Category Archives: Design

If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software

Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations (everything that falls under human resources, typically, but also accounting, communications and, at one time or another, just about everything else) are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdings — or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company — then you’ve probably encountered these confounding user experiences. And you probably cursed out loud.

This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it’s only natural that the result is often very strange.

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New York to Boston to Denver, and Back Again

That was a busy weekend. Here’s how I spent it.

I woke up at about 4:00a on Friday morning and flew to Boston for the Society of News Designers conference, which was great fun. In our session just before lunchtime, Tom Bodkin and I had a very lively public debate about the merits and flaws of digital design, which I think some members of the audience recorded. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have stayed longer.

Then it was off to Denver for the AIGA National Design Conference. I got just a few hours of sleep that night before reporting to the impressive and immense Denver convention center (they have an awesome sculpture of a bear giving drivers-by the ass in front of the building) the next morning, to be introduced for my solo talk by the extremely classy Kurt Andersen, who asked me some sharp follow-up questions after I was done. It was a little frightening, too, to speak for twenty-five minutes in front of some 2,500 attendees, but I’m proud to say that I did not mess up, at least.

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Standing in the Drop Shadow of Usability

There’s a crucial part of interface design that vexes me and it’s iconography, the discipline of crafting highly communicative, aesthetically efficient pictorial symbols in miniature. It takes a special combination of artistry, patience and visual economy in order to get it right, and I’m in awe of everyone who has this skill. (I’ll say also that there are many folks who are competent at this art form, but exceedingly few who are truly good at it.)

What confounds me about iconography, though, is only partly the fact that I’m astoundingly no good at it. It’s also the idea that the idiom of icons, at least in its current state, stands at a polar opposite to my own sensibility. To be specific: the majority of commonly accepted and commercially functional icons in use today are visually literal — they represent objects or combinations of objects, even if they are intended to stand in for abstract concepts — and they’re almost exclusively dimensional.

By contrast, I like incredibly abstract and minimal graphical elements. For me, a simple, one-pixel straight line is practically a revival of the Rococo style. If I had my way, the only pictorial components of my design work would be the pictures: photographs or illustrations. Everything else would be simple and elementally native to the browser, or whatever other rendering mechanism I’m working with. Which is to say, you’d only ever see lines and boxes — and flat ones at that. No shading, please, and no three-dimensional modeling.

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Sustainability, Schmastainability

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in print, so I don’t often think about the wonderful world of paper. As a print designer working in a design studio, you tend to think a lot about the stuff; what paper to run a job on, what it costs, who stocks it, where it comes from, etc. To be honest, it bored the living heck out of me; there were few things that I found more tiresome than rifling through an endless and disorderly stack of paper samples, each one obtusely named in a vain attempt to differentiate white from, um, really white.

I almost never think about paper companies, either. Until I got heavily involved with AIGA again, I had almost forgotten about their enormous influence in the design community. And their deep, deep pockets. In spite of the portents of doom for printed matter, paper companies continue to spend freely to promote their wares, or at least that’s my outsider’s impression.

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Elevator Expertise from an Expert

Back in June, I wrote a rant about the unorthodox and not entirely successful innovation baked into the elevators at the new Times building. As I learned afterwards, they were designed according to a principle of elevator service called destination-based dispatching. The basic idea is that, rather than putting passengers on the first elevator car that arrives, the system routes passengers to the cars that will deliver them to their destinations most quickly.

This approach somewhat upends the traditional way passengers interact with elevators. Instead of hopping on the first car that arrives and punching a button for a floor, a passenger punches the button for her floor first, on a keypad available at the elevator bank. The system then directs her to, say, car number three, along with other passengers heading to the same floor. Once on the elevator, there are no buttons, nothing to push. It’s a little strange. At least the way it’s been implemented at our building, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

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Clothes Make the Design Director

This morning I woke up and dressed myself all wrong. I don’t know why, but I dressed like an idiot. I put on a short-sleeved, collared shirt that, once I arrived at the office, seemed entirely inappropriate for the workplace; a pair of light brown corduroys that somehow seemed more ill-fitting today than anytime I’ve worn them before; and a pair of black, Chuck Taylor All-Stars-style sneakers more fit for a playground than a meeting room.

If I recall vaguely amid my early morning brain fog, my intention was to fancy the whole ensemble up a bit with a pair of the dress shoes that I keep at the office, but when I got there I was reminded that I kind of hate those shoes. I thought maybe I’d add a blazer I keep in the closet and sort of cover up my shame, but all of a sudden this blazer, which I’ve had for a few years, made me look as big as a house. So I resigned myself to going through the day looking like some kind of “Leave It to Beaver” reject stuck in design school. Pick me for your artsy kickball team!

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Sunday in the Times: Choking

Choking on GrowthThe front page of tomorrow’s New York Times will feature the first installment in a series called “Choking on Growth,” an in-depth examination of “the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.” It’s a major piece of reporting, and as usual you can find it at NYTimes.com alongside similarly excellent, complementary video, multimedia and interactive infographics.

There’s a little more value add this time, though, in the form of a special section on the site devoted to “Choking on Growth.” It’s essentially a micro-site that showcases the entire series — traditional journalism as well as Web-only content — as a coherent package, and it will be updated and added to over the coming days and weeks as the series continues. It’s also the result of a tremendous and not-as-frequent-as-I’d-like instance of our designers collaborating with editors from both the print and Web side, and with our multimedia, video and information graphics teams.

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The Start Is at the Finish

Speaking of movies, I did in fact go to see “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which was fantastic. With my perpetually critical designer’s eye, though, I noticed two things: first, that the movie’s titles are actually quite bad. They use a simplistic, somewhat retrograde graphical animation that amounts to pretty much what I imagine the titles for “Freejack” must have looked like.

But if you saw the movie too, you might not have paid much attention to the titles, because of my second observation: like a lot of films released in the past half decade, the titles follow at the end of the film, after the final frame of action. Though they are designed very much in the same way as titles that precede the film — you could almost move them to the start of the picture and they would work as is — they’re inserted as parting gestures instead of opening salutations.

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This Way to the Web, Print Designers!

Some of my best friends are print designers. Really. Here in New York, there’s a vague segregation between online and offline designers, but the local design community is still sufficiently cozy — and the island of Manhattan sufficiently small — that it’s not unusual for print and digital designers to intermingle freely. Dogs and cats, living together. Insane but true.

It’s great, actually. Especially for me. While I have an obvious partiality towards all things digital, my romance with graphic design originally started with print, obviously. That’s all we had in the pre-TCP/IP dark ages. I enjoy the two worlds immensely, even if I do believe the one is going to completely decimate the other like an atom bomb before the decade’s out. Kidding!

Over the past few years, too, I’ve come to see that the purpose of my career (in at least one aspect) is to do what I can to help bridge the two worlds. Part of this is my design sensibility, which hopes to borrow the best of print to help inform the evolving digital world in a way that’s true to the new medium. Part of it is the mission that I set out for myself when I joined the board of directors at AIGA New York, which to me plays a crucial role in our industry’s transition. And part of this is the fact that I work at a company that employs dozens of print designers even as we’re transforming ourselves into a digital enterprise.

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Passing on Periodicals

Speaking of magazines, does anybody read them anymore? Which is to say that while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who continue to buy, subscribe to and read traditional periodicals, I realized recently that I’m not among them.

The other day, I was over at a friend’s house and was surprised to see that she had copies of Monocle and Good Magazine on her coffee table. Well, I wasn’t surprised by that so much as I was surprised by how interesting I found them, at least for the short spell in which I was flipping through their pages as my friend and I chatted. I have complaints about the art direction in Monocle, but between those two, I can’t deny that compelling stuff is happening in magazine design these days. Add just about any given week’s issue of New York Magazine to the mix, and you have a pretty good survey of some of the most absorbing design happening anywhere. The problem is that they’re like lipstick on a pig: some of the best design being done today is being wasted on magazine content.

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