Category Archives: Design

Hot off the Silkscreen Presses

The Shirt ProjectA plug for a nice project from some friends: The Shirt Project is a collaboration between Louise Ma (who works in the design group at NYTimes.com) and Rich Watts. It’s a not-for-profit experiment funded by a fellowship that the two recent graduates received from the Cooper Union School of Art.

The idea is to design, print and sell a series of tee-shirts featuring topical, news-driven graphics. Though customers can buy the garments on à la carte, The Shirt Project is most interesting as a subscription. For US$75, customers get five shirts, sent one at a time, every four weeks — or roughly on that schedule. There will be ten in total.

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The Story So Far

Last year, I spent a good deal of time talking about how print designers often fail to realize that the shift from analog to digital media also represents a shift from narrative to behavior — a fundamental change in the language and purpose of graphic design. That’s still an important concept, I think.

But after looking at portfolio after portfolio over the past two years while recruiting talent for an employer that still places a high value on narrative, I should shade this argument further: the future of this profession is not predicated simply on a one-way shift from the sensibilities of analog to the sensibilities of digital.

It’s a two-way street. Granted, the majority of the shift is incumbent upon the analog-minded. But there is a tremendous amount of storytelling that needs to be told in digital media, too, and a tremendous amount to be recovered from the craft of art direction, a discipline that is seemingly stranded in the analog world.

My complaint, right now, is that the majority of storytelling that happens on the Web is based in the interactively rich environment made possible by Flash. Flash has its uses, and I have no particular disdain for the medium. But its unique value is becoming less essential over time even as native tools like CSS and JavaScript become more capable.

Actually, I should rephrase this argument: not enough Web standards-minded designers are thinking narratively in the way that our Flash-fluent colleagues are. The vast majority of practitioners of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript are almost exclusively dedicated to behavioral work — interfaces and templates. There’s very little narrative design being done with these tools, and that’s a shame.

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Coming Out as an Innie

Alan Chochinov, from Core77 told me today that he recently came across, for the first time, the term “innies” as a nickname for designers working in-house at companies whose sole business is not design. He thought it made for a memorable and appropriate bit of slang, and while I’m not sure I with him on how catchy it is, I do agree that it gives a useful appellation to a neglected subset of the working design population.

Anecdotally speaking, the majority of what’s written by design writers and discussed between designers pays short shrift to innies. Instead, the focus tends toward the world of studios, consultancies and agencies — businesses whose main sources of revenue result from selling design services of some form or other for outside clients.

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As Seen in Magazines

All my digital cheerleading aside, I must admit there’s nothing quite like seeing your name in print. There’s an intangible quality to the medium that’s predicated, at last in part, on how relatively difficult and expensive it is to get large numbers of printed items in the hands of actual consumers.

Take magazines, for example. In this digital age, their strange, delayed distribution often makes them feel like time capsules from a world that’s perpetually six to eight weeks behind our own. And yet, when one’s name appears in one… then it’s a thrilling moment, there’s no doubt.

This month, my name appears in two magazines, and I have to admit, both times gave me a thrill. They’re both design publications, of course — Reader’s Digest still refuses to run my heartwarming story of how typography saved me when I fell through the ice during a cold New England winter — and they’re both on newsstands right now.

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Books Under Glass

The Czech Center, located at 83rd Street and Madison on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has a modestly terrific exhibition right now called “Ladislav Sutnar: Modern, National and International.” It’s an incomplete but nevertheless enlightening retrospective of this crucial graphic designer’s work from the first half of the Twentieth Century. Though you’ll be able to peruse the whole of the exhibition in less than thirty minutes, if any part of your job as a designer — online or offline — involves the organization of information according to the subjective rules of visual elegance, then it’s worth the trip.

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Just Doist It

Like a lot of people, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that how I manage to-do items is more of a perpetual journey than an achievable goal. I have yet to come across the perfect task manager, and despite some intermittent progress, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I ever will. So, periodically, I find myself possessed with an urge to overhaul my system — because of inherent shortcomings in my existing methods that have scaled to intolerable inconveniences, because of changes in my working style or my life, or because newly introduced productivity tools promise to make the ongoing search more interesting.

So in this spirit, I’ve been playing with a few new task managers lately. I’ve had mixed success, but one thing I can say: this new round of candidates has definitely confirmed my previously stated opinion that most thinking in the “Getting Things Done” school of productivity is far too elaborate for me.

For over a year, my daily to-do list has more or less been managed in an entirely manual fashion; every morning I create a new list and copy over incomplete items from the previous day’s list. It’s an approach that’s not completely at odds with GTD, but neither does it adhere particularly closely to David Allen’s principles. But one of the to-do applications I’ve flirted with (currently in pre-release state, so I won’t talk about it in too much depth) is so thoroughly committed to the GTD way that it’s more of a hindrance than a help for me. After the initial delight of getting my hands on a fairly powerful task management machine, I’ve become weary of its apparent and frequently unavoidable complexity.

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Our Books, Our Shelves

Even though it’s only November, I’ve been sitting around thinking about next year, specifically about what I’m going to do with it. As I indicated recently, my plan is to scale back on the number of speaking engagements I’ll do in 2008. Partly, I want more time at home and less time at the mercy of the airlines. And partly my plan is to spend at least some of that time writing a book. (I’m nervous even saying that here because who knows if I really have it in me to actually finish writing a book, to say nothing of getting it published.)

What kind of book, you might ask? Well, I’ve decided that it’s not going to be a book about typographic grids, in spite of what modest sums of notoriety I’ve achieved with regard to that subject. Beyond what I’ve committed to blog posts and extemporized at conferences so far, I just don’t think I have much more to say about grids. They’re a valuable and fascinating tool for design, but I feel that, for now anyway, I’ve reached an upper limit on my ability to add to the discourse.

What other subject, then, for this so-called book I’m allegedly planning to write? It’s something that’s still germinating, so it would be premature to go into detail on it now. If and when I get further down the road with it — and if I get a sufficient, confidence-building head of steam — I fully expect to be drafting at least parts of the manuscript in public view on this blog. So not to worry; if it ever becomes a real thing and not just me talking aimlessly, then you’ll get more posts about the book than you care to read about right here.

However, without going into too much detail, I can offer one high-level idea of what kind of product I’m going for: it should be the kind of book that simplifies the shopping experience at your local Barnes & Noble bookseller.

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Something’s Missing in Web Design

Two mildly controversial and seemingly unrelated blog posts were written last week that you shouldn’t miss. First, on Tuesday, Armin Vit asked “Where are all the ‘landmark’ Web sites?” over at Speak Up. His contention is that we have yet to see examples of Web design in the fashion of “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster; Paul Rand’s IBM logo; Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters; Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map; [and] Kyle Cooper’s ‘Seven’ opening titles.” In short, Armin claims that the practice of design online has yet to produce its own canon of seminal and iconic works that can stand their own in the history books of the profession.

Then, over at our very own A Brief Message on Thursday, interaction designer extraordinaire Dan Saffer argues that making stuff is better than making stuff up. “It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur,” he asserts. “Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself.” It’s a provocative argument that seeks to let a little air out of the notion that designers have more to offer as thinkers and planners than as craftspeople.

Naturally, I have an interest in pointing folks to Dan’s excellent article because of my involvement as publisher at A Brief Message (keep clicking on those ads, folks). But I refer to it here not just out of self-interest, but also because I think that, though uncoordinated, both of these posts actually tackle the same issue from different vantage points. Or, rather, I should say that Dan’s post, in a roundabout way, provides an answer to Armin’s post.

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The Elements of My Style

Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?

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