Category Archives: Web Design

Introducing Basic Maths, a Theme for WordPress

Things that have been keeping me from blogging: raising a brand new baby, having grown-up time with my girlfriend, walking my dog, holding down a day job and, now finally revealed: working on Basic Maths, a brand new theme for WordPress that I designed with my friend Allan Cole.

After months of plugging away at in during whatever free time we’ve been able to find, we’re finally releasing it into the wild today, to coincide with WordCampNYC 2009. (In fact, I’m heading over to that conference later today, and Allan will be speaking there early this afternoon, so if you’re there, be sure to say hello.) It’s available right now for purchase at this link — for a limited time only, it costs just US$45, which is less than half the price of other, far less awesome WordPress themes, if you ask me.

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Personal References

I get a very minor mention on page fifty of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio’s new book, “Graphic Design, Referenced,” but that’s not why it’s worth blogging about. Rather, this book is notable as an ambitious and largely successful attempt at capturing the current state of graphic design, or at least its current state as seen through the uncommonly thorough gaze of two young, talented and already influential designer-editors.

Vit and Gomez-Palacio, operating under the name Under Consideration, were responsible for the now shuttered but once widely-read design criticism site Speak Up, where they played a key role in shaping the graphic design conversation over the past decade. Now, in “Graphic Design, Referenced,” they’ve capitalized on their rather breathtaking ability to pull off massive editorial feats with a kind of contemporary history of their chosen field, a beautiful, page-turner of a tome that aims to be “A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design.”

I received my copy in the mail not long ago and was frankly astonished when I opened it up. I was vaguely aware that they had been working on a book, but I had no idea that they had aimed so high. So I felt compelled to find out more and struck up an email conversation with Armin, a friend of mine, to find out more.

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Our Craigslist

Wired MagazineThe cover story for the September 2009 issue of Wired takes a look at the current state of Craigslist and the challenges it faces as it continues to evolve. In a sidebar, the magazine’s amazing art director Scott Dadich invited several designers to re-imagine and redesign Craigslist itself.

In addition to inviting contributions from SimpleScott, who was the former design director at BarackObama.com, Matt Wiley of Studio8 Design, and Luke Hayman and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, Scott was kind enough to ask me for my take as well, and I leapt at the chance. I conscripted two colleagues from my design team at NYTimes.com to help me: Anh Dang who provided an invaluable sounding board for the information architecture and interaction design, and Paul Lau, who helped turn around the visual design literally over a weekend. You’ll see the mock-ups we submitted on page 104 of the magazine or, here at this link.

A magazine sidebar of course has a finite amount of space in which to show and explain the ideas that went into this design. Thankfully, someone invented blogging, which is not similarly space deprived — and so I shall now use the medium to indulge myself accordingly. Here, then, is a closer look at the mock-ups we submitted.

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Muxtape Pushes Play Again

MuxtapeIn its original form, Muxtape, the still-influential and, at the time, insufficiently legal music sharing site was a service for users to load and share playlists of their own music. Since its demise last year, it’s been greatly missed.

In its latest incarnation, launched last week, Muxtape has been re-imagined as a service for bands, allowing them to assemble and customize promotional pages (including their own playlists) from stock parts. (For now, bands can only participate if invited by other bands.) It’s a radical makeover, but if you were to overhaul the now-iconic Muxtape 1.0, this would be a very sensible way to do it.

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Tapes & Tapes

MuxtapeVery belatedly, I want to offer a requiem for the old Muxtape. In its current incarnation, it’s become a showcase for new bands that shows some real promise, hewing to the artful, minimalist aesthetic that in part made Muxtape famous. But in its original form, as imagined and launched by its creator Justin Oullette last year, it provided an elegantly efficient social space where anyone could upload their own mix of songs — of all the social networks we’ve seen so far, it was for my money the least fussy and the most elegant.

The old Muxtape was a perfect example of going to great — one might say drastic — lengths to minimize distractions, yielding a wonderfully designed experience for the user, and coming as close as anyone has to achieving a truly, thoroughly modernist online environment. Not incidentally, its somewhat brazen flouting of copyright laws allowed scores of would-be deejays to have fun programming their own playlists. It was really, really fun.

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Read All About It

Starting today, visitors to NYTimes.com have the option of seeing an enhanced version of our home page that we call Times Extra. This alternate view of the same editorial slate adds links to related coverage from third-party news sources and blogs — right there beneath our main news stories.

Now, I haven’t been posting much about what we’ve been up to at the Times because there’s been so much good stuff (like our voter mood gauge from election night, our holiday shopping guide from David Pogue and our overhauled video library, among many others) that I didn’t want to overrun this blog with press releases.

False modesty aside, I’m making an exception for Times Extra because, well first I think it’s a quiet breakthrough that’s pretty neat, and second, because it’s a concept that I personally hatched on the side with my Times colleague Philippe Lourier, the brains behind our Blogrunner aggregation engine. It was originally something of a lark so we’re pretty happy that it’s finally seeing the light of day (as a beta experiment). Of course, it would still be nothing more than an intriguing idea without the many, many hours of additional dedication from the designers, editors, technologists, the ace project manager and the hard-driving product manager that joined our campaign to make this happen. For their long hours, patience and dedication, I’m incredibly grateful.

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Game On

Back in 2007, during the initial burst of enthusiasm for the Wii, I bought one, thinking that perhaps there was the soul of a gamer lying dormant inside me. After playing with it for several months, though, I essentially got bored, and haven’t much touched it recently. Today it sits in my living room, hooked up but usually forgotten.

In spite of this inability to muster a sustained interest in video games, I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that world. As a point of reference for interaction design — for design of every kind — I’m convinced that games represent an important new paradigm that people, like me, pay insufficient attention to at our own peril.

Forget design, even. As a subset of our culture, video games are clearly headed to center of the conversation, where it’s not inconceivable that one day they might shoulder aside old media mainstays like television and newspapers, or even eclipse plain-vanilla Interweb browsing. The inherent power of the concept of play shouldn’t be underestimated.

There’s no shortage of intelligent thinking about this field being written in all corners of the Web. For someone like me though, who remains essentially disconnected from gaming, validation still bubbles up through the mainstream media. And lately, I’ve been noticing increasingly thoughtful writing about video games in some of my favorite publications.

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If It’s Too Social, You’re Too Old

I recently came to this conclusion: as an interaction designer, if I’m not actively using social networks, then I’m just not doing my job. It’s obvious to say, but social media is the evolving, messy, inexorable and probably bright future of this business. Its all-comers approach to the creation of content and value is exactly in line with my philosophy for how design needs to change in order to matter in the coming decades. Still, that inevitability hasn’t stopped me from more or less ignoring these networks for too long.

To be sure, I have found some limited entertainment and satisfaction in social networks; Flickr is a good example. But frankly, I more often find them to be incredibly tedious. When it comes to a site like Facebook, whose proposition as an integral part of how we will all communicate, commiserate and transact in the near future is almost a sure thing, the time I spend on it seems more like homework than play. For many months, my position has been: email me and instant message me all you want, but please, whatever you do, don’t make me sign into Facebook. It’s just too much of a drag.

I admit that’s a bad attitude. Actually, it’s an irresponsible attitude for someone who purports to be a forward-looking designer. It’s a disservice to my colleagues and my employer, to begin with, as it basically amounts to sleeping on the job. But it’s also a terribly ineffective way to manage my own, long-term career development; ignoring social media in 2008 is not dissimilar to ignoring the emergence of the World Wide Web fifteen years ago. Those people got left behind, and the same thing could easily happen to me.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Art Supplies

There has been some changing of the seating chart at my office recently, and in the process, I’ve seen some of my colleagues — art directors on the print side of the organization — moving the contents of their flat files back and forth along with their seats. Watching them do this in the background, I realized that since we first took up residence in our our new building last year, I’ve barely paid attention to those file cabinets, which store critical samples of printed pages and reference material in wide, shallow drawers. But for a print designer, they’re critical tools.

In fact, I realized, it’s been years since I’ve paid attention to or felt the need for flat files at all, to say nothing of ‘traditional’ art supplies of any kind. This is what it means to practice design on the Web, I guess. On the digital side of the business, we’re admittedly still a long way away from a paperless office, but we’re getting there. I rarely ever print out my own work these days, and I’ve made it a habit to throw away nearly every single piece of paper handed to me by colleagues before the end of that same day — and I can’t recall a single time that practice has made it harder for me to do my job the next day.

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Highly Demographic Language

In a recent blog post, my friend Chris Fahey raises the question of whether or not an interface designer is a salesman. In a way, he’s tackling more seriously a subject that I wrote about three years ago in a post titled “Window Dress for Success,” in which I only half-jokingly inferred possible marketing motivations from the then-proliferating varieties of chrome in Mac OS X applications.

In his post, Chris cannily argues that it’s the designer’s job not only to create a solution that is easy to use, but also to create a solution that looks easy to use. He writes:

“A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).”

With some qualifications, this statement about the role of designers — and especially, from where I sit, the role of interface designers — strikes me as insightfully true. As I somewhat cheekily suggested in that June 2005 post, it’s my opinion that interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.

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