Calling All Famous People

Fri 16 Jun 200610:02 AM

If you haven’t yet seen it, the reigning lion of design criticism blogs, Design Observer, recently launched a new visual make-over. At long last, the tiny white type on dark gray background of their old look and feel has been cast aside, and now it’s finally possible to read the text without incurring lasting corneal damage.

It’s not a revolutionary design, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. The new look is austere, tasteful and orderly, and I like it quite a bit even if I do wish the text was larger still (I’m somewhat prematurely succumbing to that inevitable decline in the power of the eye to make out teeny tiny designer typesetting). I’m not going to get into a big review of it, though — for that, you can turn to the excellent roundtable discussion on this subject over at Speak Up.

Mainly, I point it out because I want to piggyback on a great piece that Michael Bierut published on the site a few days ago about the recent, unfortunate passing of photography great Arnold Newman.

Crazy Like a Vox

Tue 6 Jun 200601:47 AM

Little Orange Icons

Wed 31 May 200612:37 AM

The world of XML syndication is still a soup of acronyms and counter-intuitive terminology — RSS, Atom, XML, feeds, aggregation, ’casts, etc. — but at the very least, we’re inching towards visual standardization in how we represent it iconographically. Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic but laudable show of cooperativeness, agreed late last year to adopt Firefox’s orange RSS/XML icon — a rounded little square with featuring what might be best described as ISO-style broadcast waves — for its Internet Explorer 7 browser.

I like this icon, but it has its shortcomings: First, it too neatly sidesteps the issue of what flavor of XML feed it’s representing, which would require, in some instances, that it be accompanied by a text label. No standards or guidelines exist for such text labels, as far as I know. And second, even with a text label, it can be fairly diminutive on a page, causing it to get overlooked easily.

Arts & Croft’s

Mon 1 May 200611:29 PM

It’s the sixth annual May 1st Reboot today, in which designers all over the Web launch visual makeovers of their Web sites. You can go and see the sites that have launched under the rubric of the original campaign at May1Reboot.com, and you can see the campaign’s less Flash-intensive, more standards-friendly offshoot at CSSReboot.com. Together, both efforts can boast of literally hundreds of participants; a heck of a lot of designers have been busy nights and weekends over the past several weeks.

But the only one you really need to go see is the brand new JeffCroft.com, which is a major home run of a redesign if I ever saw one. It’s perhaps the deftest and most cohesive user experience yet fashioned from all of the various de rigeur weblog features, circa 2006: there’s a blogroll, a list of shout-outs, an integrated Flickr feed, comments on everything, a “tumblelog” that orders everything Croft touches, apparently, into a single, chronological view — not to mention a good ol’ fashioned weblog of stuff he writes, too.

It’s a kit of parts that could have easily produced chaos, but Croft unifies everything with a particular élan that has the feeling of a breakthrough. The interface is thoroughly unified and orderly, yet pleasing inventive at all levels — there’s a bold and striking effect to the whole presentation that can be taken in instantly, but it’s a nuanced performance, too (I’m not sure if anything Croft has done before has balanced gestalt and minutiae so successfully; if it has, I want to see it soon). This is the kind of design that thrills me; completely self-motivated and yet unfailingly conscientious in its attention to detail. And it makes me think that things around here are starting to look a little long in the tooth.

Arts & Croft’s

Mon 1 May 200611:29 PM

The Movable Feast Got Away from Movable Type

Wed 26 Apr 200612:59 AM

From time to time I get emails from readers asking some variant of the question, “What did you use to make your blog?” The answer is Movable Type, a very capable publishing tool to which I owe a great debt; without it, I’m not sure I would have written the hundreds of posts I have, probably remaining instead just a frustrated design and technology writer of dubious talent, wrestling with the limitations of Blogger. For publishing power relative to what was available even just five years ago for much, much more money, Movable Type offers a tremendous and compelling value.

Those questions are often followed up with, “Do you recommend that I use Movable Type, too?” That’s a little trickier, but honestly, I think I’ve come to the point now where I’d have to answer, no, I wouldn’t recommend Movable Type to new bloggers. Instead, I would recommend WordPress, very similar software that’s marked by a few key differences: it’s open source, which means it’s free; it’s PHP-based (versus CGI and PERL-based, like Movable Type), which means it’s technologically easy to modify; and it’s clearly the publishing tool of the moment.

Music for Blogging

Tue 18 Apr 200610:16 PM

I.A.s in Isolation

Tue 28 Mar 200612:52 AM

For folks still recovering in whole or part from the exhaustion of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, just think about those fellow attendees who went on to this year’s Dorkstock — I mean, this year’s Information Architecture Summit, wrapping up right now in Vancouver. I kid, I kid. Because if you follow the blog-borne reports coming out of the conference, you’ll see some really interesting stuff going on: tagging, tagging and more tagging, as one attendee told me, and lots of fascinating discussions on the organization, management and manipulation of information. Plus some flat out, wild and crazy fun. Look out.

Seriously, I’ve been following the events through excellent summary posts from Luke Wroblewski, among other bloggers, and feeling like I’m getting way more reporting value from the generally more analytical mindsets of the information architecture audience than I saw come out of South by Southwest. A lot of this ad hoc reporting is so good it’s almost like I’m there, but I’m not. It all sounds geekily absorbing, and it makes me think that maybe next year I’ll go.

I Am the Answer

Sun 19 Mar 200601:22 PM

Almost forgot about this until I was cleaning out my travel bag this morning: on my way to throwing out the mostly superfluous contents of my 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival goodies bag, I ran into Jeff Croft and Wilson Miner in the lobby of the Hampton Inn. They pointed out that I might want to hang on to the “SXSW Activity Book,” a “cheeky” collection of nerd-friendly, rainy day-style games included amongst the ad flyers and industry magazines stuffed inside the bag. The back of the four-page booklet featured a trivia question, the answer to which is actually my name. I got a kick out of that.