Category Archives: Design

Event of the Summer

An Event ApartEric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman’s rolling design conference tour, An Event Apart, is coming to New York City in July. For the first time, it will be two days long; the first day will be devoted to matters design, and the second day will be devoted to matters code.

Count me a lucky bastard, as these gentlemen have been nice enough to invite me to be one of the presenters on the first day, appearing on the same slate as the prolific Jason Santa Maria and the scary-smart Adam Greenfield, two design practitioners and thinkers that I would gladly pay to see any time. The second day will feature the amazing Aaron Gustafson, from whom anyone can learn more about the practice and management of good code. And, of course, the estimable Eric and Jeffrey will be around too, either in “yadda yadda” mode or “as needed.”

It’s going to be exciting and I can’t wait. Registration isn’t yet open, but you can keep tabs on the An Event Apart Web site or its RSS feed to find out as soon as it goes online. Past events have sold out quickly in Philadelphia and Atlanta, so it’s reasonable to expect the same thing to happen here in New York City. Plus, if you don’t live here, you can treat yourself to a fun few days roaming the Big Apple — the July heat’s not to be missed!

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Reading About Design Is No Fun

Swiss Graphic DesignI’m in the middle of reading “Swiss Graphic Design: The Origin and History of an International Style” by Richard Hollis, a thorough and lavishly illustrated overview of the extremely influential designers and philosophies that shaped much of the craft in the last century. It’s a fantastic tour through the evolution of visual communication in the Modernist style, comprehensive enough in its account to qualify as required reading for any graphic designer, I’d be willing to say. I recommend it.

The problem is, it’s not a particularly gripping read. To be sure, it’s well written and professional, but it’s not engrossing in its narrative; the mind tends to wander a bit when your eyes run back and forth across its dense paragraphs of factual prose; the words don’t do a particularly great job of grabbing your attention and holding onto it with the authority and immersiveness of storytelling. This is perhaps owing to the fact that it’s a history book and a book about design — two non-fiction genres that aren᾿t exactly known for yielding page-turners. Still, I don’t see a good reason why the book couldn’t have been as gorgeously and expertly assembled as it is and, at the same time, also proven to be a blast to read.

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The Home Page’s Middle Manager

NYTimes.com MOTHsOne of my favorite features on the new NYTimes.com is the row of feature articles that we have running across the middle of the home page. With questionable creativity, we refer to them by their acronym, “MOTHs,” though when they appear at the bottom of an article I guess they really ought to be referred to as “BOTAs.” I had almost nothing to do with designing them, so it’s not bias talking when I say that I think they’re a very attractive, eye-catching method of highlighting features using sometimes very different kinds of imagery (or no imagery, as with the headline-only ones) in a surprisingly cohesive presentation.

They’re also incredibly effective at signaling a different kind of content from what appears at the top of the home page, which is an important role in a layout that must juxtapose sometimes incredibly serious and upsetting content with sometimes esoteric or lighthearted content. The editorial team have used the MOTHs to great effect to publish a mix of opinion, arts, sports, technology and other articles less urgent than those at the top of the main columns. They make it all work together.

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The Home Page’s Middle Manager

NYTimes.com MOTHsOne of my favorite features on the new NYTimes.com is the row of feature articles that we have running across the middle of the home page. With questionable creativity, we refer to them by their acronym, “MOTHs,” though when they appear at the bottom of an article I guess they really ought to be referred to as “BOTAs.” I had almost nothing to do with designing them, so it’s not bias talking when I say that I think they’re a very attractive, eye-catching method of highlighting features using sometimes very different kinds of imagery (or no imagery, as with the headline-only ones) in a surprisingly cohesive presentation.

They’re also incredibly effective at signaling a different kind of content from what appears at the top of the home page, which is an important role in a layout that must juxtapose sometimes incredibly serious and upsetting content with sometimes esoteric or lighthearted content. The editorial team have used the MOTHs to great effect to publish a mix of opinion, arts, sports, technology and other articles less urgent than those at the top of the main columns. They make it all work together.

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Hiring the Right Design Manager

As hard as it is for designers to learn management skills, it’s even harder for companies to find truly qualified design managers to hire. It’s just a rare quality, because for truly creative types, the act of managing can often be a daily struggle between satisfying the sensibilities of the artist’s id, and orchestrating all the business factors that intersect with a design team. It’s an unnatural and often uneasy internal alliance of opposing agendas.

All of this occurs to me because an acquaintance is in the middle of a search for a new design director, someone to bring a keen design awareness and a sense of leadership to the Web design group inside of the Fortune 1000 company where she works. Aside from the usual qualities that one looks for in a candidate — portfolio, professionalism, work history, proficiencies — I thought it important to look for a few key characteristics when looking for a design manager. So I sat down and knocked out a short list of must-haves that I would recommend looking for when hiring someone to manage a group of designers, specifically in an in-house design group.

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The Awesome Redesign I Didn’t Do

The New York TimesAlert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.

I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.

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The Awesome Redesign I Didn’t Do

The New York TimesAlert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.

I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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The Deck That Didn’t

Traditional Design & New TechnologyHow many more weblog posts can I squeeze out of my trip to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival? This is the last one, I think: it wraps up the panel discussion in which I took part on the first day of the conference, “Traditional Design & New Technology.” As promised, I’m making the slides available for download. However, be forewarned that this deck is unlikely to be of much good to anyone. It was prepared as just a skeletal framework for the discussion, so there’s not a lot of content in the slides themselves.

In preparing for the session, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria and I all labored through several rounds of a much more detailed and extensive deck of slides that we used to help us get our bearings with the subject matter. After several rounds, we ultimately decided that first framework was too constricting, that it would too forcefully guide the discussion and suppress the spontaneity of the group. So we took a deep breath and threw it all out, keeping only a choice few slides as touch-points for the conversation.

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