Category Archives: Design

Week in Review

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

Continue Reading …

+

Building Good Credit

Chase Credit CardsVery early this morning, at about 03:00a, a year and a half of Behavior labor finally bore fruit at Chase Credit Cards. We’ve been working on the redesign of this Web site since late 2001 — in fact, it was one of the marquee projects that got us going straight out of the gate when we opened up shop late that year — so we’re very, very happy to finally see it launched. If you’ve got a Chase credit card (and research shows that many of you do!), you can start using the site and all its cool tools immediately; if you don’t have a Chase credit card, the site makes it dead simple to choose and apply for the perfect one for you.

Continue Reading …

+

A Flock of G5s

PowerMac G5It’s hard to know when I can trust myself when it comes to applauding new Apple announcements, but I had that same familiar excitability come over me when Steve Jobs unveiled new PowerMac G5 desktop computers at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference today. From the online images, these new machines look dead sexy — sleek, angular and forbiddingly cool. In a way, they remind me of the industrial design language that informed high-end stereo systems in the 1980s; I’ve also seen a few recent automobile dashboards modeled in this fashion. Maybe it’s time I broke out my stash of skinny ties.

+

The Fantastic Fourth

The Invisible Girl“The Invisible Girl” is the title for my latest contribution to the Squat mix CD club. It’s not as late as its predecessor, but it wasn’t on time, either; I only shipped it today, two and a half weeks after the original deadline of 31 May. If I can offer any excuse, it’s that my packaging for this round was more complex — and expensive — than ever.

Continue Reading …

+

The Design of Everyday Mix CDs

Squat CDMy contribution to the CD mix club of which I am a member is tardy yet again. I had burned thirty copies of my mix and handed out a small number to some friends, and one of them pointed out to me that the tracks on the disc don’t match the tracks listed on the sleeve. Somehow the master CD I burned was missing a track. Since my packaging this time is somewhat complex and pricey, it was easier and cheaper for me to throw away thirty CDs and burn thirty new ones. Ouch. Anyway, the whole act of got me thinking about what I actually enjoy about being a member of a CD swap club.

Continue Reading …

+

Unfit for Print

These days I’m getting my fill of the world of print design. We’re getting ready to send out a new marketing brochure at Behavior and I’m lending a hand to get the production files out to the printer. A lot of Web designers would like this change of pace, would like the opportunity to work on something tangible and based in atoms rather than dealing with the world of the Web, but not me.

Continue Reading …

+

Atomic Comic Book

The Atomic Revolution“The Atomic Revolution” is a gorgeous relic from America’s early love affair with its ability to split the atom. A kind of promotional brochure for the wonders of the atomic age that highlights the concepts and history behind what was then a brave new frontier, it was copyrighted in 1957 and has been apparently forgotten until now. The comic book artist Ethan Persoff recently happened across a copy at an estate sale and has kindly published some wonderful scans of its contents on his site.

Continue Reading …

+

We Did Can Do

Can Do FitnessAnother casualty of my time away last week was the timely announcement of the latest site launch from Behavior: the official Web site for Can Do Fitness, a chain of high-end health clubs in New Jersey. We built the site entirely in Flash, and it’s driven by a custom content publishing tool on the back-end to make class schedules available online. You can also explore interactive floorplans, newsletters, trainer biographies, ‘smart’ directions and more… it kinda makes me wanna get up from in front of my computer.

Continue Reading …

+

Why Oh Why

AIGA DESIGNINGThe most recent manifestation of the AIGA’s new emphasis on demonstrating the business value of design is AIGA DESIGNING. This initiative’s centerpiece is a kind of universal framework for the development of design solutions — not necessarily a prescriptive approach to tackling any design challenge, but a method for structurally understanding how design solutions become reality.

[Full disclosure&#58 The AIGA was a client of Behavior when we developed Gain 2.0 for them in Fall 2002.]

Continue Reading …

+

Sir WThRemix-a-Lot

WThRemixRadu Darvas is the grand prize winner of the WThRemix contest, in which contestants were asked to redesign the W3C home page using valid, table-free XHTML and CSS. Among the five winners, Darvas’s design clearly deserves the grand prize. Unfortunately, the overall quality of the contest entries is a bit disappointing, with many devoid of personality or attention to typographic detail, and many more employing questionable design tricks. This is the danger of CSS, I suppose: its toolbox of layout tricks is plentiful enough to override good taste; in a way, the standard’s novelty factor echoes the early days of Photoshop, when everything was marbleized, drop-shadowed and/or embossed.

Continue Reading …

+