Category Archives: Design

Window Dress for Success

Window ChromeNow that Mac OS X Tiger has given us yet another variation on window chrome — the user interface ‘parts’ that frame windows in the operating system — I got to thinking about how they all work together. Well, to begin with, I’ve more or less given up on the idea that there truly is any kind of overarching strategy at work between the various styles of chrome offered by Apple. For instance, there’s no clear reason to me why the Finder is adorned with brushed metal or that Mail 2.0 looks completely foreign from its logical close cousin, the Address Book. Even saying there was, at one point, some kind of tidy logic governing chrome styles, that original concept has taken yet another debilitating body blow.

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Temporary Insanity

Adobe IllustratorAs spring seasons go, this one has been extraordinarily busy for me so far. Between work, traveling for work and working more, we’re doing more projects and more intensive projects at Behavior than ever before. This means good things for us and our clients, but bad things for the frequency of posts here while I go crazy over work tasks.

Another reason for my slacker performance on this weblog over the past week is Adobe Illustrator CS’s new, bewildering habit of creating dozens of unaccountable temporary files all over my hard drive. There are various explanations for the cause, none of which are conclusive, but the answer seems to lie somewhere between the Creative Suite’s PDF features and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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New Logo for an Old Favorite

It’s going to take me a little while to really come to grips with the fact that DC Comics has changed its logo, obsolescing the long-standing, Milton Glaser-designed icon for something, well, different. The new mark includes forward-leaning “D.C.” initials against a swooshy, Saturn-like ring in a dimensional rendering, with a hint of Adobe Illustrator-style gradient along its edge. A curiously Captain America-like star, drawn in perspective, punctuates the whole thing.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t find it particularly attractive or probably as utilitarian as Glaser’s original triumph of compactness and visual exclamation. To the designers’ credit, it does attempt to rescue what’s good about its predecessor from the short-sighted imperatives of DC Comics’ current marketing strategy, but in doing so, it completely misinterprets the old mark’s substance for rather shallow style.

Old vs. New DC Comics Logos

The classic, Milton Glaser-designed logo, at left, and the new form, at right.

Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To

Maybe this is just nostalgia, because I was an avid reader of DC Comics when I was a kid, and I still feel invested in their canon of heroes and pop mythology. As a function of my childhood, the old logo really represents something constant and reliable, even when the tonality of the comic books changed drastically. Just to get pretentious for a bit: the nature of the art and writing and even the economic reach of comic books has metamorphosed in a kind of parallel to my advancement from kickball games on blacktops to PowerPoint presentations in front of corporate officers, but that logo has been always the same, at least until now. It’s my sense of vanity and obstinacy speaking when I say that the new logo just isn’t worthy of the old logo’s legacy, but I really do mean it.

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An Inside Job

I’ve always worked at design studios rather than within design departments. That is, at shops (usually small) that deal with lots of different kinds of projects for different clients, rather than on a company’s internal design team, working on projects for in-house clients. Those studio jobs haven’t always been glamorous, especially when I was just getting started, but I’ve always enjoyed the varied exposure to different businesses and challenges that kind of environment affords me. It’s been a kind of an education in itself, and I’ve become familiar with lots of industries that otherwise I never would have known much about at all. It’s no accident that, at the last crossroads of my career, I helped found Behavior, rather than looking for work inside a corporate entity.

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You Got Your Flash in My Acrobat

My first thought when I heard this morning that Adobe has agreed to buy Macromedia was: poor Freehand, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Though I long ago stopped using that drawing program in favor of Illustrator, it was nice to know that it was still kicking around. Freehand was my first introduction to the Macintosh, and so I carry a quiet little torch for it. For me, anyway, if Adobe decides to finally kill it, it will be like the end of an era. Of course, there’s the possibility that the program’s owners — who licensed Freehand first to Aldus and, when that company was bought by Adobe many years ago (notice a pattern here?), then to Macromedia — will valiantly try to find yet another new publisher. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

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Design in Flight Four Takes Flight

Design in FlightThe newest issue of Design in Flight is out now, today in fact. This issue looks and feels more like a serious, world-class design publication than ever; editor Andy Arikawa, who apparently has the strength and fortitude of a hundred designers, does an amazing job bringing it all together and I highly recommend you go get yourself a copy (a bargain at US$3.00) and see for yourself. Between its covers, you’ll find some really good articles from Veerle Pieters, Mark Boulton, Molly Holzschlag and many more. As an added bonus, you’ll get my own contribution, “Acing the Interview,” which is a very modest little attempt at helping designers perform better in interviews. It’s rather more low-level an article than I tend to like, but I think it contains some really useful straight dope. If you have an interview coming up, you could do worse than to spend your three dollars here.

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Programming Skills Wanted

Lionel RichieLionel Richie has a jukebox in his head, or so he said many years ago, and new songs pop into it all the time — a principal source of his boundless inspiration, apparently. I’ll never reach the heights of “Say You, Say Me,” but I’m starting to think I have a venture capital fund in my head, because new ideas for Web-based products and businesses keep occurring to me all the time. Over the weekend I had an idea for the funniest and most robust movie plot generator ever — not exactly a powerhouse enterprise, but something that I think a lot of people would find amusing for at least a while.

The problem, really, is my appalling lack of programming talent, a situation that’s becoming more and more acute with each new idea I generate and am unable to act upon, and compounded by the continual emergence of hot new technologies that seem like immense fun to play with.

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The Art of Wiki Design

JotSpotThis morning I spent some time fooling around with JotSpot, a hosted wiki-engine that allows anybody to create a new wiki and share it with authorized collaborators instantly. It’s a pretty cool piece of work with a lot of smart user information architecture behind it. The JotSpot team has put some laudable effort into making this tool a solid user experience — no installation or server configuration is necessary, and I got a pilot wiki up and running in under ten minutes. But there’s not much new to be found in terms of design, unfortunately; in spite of its competence, the application doesn’t look or feel particularly slick. In fact, JotSpot got me thinking that the rendering of wikis, by and large, has been quite lacking to date.

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Bright Ideas

AdobeIt takes a lot of energy to write new weblog posts regularly, and last week I just didn’t have it, between working some long days and flying out of state on a business trip that began with a Thursday morning flight at 5:00a and returned that same day around 8:00p. Whew. Anyway, it’s over, and I spent the weekend recuperating, which left me fresh and alert for today’s Adobe Ideas Conference here in New York. It was an interesting affair that brought together lots of different kinds of Adobe users — illustrators, designers, artists and business people — for seminars, mingling and, as it turns out, the celebration of the announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 2.

I saw some interesting speakers, but the best was the “holy shit” moment I had when I realized that the legendary illustrator and designer Paul Davis was sitting at the table next to me at lunch. I’ve actually met him in person once before — he’s the father of a friend of a friend — but that did nothing to diminish the awesomeness of the moment. The free swag wasn’t bad either — Adobe gave out shoulder bags to all attendees which, rare for a conference giveaway, is actually useful: it’s made by Brooklyn’s YAKPAK and fits my laptop and doesn’t look completely cheesey.

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The New New Methodology

New!Jason Fried made some waves at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference with a talk he gave entitled “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams.” It’s a little uncomfortable for me to talk about a competitor in a weblog post, even (or especially) one I respect as much as Fried, a principal at the justly lauded 37signals — but he raised some excellent and also controversial points that bear further discussion. Equal parts advertisement for his company’s hit Basecamp product and a proposal for a new way to look at Web development, his presentation might be grossly summed up thusly: set aside almost all of the time-consuming, preparatory measures of user-centered design and start designing the final customer experience — the interface — as soon as possible. You might call it something like “iterative design.” Fried published some initial thoughts on this approach in this weblog post, and if/when I can find a copy of his slide deck, I’ll link to it here.

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