Category Archives: Design

How Much Design Is Too Much Design?

As we await the launch of Apple’s latest attempt at creating a credible cloud computing service, an editorial at Ars Technica asks whether Apple can really succeed at this game. Writer Timothy B. Lee argues that Apple’s “centralized, designer-driven culture can be a serious weakness when building scalable network services,” and that analysis and iteration is what is truly necessary to make these things work.

This may or may not be an accurate assessment of Apple’s predicament, but I think the debate about whether designer-driven network products — not just cloud services, but social networks too — can succeed is an interesting one. I wouldn’t say that a strongly designer-led corporate culture makes it impossible for a company to create network products that people really want to use. But it does seem to me that, as much as we talk about the cruciality of design to the success of software that it’s also true that having too much design is often counter-productive.

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My Column on Columns

For as long as I can remember, designers working in digital media have wanted the ability to lay out text in columns — first on the Web, now within multitouch apps. I’ve flirted with it myself, back when when it was relatively difficult to pull off, but in recent years CSS3 has made it possible, if not probable, that columnar layouts can be delivered to wide swaths of Web users. On multitouch devices, iOS developers routinely columnize text using Core Text and other methods, and their successes with these techniques have led columnized text to be common on that platform, creating perhaps the most ‘print-like’ digital layouts we’ve seen yet.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that, along with other recent improvements in digital typography, columnized text augurs the future of digital layout design. That is, some might argue that screen-based content will over time look more and more like magazine-style pages, where text is flowed from one parallel column to another, rather than the more common Web convention in which a block of text exists in a single column, reading top to bottom within a screen that scrolls.

I take a different position, though. I think that the desire to approach screen-based layout with columnized text is misguided. Multiple columns are an effective layout technique in print because they improve legibility for long blocks of text. But for digital media, it’s my feeling that they make it harder to read text.

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Paper Toss

I consider myself lucky that I have some modest respect from among my peers in the design industry, and I also consider myself fortunate that many of these designers like to keep me abreast of their recent works and new projects. As a result, I get a fair amount of posters, pamphlets, books, magazines and assorted other promotional stuff, usually mailed to me but occasionally pressed upon me in person, too.

Many of these items are very creative and quite stunning, and I’m often impressed by the time, labor and expense that goes into them. But I also find them somewhat bewildering and, if I’m honest, burdensome.

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The Silver Computer Screen

If you can’t tell already I’m a fan of the movies, pretty much all kinds of movies. From art house fare to popcorn flicks, I’m pretty confident I can find something interesting in just about every film I watch, and so I try to watch as much as I can of as many different genres as I can. This requires a well-practiced suspension of disbelief, of course, which is not hard to muster if you are passionate about films in general.

But one thing that almost always breaks me out of any movie’s spell is the on-screen appearance of any kind of computing technology — specifically the appearance of interfaces for computing technology. The reason is obvious: they’re almost always completely phony, designed not so much to reflect what the movie’s characters are supposed to be doing with a computer as to reflect what the movie’s producers want us to understand about what the character is doing with a computer.

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The Speed of Redesigning

The New York Times MagazineThis past weekend, The New York Times unveiled a new redesign to its Sunday magazine under the sure hand of my former colleague, magazine art director Arem Duplessis, and the magazine’s new editor Hugo Lindgren. The new look of the magazine is heavily influenced by “newspaper and vintage magazine issues from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s,” what many might call the golden age of publication design. I think it says something about the state of publishing today when even a magazine that is exempt from the metrics of newsstand sales (The Sunday magazine is distributed as an insert to the paper and is thusly not subject to newsstand sales numbers) still feels compelled to recall the glories of an earlier age. Nevertheless, the redesign is stunning work.

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The Sad Story of Illustration on the Web

I’ve argued that you can’t design for digital publications the way you design for print publications, but that doesn’t mean that what we leave behind in the print tradition is not missed online. One of strengths that print designers have long brought to their publications is illustration, where artists are commissioned to create visual translations of an article’s most salient or provocative concepts. Print publications have a long, long history of truly great illustrations that became indelible companions to the content they accompanied. Not so much online.

In fact, in digital media, illustration is missing in action, and its absence is palpable. I can’t think of a single, regularly publishing, large-scale digital publication that uses original illustrations prominently, much less pays illustrators a working wage for their efforts. By and large, digital publishing traffics in photographic images, most of them literal — an article about President Obama will be accompanied by a photo of President Obama. Occasionally, when the subject matter of an article doesn’t inspire obvious photo selections, a bit more imagination becomes necessary. This is where, given different economics, digital publishers might turn to illustrators. Instead, they turn to stock photographs, usually with awful results. Here are a few I found this morning.

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An Archive for Interaction Design

Designers are terrible at saving what we do. Most of us know that we should take the time to document what we’ve done for our own portfolios, if not for posterity. Yet few of us take the trouble. We usually wait until we leave our jobs and a portfolio becomes an imperative, or when a potential client spurs us to write a case study of a finished project.

In the analog world, this is merely an inconvenience. We scramble to dig up old mock-ups, assets, tearsheets, samples, and digital files. It’s tedious, but the definitive nature of analog design — the fact that there’s a canonical version of every brochure or book jacket — makes the archival process a straightforward one.

Archiving digital design, on the other hand, is far less clear-cut. It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating that digital media is a conversation. To design for digital media is to design systems within which wildly varying kinds of interactions can happen, virtual systems that are conducive to great conversations. Conversations, however, are notoriously difficult to fully capture.

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Uncommon Cures for the Common Cold

I was thinking about medicines this morning. As I’ve complained before, it’s been a terrible winter and so I’m fending off what seems like the fourth or fifth cold of the season already (having a toddler who brings home germs from play groups is part of this too).

My medicine cabinet is full of open boxes of cold remedies like Cold-Eeze, Zycam, Robitussin and others. Most of these over-the-counter medicines would taste neutral, bitter or worse were it not for the window-dressing of artificial flavorings like cherry, citrus or that generic, unidentifiable kind of sweetness you might associate with Smarties and other completely unnatural candies. Similarly, they’re all far too sweet for my taste; almost all of them make me a little nauseous.

Part of the reason for this of course is that it’s probably unwise, for obvious concerns, to make medicines so tasty that you look forward to the next dose. Still, it seems possible to me to create a sub-class of cold remedies that have more subtle, less powerful flavorings. I’d probably buy a cough syrup that tastes like some kind of lightly sweetened tea, for example, or a throat lozenge that has the flavor of rice candy, or a zinc supplement that comes in butterscotch. These could and probably should still taste a little bit unpleasant, but they don’t need to be as brutally sugary as they are now.

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Unnecessary Explanations

Introducing users to a new app or set of functionality is a difficult task for which there are no easy answers. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to create a kind of instructional screen in which the interface is explained, either diagrammatically or through the use of elucidating circles, arrows, lines and notational text (what Apple has in the past called “coach marks,” a term I haven’t heard elsewhere but that I really like) directly over the interface. The idea is to add a meta level of guidance to help acquaint the user with the key parts of the interface and how to use them.

I’ve been noticing these more and more lately, a trend that I find regrettable. I’ve designed products with instructional screens and coach marks in the past, and they were miserable failures. In my experience, these types of parenthetical interfaces are almost always misguided, mostly because they run up against one of the (nearly) immutable laws of interface design: people don’t read interfaces.

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This Could Be Google’s Design Moment

Last week’s news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence led many people to wonder whether the company truly has a vision that will sustain it in his absence. I happen to think that in the short term, at least, Apple will be just fine, but it’s interesting to note that implicit in this worry is whether Apple’s singular attention to good design will continue to prosper. Which is to say, perhaps the paramount anxiety surrounding Jobs’ leave — and his inevitable departure, whenever that is — is whether it represents the point at which Apple’s ability to design wonderful products went on the decline.

It’s true that when visionaries leave a company, a lot can go wrong, though of course right now it’s impossible to know for sure what will happen. But by the same token, major shifts in leadership are also an opportunity for a company’s design acumen to improve.

This is what I’m hoping happens over at Google where, as also reported last week, Eric Schmidt is handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page. Page is an engineer, of course, and quite private, so I have no particular insight as to whether he has any meaningful appreciation of design. But as a founder he has a unique power to influence the priorities at his company, and as the new CEO he has a unique opportunity to imbue his organization with a new design sensibility. If he wants to.

And hopefully he does. Few companies seem to understand the concept of design so cannily and yet so incompletely as Google does. It’s abundantly evident that they pay exceedingly close attention to usability and they slave over getting that right. And yet the total, intangible effect of their hard work is little more than the sum of its highly efficient parts. Google products are rich with design intelligence, but they also suffer from a paucity of design inspiration. They could be so much more than they are — they could be surprising, witty, fun and, yes, they could be truly beautiful. (Read former Google designer Doug Bowman’s notes on this for added perspective.)

We tend to think that design is a function of good process, well-structured organizations, and copious time and budgetary resources. But design is just as much a function of leadership. Who’s in the top seat matters very much to whether a company can design well. If the leader cares passionately about producing amazingly well-designed products, then you can get a string of indelible successes that capture the popular imagination like we’ve seen at Apple for the past decade-plus. We haven’t seen that kind of result from Google during that same span of time, though. Beyond the iconic minimalism of the original Google home page, not one of their subsequent products has truly inspired us. I hope that Larry Page realizes that, with the resources and design talent he probably already employs, there’s no reason that has to continue to be the case.

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