Category Archives: Design

Thoughts on Performance Reviews for Designers

As last year came to a close and I was taking stock of the many things for which I’m grateful, the fact that I did not have to write year-end performance reviews for staff members was near the top of the list. Managers know what I’m talking about: that annual (or even semi-annual) ritual of summing up months and months of of an employee’s performance nuances in a single document. In many organizations, they a standard part of the manager’s job, a tool intended to engender productive teams, keep people motivated, and check against lackluster performances. In theory.

When I was at The New York Times, writing reviews for my staff was among the most painful parts of my job and a nontrivial downside of the holiday season. As much as I enjoy all the excitement and cheer and vacation time of December, I always knew that reviews would be due in January. In order to get a jump on them I’d need to start them in earnest in the midst of all that holiday excitement.

For each review, I’d have to solicit feedback from at least a handful of the staff member’s peers. With that input, I’d then look back on a year’s worth of work deliverables and, if I had been particularly conscientious, any notes that I might have made about how that staffer had done during the course of the year. At The Times, there was also an understandable if burdensome emphasis on distilling all this feedback into eloquently worded narratives, not just simple lists of bullet points. It was all very time consuming and very, very, laborious.

Which isn’t to say that I saw no value in the process. On the contrary, the reviews I received from my own superiors were by and large thoughtful, constructive and (usually) timely. They offered me insight into my own performance that I don’t think I would have had otherwise, and they gave me an opportunity to course correct in areas where I’d been neglectful. I was very grateful for those reviews, for how respectful they were of my own efforts, and I did my best to pass on similarly constructive criticism to the people who worked under me. It was hard work, and I’m sure I didn’t always succeed, but I tried.

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A Sketchbook Book

If you’re still looking for a great holiday present, It’s not too late to run down to your local bookseller or order overnight delivery for this terrific book I just got my hands on: it’s called “Graphic: Inside the Sketchbook of the World’s Great Graphic Designers,” and it’s another production from the prolific Steven Heller, who co-edited the book with Lita Talarico.

Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to be included within the 352 pages of drawings, doodles, paintings, collage and random visual goodness from over one hundred prominent graphic designers. On page 340 (the book is organized alphabetically by last name) you’ll find about a dozen sample pages taken from the many sketchbooks that I’ve kept over the years. In addition to my own work, there are samples from a ton of amazing luminaries including Gary Baseman, Michael Bierut, Henrik Drescher, Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Bruce Mau, Christoph Niemann, Art Spiegelman and many others.

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Basic Maths Updated

Over a year ago my friend Allan Cole and I released Basic Maths, our theme for WordPress, which was an instant hit. This week we’re releasing a new update — Basic Maths 1.1.

This new version includes a slew of significant enhancements, including: full compatibility with WordPress 3.0, easier logo customization, improved CSS support for embedded video, smarter conditional logic for widgets and article-to-article navigation and more. Read more about it or buy your copy at the official site.

Maybe the coolest part of Basic Maths 1.1 is the brand new, iPhone-friendly view. Any user viewing a site running this newest version of our theme will see a mobile-optimized presentation of the exact same content. As a blog publisher, the only configuration you have to do is — nothing. It all happens automatically.

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Students, Don’t Do As I Have Done

The Canadian graphic design organization RGD Ontario was kind enough to invite me to speak at their annual Design Thinkers conference in Toronto last week. It was a quick trip for me — I flew in and out of the city on the same day — but they made it really fun. In addition to a lecture I gave about the difficulties that the practice of art direction has in finding a place in digital media (I’ll post some notes from that talk in a few days), I also appeared on a question-and-answer panel for design students, the theme of which was providing advice on ‘making it’ in the design world.

In that session, I heard from another of the panelists that, due to inexperience, newly minted designers should understand that their productivity will barely cover the cost of employing them. It was his belief that businesses who hire fresh graduates essentially sign up to provide a kind of on-the-job training — at a loss to the business. He didn’t put it in so many words, but the inference I made was that employment is a kind of favor bestowed by the company on new entrants to the job market.

What’s more, this person insisted that these freshly graduated professionals should be prepared to work for very little and for very long hours, that they should dedicate themselves to their work in tireless fashion, potentially at the expense of many other priorities in their lives.

I have a hard time with this advice, but for complicated reasons. It’s not that I think that the advice is not valid. On the contrary, I think this is an accurate reflection of the way the design industry ingests new talent. Rather, my quarrel is that I think this advice makes some unfortunate assumptions about what the quality of life within a design organization should be.

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The Only Thing a Router Is Good For

Like many people reading this, I have a broadband connection in my home that manifests itself as a router — a vaguely futuristic, plastic box attached to a cable that runs into my wall. To that router, I’ve attached an Apple AirPort Extreme, a VOIP router and a switch for additional Ethernet connections. It’s a bit of a mess, and it could probably be simplified, but for the most part it works fine.

I make whatever minor adjustments are needed to these devices through software; either browser-based interfaces or Apple’s own AirPort utility. In fact, the only time I ever have to physically touch the whole setup is on the rare occasion when something goes wrong with the cable connection itself. Admittedly, in recent months that’s been more often than I’d like with my current Internet provider, but for the most part it happens rarely.

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The Twitter Brand and What Comes Next

Twitter LogoBuzz Andersen has posted some really insightful comments on how the landscape is changing in the world of third-party Twitter apps. Quoting his partner in developing a Twitter app of their own, Andersen claims that “Twitter clients are going the way of email clients, ” i.e., becoming a commodity, and that the age of third-party innovation in this space is largely over.

For those who don’t monitor every pulse of the Twitter-scape, in recent months Twitter itself has made a marked change in strategy by investing considerable energy and care into updating its client applications (e.g., Twitter for iPhone and for iPad) and, very recently, its own Web site. For any other Web startup it would sound odd to say that these are surprising initiatives. However, in its short but rich history Twitter has become defined almost as much by third-party interfaces like Twitterific, Tweetdeck, Echofon, and others as it has by its own interfaces, so this activity is novel.

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Train Wreck in D.C.

From the age of five to the age of seventeen, I lived in the D.C. metropolitan area, where I spent a lot of time riding the Metrorail subway system. In retrospect, I have to credit the repeated exposure to the system’s beautiful modernist architecture and typography for influencing my design sensibilities. It featured a distinctive pylon-based signage system that was originally designed by Vignelli Associates, though it had already been somewhat corrupted from its original form with additional wall signage by the time I was riding it. (I actually found the wall signage helpful, I must admit.)

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Take the Money and Stand Still

Last week I tweeted this eye-opening guide to spotting an ATM skimmer published by the invaluable Snopes.com. Like a lot of people, I’d heard of ATM skimmers before — duplicate card readers and wireless cameras surreptitiously attached to cash machines with the intent of stealing your card number and PIN — but I had no idea what form they actually took. The visual evidence was striking; skimmers are uncanny mimics of the visual language of ATMs. The colors, shapes and peculiar plasticity that we’re all familiar with are faithfully reproduced in their ersatz forms. I had no idea they could blend into a cash machine’s hardware so expertly.

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What I Said About Apple and Typography

I watched with dismay yesterday when the comment thread for my post, “Better Display, Same Typography,” a rant about Apple’s lackluster efforts in typography on all of its platforms, went a bit astray. Lots of commenters understood what I was trying to say, but many others didn’t.

Many thought I was criticizing the forthcoming iBooks for iPhone, which is understandable because the photo included in the post was of exactly that — iBooks for iPhone displaying a less-than-sterling example of typographic chops. But I wasn’t singling out iBooks, or the iOS even, so it’s my fault for not being sufficiently explicit.

What I meant was that, on all of its platforms, Apple has far from exceeded expectations it has itself set for typography. Just take one look at the Fonts panel that appears in any Cocoa app (e.g., TextEdit) to see what I mean. It hasn’t changed in nearly a decade, and it’s still far more difficult to use than it should be. (I also urge everyone to read Stephen Coles’ blog post, which I linked to, for more details on Apple’s infractions on the iPad.)

Maybe most disappointing of all, though, were the comments that asserted that no one cares about this stuff except for typographic prima donnas like myself, that it matters not one whit to the world at large. I readily admit that most people will never care whether Apple changes its ways here or not — it goes without saying that Apple more than satisfies the general public’s appetite for stellar design already — but that doesn’t mean that they should be let off the hook.

Fine typography is important; it’s a tradition that goes back for centuries, that has helped us elevate our communication and that informs our sense of self and civilization. Now, it’s true that in the midst of the digital revolution we’re living through, we may have to leave many such traditions behind, but fine typography doesn’t have to be one of them. There’s no technological or business reason why we can’t make the tools for rich typography more readily available.

In fact, we have much of what we need in place already, largely thanks to Apple: an ocean of beautifully rendered and thoughtfully constructed fonts, a desktop operating system with an audience that’s highly receptive to the craft, a mobile platform that unites visual design with hardware design, and increasingly capable displays for rendering great type. All we lack is the dedicated passion of people who are in a position to bring it all together, to carry it that last mile — or to fulfill the promise that such laudable work has established. That’s why I believe Apple should do a better job.

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