Category Archives: Design

NYC Voter’s Guide

The New York City Campaign Finance Board sends out a voter guide in advance of every election, and after I get it in the mail, I usually put it on a table and tell myself a little white lie about how I’ll read it well before the polls open on Election Day. But I never do, partly because, in the past, those guides have been dryly designed and uninviting — they don’t exactly promise a page-turning experience.

For this year’s primary (coming up on 13 Sep), the board tried something different — actually injecting a bit of engagement into the design. You can get a sense of the look at the NYCCB’s new approach at the Web site, which isn’t a bad representation of the printed guide at all, but it pretty much just looks like a regular Web site.

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NYC Voter’s Guide

The New York City Campaign Finance Board sends out a voter guide in advance of every election, and after I get it in the mail, I usually put it on a table and tell myself a little white lie about how I’ll read it well before the polls open on Election Day. But I never do, partly because, in the past, those guides have been dryly designed and uninviting — they don’t exactly promise a page-turning experience.

For this year’s primary (coming up on 13 Sep), the board tried something different — actually injecting a bit of engagement into the design. You can get a sense of the look at the NYCCB’s new approach at the Web site, which isn’t a bad representation of the printed guide at all, but it pretty much just looks like a regular Web site.

Continue Reading …

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Upside-Down Inverted Triangles and Other Interface Details

050816_triangle.pngHere’s how much tiny user interface cues can matter: this afternoon, I spent about five minutes scratching my head in front of an Open dialog box in Adobe Photoshop, trying vainly to locate the files I’d saved several months ago to a particular folder. They just weren’t where I expected them to be.

The dialog box was displaying the contents of the folder in list view, and I had clicked on the Date Modified column to sort most recently modified items last. At least that᾿s what I thought I had done; the triangle icon was in fact in the correct mode — pointed end at the top, wide end at the bottom. But apparently, some kind of preference file had been corrupted, and the list was actually sorted so that the most recently modifed items appeared first.

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Try Before You Buy Fonts

There’s something broken about the way typeface licenses work. First, in my dozen or so years of working in professional design studios, I would say that most of those digital environments have habitually ‘pirated’ typefaces — or at least regularly violated licensing agreements — by more or less copying and distributing fonts wantonly. Everyone knows this.

For better or worse, the type industry has chosen not to crack down on this behavior by imposing unwieldy digital rights management or other draconian schemes on the market. Compared to the increasingly onerous anti-piracy measures for traditional application software, little attention is paid to preventing the proliferation of unlicensed typefaces, and by and large most designers enjoy the benefits of such a lax approach. But that rampant piracy has a negative effect: it keeps prices for quality typefaces high, or at least high enough to inhibit frequent designer adoption of new ones.

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State Your Profession

Among the fifty or so potential jurors who reported along with me to the courthouse for jury duty last week, I noticed there was a surprisingly large number who identified themselves as designers. I was in the candidate pool in three jury selection processes, and I heard maybe a dozen people state their occupation as packaging designer, art director, interactive designer, web designer or just plain graphic designer. When it came time for me to answer the judge’s questions, I could only answer sheepishly that I was yet one more of the same.

This is Manhattan, after all, where we have what is probably the densest assembly of design professionals on the planet, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody to find a disproportionate number of design professionals in any gathering. I have a deep and abiding respect for the trade and its art, but every time I hear someone, including me, identify himself or herself as a graphic designer, it makes me cringe a little.

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How to Get Started in Design

At the very beginning of a design project, before any boxes have been drawn or pixels have been pushed, there’s the nerve-wracking ritual known as ‘the kick-off.” For larger engagements, clients may set aside as many as four or five full days to sit down with a design team and impart as much knowledge as possible, and it’s up to the design team to make that time worthwhile. To me, this has always been one of the most difficult — and least documented — parts of the design process, because it demands a confluence of skills that you can’t pick up in front of a computer screen. To run a successful kick-off, you have to ask probing questions and carefully parse the answers that come back, taking into account corporate culture and stakeholder agendas. You have to be an assiduous gatherer of information while also a gentle tutor in best practices. And on top of it all, you have to be able to guide conversations and keep things lively, while transitioning issues logically and productively. I’ve done it about two dozen times in my career, and every time I sit down to plan one, it’s almost like starting over from scratch. Really, what makes kick-offs truly difficult is that each and every one is different.

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How to Design Faster, Maybe

From a perspective of sheer design labor, the most difficult part of bringing a new Web site to life is production. At that point where the major design challenges have been resolved (what the home page and a few other key pages look like, how the site feels) and when those resolutions have been approved by the stakeholders, designers then apply that solution across all the constituent parts of the site: marketing pages, content pages, forms, search interfaces, etc. Typically, this is done with Adobe Photoshop or, recently for me, Macromedia Fireworks, in a fairly painful process of rendering “flat comps”; creating static, visually accurate representations of what the XHTML should render while also suggesting, rather awkwardly, how the interface will respond to user interactions.

Does this sound like a drag? It is, especially for sites with dozens of pages, like the ones we often do at Behavior. It’s not so much that the work itself is drudgery. It’s not; in fact, this work is the crucial evolution between concept and reality, when the design ideas put forward in early comps are expanded and embellished upon to create a fully-fledged system of interrelated parts. In production, the design becomes real. What’s a drag is how much effort it takes to build all of these flat comps; you could spend weeks trying to address all of the design problems that a site presents and iterating on those solutions continuously before even getting to the first line of XHTML. I’ve done that.

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Vote Gets a Vote

VoteSeveral folks have emailed me about this, but I just got my hands on a copy of the I.D. Magazine 2005 Design Annual last night; Behavior’s design for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy was lucky enough to receive a Design Distinction award. I had actually heard about this a little while back, though I wasn’t even sure what “Design Distinction” might mean. Now that I have the annual in front of me, it’s turns out to be something like a runner-up position, just a step above ‘honorable mentions.’ We’re in good company, too — the Museum of Modern Art’s gorgeous Tall Buildings, designed by the sharp minds at For Office Use Only, also received a commendation, which is very flattering.

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The Problem with Fireworks

FireworksEvery time I complain about Adobe Photoshop’s handicapped suitability for web production, people tell me to give Macromedia Fireworks a try, so today, I finally did. I spent a few hours in the program re-creating a layout that originated in Photoshop, and, after acclimating myself to the new application’s interface, I was generally pleased. It is indeed faster and more flexible in terms of shifting elements around, and it does in fact match a web designer’s frame of mind better than does Photoshop — I’ll almost certainly use it as the primary comping tool for my next project. However, I’m still not completely sold on Fireworks as the solution for all the problems that web production presents to a designer.

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The Problem with Photoshop

After trying many times to regulate the manner in which Web site production is organized on the many design teams I’ve led, I’m still not at peace with the amount of control that should be imposed on other designers. On the one hand, everyone works in a unique manner, and it’s counter-productive to shoehorn a single, unified and overly detailed process on designers, who are typically free-thinkers when it comes to this working style. This I accept readily, but there are some things, admittedly low-level things, that I find it hard not to at least want to control.

There are more profound — and touchier — examples than this, but the one that has me preoccupied lately is the relatively trivial matter of organizing Photoshop documents. By and large, most designers approach the construction of a Photoshop document in an ad hoc manner, creating new layers as they are needed, not always naming them properly, or defaulting to Photoshop’s automated, serial numbering scheme, which happens to be generally devoid of meaning. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of Photoshop documents are created in this way, and more often than not without negative consequence.

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