The Awesome Redesign I Didn’t Do

The New York TimesAlert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.

I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.

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I.A.s in Isolation

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.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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C’mon Feel the Signalz

37signalsMy first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.

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Report from SXSW

South by Southwest InteractiveSo I really blew it with the live blogging from the epicenter of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival thing, meaning I barely did it at all. I blame it on preparatory frenzy, post-panel appearance exhaustion, and general laziness — I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a pen almost the entire time I was there. In practice, I’ve never really understood those who show up at conferences and find within them the fortitude to record nearly every single point made by speakers and lecturers on paper; I much prefer to just absorb the onslaught of knowledge. In that spirit, I mostly just kept my ass in my seat, listened, and hung out, and had a great time. But, for the record, here is a spotty list of the conference as it went for me.

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Post-panel

Liz Danzico, Mark Boulton, Toni Greaves, Jason Santa Maria and I have just finished our panel, “Traditional Design and New Technology” here at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Frankly, I’m relieved; we spent a lot of time preparing for it, including an endless stream of email exchanges, many outline drafts, international conference calls, and a big, team-building breakfast here in Austin at 7:30a this morning, so there was a lot of build-up. In the end, I think the panel went pretty well — basically, anything that went well is owing to Liz Danzico’s masterful job of moderating the discussion. We had a pretty lively debate and several challenging questions from the audience; the festival management has recorded it, apparently, and will be posting a podcast sometime soon, which I’ll link to when I find it. Anyway, I enjoyed the whole experience quite a lot. If you were in the audience today, first, thanks for attending, and second, I’d be keen to know what you thought. Don’t be shy, I can take it.

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The Elements of Style Manuals, Part One

It strikes me that there are lots of problems with style manuals, those definitive pieces of documentation that accompany a completed design solution: Clients want them to be a comprehensive set of full-contigency bylaws governing the usage of the designs they’ve paid for, but they frequently balk at the necessary time and expense that’s necessary to produce anything so complete. Designers want to deliver a sound set of pliable guidelines that will continue to do justice to their work, but even with a capacious budget, they can’t possibly provide enough all-encompassing logic to stand in for design talent absent from a client’s payroll.

These conflicting circumstances usually result in style manuals full of what I like to call ‘rote specifications’; thick booklets packed with granular details on sizes, measurements, colors and rudimentary “do’s and don’ts” for the usage of a design solution. Unfortunately, these are usually constructed to appearimpressive above all else, relying on the sheer quantity of detail to justify to clients both the full expense of the design process and to evince the apparent sustainability of the completed design.

At best, they’re superficial documents with limited usefulness; like blueprints for television homes, they’re interesting in their intricacy, but of limited practical value in real life. I’ve seen many style manuals that, while voluminous, were useful for only a handful of factual attributes: PANTONE colors, typeface specifications, and grid measurements, for instance, but little else. One could have easily been reduced these manuals to a handful of pages and they would have proven just as useful.

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Talk Amongst Ourselves

Traditional Design & New TechnologyFor some weeks, I’ve been working hard to make a spectacular contribution to what I’m sure will be a spectacular discussion panel at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. It’s called “Traditional Design & New Technology” and it examines the questions of whether and how the aesthetic and functional principles that guided graphic design throughout its pre-Internet existence make sense on the World Wide Web. How do the vastly differing criteria between offline and online media determine what makes for ‘good design’? How has the shifting role of designers affected the expectations that audiences set for design quality? How do changing tools and techniques influence the relevancy of traditional design values?

As far as design topics go, these are some of the thornier ones, at least in my estimation. For this, I have the formidable Mark Boulton to thank — or to blame, as it’s turned out, for all the extracurricular hours we’ve spent preparing for this session. The original brainstorm was his; then he and I did the initial planning together. But the whole affair has come much further than we could have ever hoped thanks to the work of our co-panelists: Jason Santa Maria and Toni Greaves, and our moderator, Liz Danzico.

These people are all very, very impressive, and if I weren’t on this panel, I’d be in the audience just to watch them. For real! I’d even be there at the very early time and date of 10:00a on Saturday morning, 11 March, which just happens to be when “Traditional Design & New Technology” will take place. Yes, that’s the first day and the first time slot in the festival — we’re even on before the opening remarks, if you can believe it. The way I like to look at it: I once went to see Spiritualized open up for The Jesus & Mary Chain in the early nineties: I don’t regret seeing the Mary Chain, but I’m really glad I saw Spiritualized. You’ll be glad too, if you show up for this panel. Hope to see you there.

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How to Get Ahead in Online News Design

Things about my job at The New York Times that I can talk about: I’m working slightly fewer hours than I did at Behavior but each hour is more jam-packed with work than ever before. I’m walking to work most every day; it’s more than two and a half miles each way, but I’ve never liked commuting to work on the subway, it probably doesn’t take that much more time by foot anyway, and it’s great exercise. I’m taking lots and lots of notes, and getting in the habit of writing everything down — or recording them in the impressive, Omni Outliner Pro-powered Kinkless Getting Things Done system — as quickly as I possibly can, before I forget the dozens and dozens of details that get thrown at me every day.

Perhaps most importantly for those reading this weblog, I’m also hiring several full-time positions for the design group that I lead, and I’m looking to do this pretty soon. So maybe you’re an awesome visual designer, information architect, or design technologist and you want to come work with me?

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Mail of the Species

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the luxury of unfettered access to my mail server for Subtraction.com from wherever I’ve happened to work. This has allowed me to maintain a clean separation between personal and business correspondences, as I’ve always been able to receive POP3 message traffic right into a separate mail database at my office (usually in a different email client from the employer’s official, sanctioned email client), without having to rely on my workplace email address to keep in touch with people.

That’s no longer the case. For security reasons, POP3 traffic is restricted to me during the workday now, so now I have to rely on Web-based email clients, a genre of net software for which I’ve never managed to drum up very much enthusiasm. Managing my email box over the Web is a bit like providing technical support to my mother over the phone; it’s halting and inelegant at best, and frustrating and time-consuming at worst. No matter how many gigabytes of free storage and no matter how much Ajax-goodness is conscripted into the service of the user interface, Web-based mail clients can’t hold a candle to the experience of a desktop email client — even one as convoluted and inscrutable as Microsoft Outlook. And that’s saying a lot.

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