Category Archives: Web Design

The Making of Avatars

I’m designing a social app right now and I need lots of avatars to use in the mock-ups. Designing social interfaces is a bit like trying to visualize a party, attendees and all, which is to say the designer is challenged with representing something full of life using tools that are inherently static.

Insofar as avatars give the impression of lots of people using the system, they’re a helpful design detail. I could use one or two ‘generic’ avatars across all of the various interfaces I’m designing, but the more that the hypothetical users in my mock-ups look like they could be actual, real-life users — and the more of them there are — then the better my chances for communicating a convincing design to collaborators.

Picking up a random selection of avatars from Twitter or Flickr, which is what I’m doing now, presents several problems. First, it’s laborious. Second, the users from whom I’m ‘borrowing’ these assets haven’t granted usage permissions of any kind. And third, they’re not a great cross-section of a wide user base.

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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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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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Explanations Worth Reading

In my post yesterday about instructional screens, those meta-states that apps sometimes use to literally explain how their functionality works, I said that if an interface has to be explained, then it’s probably broken.

Of course, there are no absolutes in interface design, so a declaration like that should be taken with a grain of salt. The concept of coach marks can work, and quite well, but usually not in the static, superficial manner of the examples I cited in that post.

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The Times Has a New Opinion

The New York TimesLate in the day yesterday, one of the last major projects that I worked on at The New York Times launched: a major overhaul of NYTimes.com’s Opinion section, now rebranded as The Opinion Pages. I shepherded this project from its inception to the completion of its design, but left the company before its implementation got underway. So I’m really happy to see that in its launch state, it’s still very close to the design that we created several months ago. Kudos to my former colleagues who have undoubtedly done a tremendous amount of sweating the details over the past several weeks to make this a reality. And I’m happy to see their hard work is already receiving complimentary notices.

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Show Me the Money (for Art Direction)

Speaking of magazines, I’ve just started writing a regular column about interaction design over at Print. If it seems a bit retrograde for me to publish my thoughts on digital media in that forum, believe me the irony is not lost. In spite of its somewhat anachronistic moniker, though, I still find Print to be incredibly vibrant as a showcase for great graphic design — and in spite of all my pooh-poohing of the fitful and awkward migration of traditional graphic design values into the digital space, I still think that digital designers have a lot to learn from print — just as print designers have a lot to learn from digital.

My first column will appear in the June 2010 issue, which will be on newsstands in May, but the editors have graciously decided to publish it in advance on the Web in full here.

Almost inevitably, the topic is Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” iPad and so the column has some overlap with my harsh criticisms of the Popular Science magazine app from earlier in the week (catch up on that blog post here). Specifically, I try to wrestle with the iPad’s prospects for ushering in a return to the visually and expressively rich values of traditional art direction.

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Layer by Layer

Truth be told, I was pretty nervous before facing off against Nicholas Felton in our Layer Tennis exhibition match last Friday afternoon. I’d never played the game before, and its structure, in which two visual artists volley a collage-like series of images back and forth under the scrutiny of a stopwatch, seemed very high pressure. Plus, my opponent was none other than Feltron himself (as Nicholas is sometimes better known), a designer famous for autobiographical annual reports in which he creates gorgeous visual narratives from nothing more than the statistical mundanity of everyday life.

Layer Tennis

All that trepidation wasn’t without good reason, as it turned out. You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is.

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Really Basic Maths

It should be obvious to most readers of this blog that Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that Allan Cole and I released recently (and available here), is a direct descendant of the overall look and feel of Subtraction.com. There’s a good reason for this: over the years, I’ve been asked countless times by others if they can use the Subtraction.com ‘theme,’ even though none existed — even if it did, I would have been inclined to say no, wanting to preserve its uniqueness for myself. So when I sat down to design Basic Maths, the aim was to create something that would satisfy this desire to have something Subtraction.com-like in the marketplace — not a clone, but a reinterpretation. As reinterpretations go, it’s pretty straightforward, I think. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to showcase some of the steps in its design evolution, and how I arrived at the theme as it stands today.

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