Category Archives: Web Design

Awards Season

BloggiesQuite unexpectedly, I woke up this morning to an email from Nikolai Nolan alerting me to the fact that Subtraction.com is one of five finalists nominated for the title “Best Designed Weblog” in this year’s Annual Weblog Awards — it’s amazing, but I can now make an authentic claim to being “Bloggie-nominated.” I’m quite flattered by the whole thing of course, having never expected to achieve enough notoriety to ever register on the same level as a site as universally well-read and well-regarded as fellow nominee Kottke.org.

Of course, it’s a short distance from incredulous surprise to shameless self-promotion, so I’m beggin’ you: won’t you please vote for me? Head on over to Bloggies.com and cast your vote to make this the most successful colorless Web site ever. And be sure to attend the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, where the Bloggies award ceremony will be held in person with a real audience and everything — the single funnest place where you can find out for yourself whether or not a roomful of bloggers really do glow in the dark. Thanks for your support.

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The Lost Art of Art Direction

Alexey BrodovitchFor a year-end round-up on the state of Web design that ran last week over at Publish.com, I provided, among other quotes, this little bit of crankyism: “There’s so little illustration, photography and adventurous typography going on [in Web design], that I genuinely worry that we’ll never match the heights of graphic design achieved in the last century.”

Now, I know that there are lots of terrific designers out there doing genuinely daring work today; I grant that freely. But it’s reasonable to say that the vast majority of that work can be tagged with the familiar descriptors ‘personal’ and ‘experimental.’ There’s absolutely nothing wrong with design created for those ends; I applaud and admire those who are making genuine efforts to push the medium forward with excursions into the non-commercial, because they’re doing important advance work upon which the rest of us will eventually feed.

However, with respect to what I was talking about — the commercial application of our craft — there remains, to my mind, a somewhat conspicuous gap in its practice: almost without exception, the Web is a medium in which all of us design and almost none of us art direct. I think of the former as a mode of work that’s closely wedded to execution, whether that means pushing pixels in Photoshop, bringing ideas to life in code or even ‘directing’ teams of designers in the development of a design solution.

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Interview at The Weekly Standards

The Weekly StandardsTo faithful readers of this weblog: if you stick with me, you have my pledge that you will not have to read about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion in perpetuity. At least I hope not. Looking forward, I hope to get famous (or at least infamous) for many more projects as interesting and as influential as this one, but in the meantime, I’m humbled by the fact that at least some people continue to find it interesting.

One of them is James Archer who, aside from being the founder of Fortymedia, is the publisher of The Weekly Standards, an online magazine focused on the real world practice of standards-based Web design. He’s just published an interview with me which discusses at length — you guessed it — the redesign of TheOnion.com.

But wait! That’s not all you get with this article because, for absolutely no extra money, James has thrown in a major added bonus: a very thoughtful, fair and insightful critique of the redesign as a whole by none other than Garret Dimon. Even if you scroll right past my own rambling answers to James’ questions, don’t miss Garret’s comments.

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Thinking about The Times

The New York TimesWhen Behavior was working on our redesign of The Onion, we would frequently look to The New York Times for hints on how a publication should present itself online, how content should be organized, how the user interface to an archive of articles should be manifested, etc. In so many ways, The Times is a de facto standard that leads the way in best practices: the decisions they make in developing their user interface can effectively validate a design convention.

For instance, their recent decision to provide, from articles, access to all the paper’s sections in a DHTML pop-up menu is a convincing argument for a navigational method that might previously have met with skepticism from any client I proposed it to. In my experience, the fact that “the Times does it” is proof enough that a convention is widely understood and acceptable.

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The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw

The Onion GridIt’s hard to deny the rightness of at least one complaint that some people have had about Behavior’s recent redesign for The Onion.com: there’s a heck of a lot of stuff on that home page. My defense is: there’s also a heck of a lot of free stuff on that home page — and througout the site, too. I’m not just talking about all of the archived content that, now unbound by the subscription model that previously restricted it from public consumption, has floated up to the front page for ready access — like old friends, they rotate in and out randomly to let you relive good times. I’m also talking about the new content that will now appear in the right-hand column, comedic tidbits released by the editorial staff every day between issues, again for a grand total of free. Not to mention the loads of ‘regular’ content that’s turned out faithfully every week. All of which justifies the abundance of advertisements — someone has to pay for all that great stuff.

So that adds up, and before long you have a page that, inevitably, people will consider crowded. I’d like to believe that we made a conscientious and serious effort at trying to present all that content with as much clarity as possible. We won’t win any awards for minimalism, but we did a very respectable job, in my opinion, that borrows best practices from online news sources that do it very well already. And we made sure to add a little extra goodness of our own: a flexible yet comprehensive layout grid that underpins every page on the site.

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Making New Fake News

The OnionIt’s been so long that I’ve been wanting to write this weblog entry that I almost don’t even know what to say anymore. So I’ll be blunt: earlier this year, Behavior was fortunate enough to have been selected to redesign the online edition of The Onion. Our assignment: a major overhaul of the satirical newspaper’s online presence from top to bottom, and to help their Web team open up the entirety of their online archives — previously subscription-only, now freely available to everyone, gratis. A huge undertaking.

That wasn’t the whole of it though, as we were also enlisted to perform a comprehensive overhaul of The Onion’s pop-culture review section, The A.V. Club, including a complete rethinking of the way that publication expresses itself online. It’s never garnered the attention that the satirical content has, but the A.V. Club is sometimes my favorite part of the paper — in any given week, they run some of the most intelligent and engaging reviews you’re likely to read on any new movie, album, book or video game.

We actually launched the A.V. Club several weeks ago — you can see it now at — AVClub.com — but wanting to keep things hush hush until both redesigns went public, we kept it mum. The Onion, by its nature, was more complex and more involved, and we’ve spent the intervening weeks working with their Web team to make the new site a reality at a pretty intense rate. And now, tonight, it’s finally done; it launched earlier this evening and you can go see it at TheOnion.com.

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Free Form for All

Good FormAll of the blood, sweat and tears that I put into designing that form in XHTML and CSS last week is coming to some good. After much continued fussing, I finally got it to render reliably and consistently across several major Web browsers, so at the very least, my labor satisfied the challenge at hand. But, having heard with near unanimity the general frustration that people feel about forms, I thought I’d do the civic thing and release a genericized version of my work — and let others freely borrow, steal and/or adapt it for their own needs.

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Form Doesn’t Function

The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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Form Doesn’t Function

The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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Get Yer Invoice On(line)

BlinksaleWe need an upstart challenger to bring simplified, elegant interaction design to the consumer financial software market and, in no uncertain terms, to completely upset the dominance of Intuit. That company’s industry-leading software is powerful, useful and ubiquitous, but it’s also clunky, overly-accreted and no fun to use. I have a contemptuous relationship with their business accounting package, QuickBooks, whose menu item for closing an accounting file is labeled — I’m not making this up — “Close Company,” and I have only moderately more affection for its personal accounting package Quicken.

So I’m happy to see the talented folks over at Firewheel Design produce a product like Blinksale, a soon-to-be-released, Web-based invoicing tool for small to medium size businesses. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at its extremely well-designed interface, and picked up its basic principles in literally just a few minutes — five minutes from log-in to sending out my first test invoice. All told, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

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