Category Archives: Design

Reading About Talking About “Getting Real”

The Adobe Design Center, an online magazine exploring all manner of digital creativity, has just published an interview that I conducted with 37signals front man Jason Fried. At first glance, the presentation of the article looks misleadingly as if it focuses on me, when in fact it’s actually a serious conversation about Fried, 37signals and their “Getting Real” approach to Web application development. I tried to pose a string of serious questions as to the practicality of “Getting Real,” both to satisfy my own curiosity and also to try to get Jason to respond to some of the contradictory experience and feedback that I’ve heard about the approach. I think I did a pretty decent job that sheds a little bit more light on this emerging developmental philosophy, but you be the judge. You can read the interview here.

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Reading About Talking About “Getting Real”

The Adobe Design Center, an online magazine exploring all manner of digital creativity, has just published an interview that I conducted with 37signals front man Jason Fried. At first glance, the presentation of the article looks misleadingly as if it focuses on me, when in fact it’s actually a serious conversation about Fried, 37signals and their “Getting Real” approach to Web application development. I tried to pose a string of serious questions as to the practicality of “Getting Real,” both to satisfy my own curiosity and also to try to get Jason to respond to some of the contradictory experience and feedback that I’ve heard about the approach. I think I did a pretty decent job that sheds a little bit more light on this emerging developmental philosophy, but you be the judge. You can read the interview here.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Day but Were Afraid to Ask

An Event ApartMy speaking session on day one of An Event Apart New York City is called “Dawn ’til Dusk with a Design Director.” The idea is to compress one of my typical work days into a breezy little talk, with the hope that eighteen waking hours of activity will make for at least fifty-five minutes of entertainment. Heaven help me if it doesn’t.

I’ll be chronicling everything design related that happens to me, starting more or less from the moment I wake up, through my day at the office, and into the evening, as I slave in front of my computer in service to this blog and other extracurricular projects. Along the way, and with some humility, I hope to convey at least a few interesting lessons on how good design is created and managed, the various ways design informs those activities not explicitly design related, and maybe even how to have a life outside of design.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

Continue Reading …

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A Gel of a Conference

Gel ConferenceToday was the first of two days of the Gel (“Good Experience Live”) Conference, a production of Phil Terry and Mark Hurst of Creative Good. It’s the fourth year for the conference but my first year attending. I’ve always found the tickets to be somewhat prohibitively priced, and if it weren’t for the fact that lots of my management peers at the Times are very enthusiastic about their prior experiences attending, I’m not sure I would have spent the money for a ticket — even though it doesn’t comes out of own pocket but rather from my group budget at the Times. But the advance word was good enough for me to give it a try; so far, so good.

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Illustrations Select

Maira KalmanI suspect not a lot of readers of this blog are also subscribers to NYTimes.com’s Times Select, a service that allows access to the Times’ opinion and editorial columnists, access to up to one hundred articles per month from the archives, access to special, Times Select-only blogs written by guest journalists, and assorted other goodies. It’s a pretty divisive feature, I know, and I’m not trying to sidestep the arguments against it here — but today, under the heading of “assorted other goodies,” we debuted a new, monthly feature from the legendary illustrator and designer Maira Kalman which I think is pretty great.

On the first Wednesday of each month, Kalman will publish a new set of her quite amazing drawings and paintings in an “illustrated column” called “The Principles of Uncertainty.” There are six of them posted today, and they’ve already garnered over seventy reader comments posted to the page, which, I think, is pretty amazing for pay-only content.

In general, I’m pretty enthusiastic about illustration appearing just about anywhere on the Web, so I’m very happy about this. It’s unique, somewhat unexpected stuff, literate and playful at once, and one of the reasons I came to work at The New York Times. You could make a pretty convincing argument that “The Principles of Uncertainty” is made possible only through the particular economics of Times Select; it’s Web-only content that might otherwise be a tough sell to advertisers (as part of Times Select, it’s advertising free). But I’m not trying to invite a critique of the service. Really.

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Arts & Croft’s

It’s the sixth annual May 1st Reboot today, in which designers all over the Web launch visual makeovers of their Web sites. You can go and see the sites that have launched under the rubric of the original campaign at May1Reboot.com, and you can see the campaign’s less Flash-intensive, more standards-friendly offshoot at CSSReboot.com. Together, both efforts can boast of literally hundreds of participants; a heck of a lot of designers have been busy nights and weekends over the past several weeks.

But the only one you really need to go see is the brand new JeffCroft.com, which is a major home run of a redesign if I ever saw one. It’s perhaps the deftest and most cohesive user experience yet fashioned from all of the various de rigeur weblog features, circa 2006: there’s a blogroll, a list of shout-outs, an integrated Flickr feed, comments on everything, a “tumblelog” that orders everything Croft touches, apparently, into a single, chronological view — not to mention a good ol’ fashioned weblog of stuff he writes, too.

It’s a kit of parts that could have easily produced chaos, but Croft unifies everything with a particular élan that has the feeling of a breakthrough. The interface is thoroughly unified and orderly, yet pleasing inventive at all levels — there’s a bold and striking effect to the whole presentation that can be taken in instantly, but it’s a nuanced performance, too (I’m not sure if anything Croft has done before has balanced gestalt and minutiae so successfully; if it has, I want to see it soon). This is the kind of design that thrills me; completely self-motivated and yet unfailingly conscientious in its attention to detail. And it makes me think that things around here are starting to look a little long in the tooth.

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Arts & Croft’s

It’s the sixth annual May 1st Reboot today, in which designers all over the Web launch visual makeovers of their Web sites. You can go and see the sites that have launched under the rubric of the original campaign at May1Reboot.com, and you can see the campaign’s less Flash-intensive, more standards-friendly offshoot at CSSReboot.com. Together, both efforts can boast of literally hundreds of participants; a heck of a lot of designers have been busy nights and weekends over the past several weeks.

But the only one you really need to go see is the brand new JeffCroft.com, which is a major home run of a redesign if I ever saw one. It’s perhaps the deftest and most cohesive user experience yet fashioned from all of the various de rigeur weblog features, circa 2006: there’s a blogroll, a list of shout-outs, an integrated Flickr feed, comments on everything, a “tumblelog” that orders everything Croft touches, apparently, into a single, chronological view — not to mention a good ol’ fashioned weblog of stuff he writes, too.

It’s a kit of parts that could have easily produced chaos, but Croft unifies everything with a particular élan that has the feeling of a breakthrough. The interface is thoroughly unified and orderly, yet pleasing inventive at all levels — there’s a bold and striking effect to the whole presentation that can be taken in instantly, but it’s a nuanced performance, too (I’m not sure if anything Croft has done before has balanced gestalt and minutiae so successfully; if it has, I want to see it soon). This is the kind of design that thrills me; completely self-motivated and yet unfailingly conscientious in its attention to detail. And it makes me think that things around here are starting to look a little long in the tooth.

Continue Reading …

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