Staples, printing six copies of the 50-page document on our rather leisurely-paced color printer, trimming all the copies down to the custom size we had determined for the book, collating the pages, assembling the pages in the uncommon binder we purchased to house them, and affixing tab dividers to mark the eight sections in each book.

I’ve done manual work from time to time since starting Behavior, but rarely to this extent. I’m not complaining, though — in fact, despite its physically laborious demands, I found a kind of meditative quality in the whole endeavor. If nothing else, it was a semi-pleasant flashback to the days when I was an intern and even my first few years as a professional, so-called ‘junior designer,’ when fully half of every working day must have been spent cutting, trimming and affixing things to be given to people. After ten years (yikes!) in the business — including two as an owner in an independent design business — there’s a kind of irony in that, right?

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The Power of the Press

Printing PressBehavior is printing a special-purpose marketing piece for which we need only about 50 copies. Taking this to a traditional offset printer — the old school kind, with huge, dangerous, finger-eating mechanical presses, unionized staff brimming with arcane printing knowledge, and storerooms full of noxious chemicals — would have made absolutely no economic sense. We also priced this out with one of the new breed of printers, the kind that straddle the line between traditional shops and digital service bureaus, and even that quote was pricier than we’d anticipated.

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Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

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Building Good Credit

Chase Credit CardsVery early this morning, at about 03:00a, a year and a half of Behavior labor finally bore fruit at Chase Credit Cards. We’ve been working on the redesign of this Web site since late 2001 — in fact, it was one of the marquee projects that got us going straight out of the gate when we opened up shop late that year — so we’re very, very happy to finally see it launched. If you’ve got a Chase credit card (and research shows that many of you do!), you can start using the site and all its cool tools immediately; if you don’t have a Chase credit card, the site makes it dead simple to choose and apply for the perfect one for you.

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Big Plans

As part of an exercise in strategic planning at Behavior, I had to write down my thoughts on where I think the company will be in the future. This kind of thinking is tough, but it’s a useful way to try and reconcile vague aspirations with reality. I had to project out five years, and I set a goal for roughly twelve times the revenue we made in 2002, six times the staff, a broader client base and the luxurious market context of a second Internet boom. I think optimism is important.

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Unfit for Print

These days I’m getting my fill of the world of print design. We’re getting ready to send out a new marketing brochure at Behavior and I’m lending a hand to get the production files out to the printer. A lot of Web designers would like this change of pace, would like the opportunity to work on something tangible and based in atoms rather than dealing with the world of the Web, but not me.

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We Did Can Do

Can Do FitnessAnother casualty of my time away last week was the timely announcement of the latest site launch from Behavior: the official Web site for Can Do Fitness, a chain of high-end health clubs in New Jersey. We built the site entirely in Flash, and it’s driven by a custom content publishing tool on the back-end to make class schedules available online. You can also explore interactive floorplans, newsletters, trainer biographies, ‘smart’ directions and more… it kinda makes me wanna get up from in front of my computer.

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