Category Archives: Design

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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Post-panel

Liz Danzico, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Jason Santa Maria and I have just finished our panel, “Traditional Design and New Technology” here at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Frankly, I’m relieved; we spent a lot of time preparing for it, including an endless stream of email exchanges, many outline drafts, international conference calls, and a big, team-building breakfast here in Austin at 7:30a this morning, so there was a lot of build-up. In the end, I think the panel went pretty well — basically, anything that went well is owing to Liz Danzico’s masterful job of moderating the discussion. We had a pretty lively debate and several challenging questions from the audience; the festival management has recorded it, apparently, and will be posting a podcast sometime soon, which I’ll link to when I find it. Anyway, I enjoyed the whole experience quite a lot. If you were in the audience today, first, thanks for attending, and second, I’d be keen to know what you thought. Don’t be shy, I can take it.

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The Elements of Style Manuals, Part Two

Wow, I’m a little stunned by the general lack of reaction to Monday’s post about the long decline in the quality of design style manuals. Maybe I was under some hallucination that this is an issue that many (if not most) designers will encounter many times in their careers, and that those designers would generally find the tortured motivations of style manuals to be a worrying state of affairs. Even so, it was one of my favorite pieces so far; I took out more time to write it than I do most pieces, and I think it represents a novel perspective on what it is exactly that designers deliver to clients.

At any rate, I’m undeterred in my pursuit of this subject. Never let it be said that I’m guided solely by comment count! As it happens, the second part of my rant on this subject is considerably less ambitious — it works off of the premise that the climate of client-designer expectations is one that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. For the time being, designers are stuck with these particular circumstances when it comes to style manuals: a high bar for comprehensiveness and a low threshold for time and for fees devoted to documentation — resulting in a lot of labor producing little value.

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The Elements of Style Manuals, Part One

It strikes me that there are lots of problems with style manuals, those definitive pieces of documentation that accompany a completed design solution: Clients want them to be a comprehensive set of full-contigency bylaws governing the usage of the designs they’ve paid for, but they frequently balk at the necessary time and expense that’s necessary to produce anything so complete. Designers want to deliver a sound set of pliable guidelines that will continue to do justice to their work, but even with a capacious budget, they can’t possibly provide enough all-encompassing logic to stand in for design talent absent from a client’s payroll.

These conflicting circumstances usually result in style manuals full of what I like to call ‘rote specifications’; thick booklets packed with granular details on sizes, measurements, colors and rudimentary “do’s and don’ts” for the usage of a design solution. Unfortunately, these are usually constructed to appearimpressive above all else, relying on the sheer quantity of detail to justify to clients both the full expense of the design process and to evince the apparent sustainability of the completed design.

At best, they’re superficial documents with limited usefulness; like blueprints for television homes, they’re interesting in their intricacy, but of limited practical value in real life. I’ve seen many style manuals that, while voluminous, were useful for only a handful of factual attributes: PANTONE colors, typeface specifications, and grid measurements, for instance, but little else. One could have easily been reduced these manuals to a handful of pages and they would have proven just as useful.

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Citizen Journalists, Unite

NewsvineFor a while now, I’ve been playing with Newsvine, a news-driven community, Web 2.0 application that’s been generating considerable buzz since widening its beta program. Even though Newsvine, Inc. CEO Mike Davidson insists that, in its current state, the application is only a fraction of what it will be, it’s apparent to any beta tester that it’s an ambitious project.

Davidson and his team are trying to create a hybrid of citizen journalism and mainstream media news, allowing users to author their own ‘columns’ from the freely available Associated Press articles constantly flooding into the Newsvine system, or to ‘seed’ their own stories from virtually any outside source on the Web. While it may bear some superficial resemblance to community-driven news sites like Digg.com, Newsvine actually aims to be a news authority of its own, rivaling more established news sources. It’s an idea that has a certain amount of inevitability to it: an aggregated, community-authored news source that can stand as a peer to mainstream news outlets.

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Talk Amongst Ourselves

Traditional Design & New TechnologyFor some weeks, I’ve been working hard to make a spectacular contribution to what I’m sure will be a spectacular discussion panel at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. It’s called “Traditional Design & New Technology” and it examines the questions of whether and how the aesthetic and functional principles that guided graphic design throughout its pre-Internet existence make sense on the World Wide Web. How do the vastly differing criteria between offline and online media determine what makes for ‘good design’? How has the shifting role of designers affected the expectations that audiences set for design quality? How do changing tools and techniques influence the relevancy of traditional design values?

As far as design topics go, these are some of the thornier ones, at least in my estimation. For this, I have the formidable Mark Boulton to thank — or to blame, as it’s turned out, for all the extracurricular hours we’ve spent preparing for this session. The original brainstorm was his; then he and I did the initial planning together. But the whole affair has come much further than we could have ever hoped thanks to the work of our co-panelists: Jason Santa Maria and Toni Greaves, and our moderator, Liz Danzico.

These people are all very, very impressive, and if I weren’t on this panel, I’d be in the audience just to watch them. For real! I’d even be there at the very early time and date of 10:00a on Saturday morning, 11 March, which just happens to be when “Traditional Design & New Technology” will take place. Yes, that’s the first day and the first time slot in the festival — we’re even on before the opening remarks, if you can believe it. The way I like to look at it: I once went to see Spiritualized open up for The Jesus & Mary Chain in the early nineties: I don’t regret seeing the Mary Chain, but I’m really glad I saw Spiritualized. You’ll be glad too, if you show up for this panel. Hope to see you there.

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Seen Any Good Designs Lately?

Along with a few other design figures — each of whom have much, much more impressive reputations than myself — I’ve been been invited by one of New York’s major art museums to help select pieces for inclusion in their permanent design collection. For now, I’m going to be a bit cagey about this and refrain from revealing the name of this museum. But suffice it to say that, to be selected for inclusion in this institution’s collection is a pretty prestigious affair, and I’m more than a little stunned that I was asked for my opinion.

That said, part of my responsibility in this matter is to submit a few possible candidates by, like, a few days ago. I’m late. I’ve been sitting on this for a good time now, and though I have some ideas I’m definitely a little stumped, so I thought I would open it up to my loyal readership.

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Mail of the Species

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the luxury of unfettered access to my mail server for Subtraction.com from wherever I’ve happened to work. This has allowed me to maintain a clean separation between personal and business correspondences, as I’ve always been able to receive POP3 message traffic right into a separate mail database at my office (usually in a different email client from the employer’s official, sanctioned email client), without having to rely on my workplace email address to keep in touch with people.

That’s no longer the case. For security reasons, POP3 traffic is restricted to me during the workday now, so now I have to rely on Web-based email clients, a genre of net software for which I’ve never managed to drum up very much enthusiasm. Managing my email box over the Web is a bit like providing technical support to my mother over the phone; it’s halting and inelegant at best, and frustrating and time-consuming at worst. No matter how many gigabytes of free storage and no matter how much Ajax-goodness is conscripted into the service of the user interface, Web-based mail clients can’t hold a candle to the experience of a desktop email client — even one as convoluted and inscrutable as Microsoft Outlook. And that’s saying a lot.

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I Was a Twenty-something Print Designer

The RopersWay back when I had no idea how cool the information superhighway really would be — this was the mid-1990s — I was trying to make my way in life as a print designer. I did some lamentable work at a small advertising agency in McLean, Virginia and then at a slightly more glamorous design studio in downtown Washington, D.C., basically graduating from real estate advertisements at the former to stylistically fickle marketing work at the latter. Neither position was particularly satisfying for my creative aspirations.

For a while, I took refuge in freelance work, mostly doing work for the small army of independent bands hiding out in the outer-reaches of Northwest Washington. This meant designing album covers, CD covers, tee-shirts and posters on little or no budget, but getting a fair amount of creative license. I only did this for a few years and, because my day job at the time was so time intensive, I never became particularly prolific, producing only a handful of pieces during my four years in D.C.

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Making Work for Idle Hands

Though I left Behavior at the end of December, I won’t start my new position at The New York Times until next Tuesday, 17 January. This has left me with roughly two weeks off, the first such period I’ve had to myself — with no getaways to exotic locales, no long trips to see family, and no short excursions to New Jersey to see Joy’s family — in a long time. One might have expected me to spend this two weeks watching movies, meeting for social lunches and/or drinking nightly, but I can’t imagine feeling like I have less time for those sorts of distractions.

Rather, I made a long list of Things to Do, goals large and small that have been nagging at me for attention for ages: sell some old junk on Ebay, buy new shelves, re-organize my file cabinet, buy that long-delayed wedding gift for a friend who got married last summer, and tie up a few loose ends remaining from my commitments at Behavior. Every morning I go over the list again, then spend my day putting check-marks next to as many items as I can; unfortunately, I’ll inevitably add as many new tasks as I finish. The net result is that I feel busier, and in some ways more productive, than ever. I don’t know how I ever found time for a real job.

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