Category Archives: Web Design

Southern Fried

T.G.I. Interwebr’s Grill Slide 4Whew. I’m back from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival and feeling a bit burnt out, in part because the show was bigger than ever this year. While I can’t say that its ferocious growth has caused South by Southwest to lose its singular usefulness as the friendliest and most thoroughly stimulating of digital conferences, scaling up nevertheless has its pluses and minuses.

That’s getting ahead of myself, though. I’m a little too fatigued to fully expand on that, but you can expect a post about this year’s experience in Austin in a day or two.

In the meantime, I’m going to offer up a little something from one of my appearances at the festival: my presentation at Monday night’s 20×2 event, the annual adjunct to the festival proper in which twenty participants are asked to answer a single, purposefully vague question in two minutes flat, using whatever creative powers they can summon.

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Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

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A Commercial Message

Some readers will have noticed that, starting several weeks ago, I began running job posts from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs. This evening, for the first time, I’ve also started running ads from The Deck, Jim Coudal’s design-focused advertising network.

Truth be told, with the first move, I tried to sneak it through, without acknowledging it in any blog posts. Aside from the fact that they’re advertising, I figured that those job postings, being in black and white and being styled in such a way as to be very similar to the rest of the site, were visually innocuous. The ads from The Deck, however, are in color, and not so easily ignored.

I’m bracing for some scathing feedback from readers, so please, let me know how you feel if you find these changes to be offensive. We’ve been living with advertising on the Internet for over a decade now, but it’s still a topic that can inflame passions among reasonable people, and I respect that.

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Writing and Sizing Twitter

Twitter LogoFor some time now, everyone’s been crazy for Twitter, a kind of hub for digitally checking-in with your friends, where everyone alerts one another of what they’re up to, sometimes as frequently as from moment to moment. If that’s a bit of an obscure description, it’s because there’s nothing else quite like it. Actually, ‘cute’ may be the best and most succinct descriptor I can come up with.

More Web service than Web site, I had a hard time remembering to post the short, punchy updates that are Twitter’s principal currency until the advent of Icon Factory’s free, desktop-based Twitterific utility for Mac OS X.

Twitterific puts a persistent kind of ‘heads up display’ right on your Mac OS X screen so that your friends’ posts are immediately available, and that you can easily add new posts yourself. No more having to load the Web site, or remembering to visit that tab in your browser where you’ve got Twitter.com running.

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Two or Three Things You Know About Me

With apologies to Jean-Luc Godard.

What is it about podcasters that allows them to make what looks like such a difficult medium seem so effortless? Brian Oberkirch is a great example: he’s the brains and voice behind the consistently fascinating and highly professional Edgework podcast, in which he hosts terrific dialogues with some of the best creative minds on the Internet. Last night he interviewed me via Skype at 10:00p EST, and he had the completed podcast episode up and available for download by 10:00a this morning. Wow, how do they do it? Anyway, it was a blast to talk to such a pro; Brian really knows how to run an interview. Have a listen and let me know how badly I stammered.

In other news, please vote for Subtraction.com in the 2007 Bloggies competition, where I’ve been very, very generously nominated for the “Best-Designed Weblog” category. That’s a huge honor, and I’m totally touched. I’m up against some formidable competition — not the least of whom is Veerle. I couldn’t possibly be saddened to lose to someone of that stature, because her blog is so clearly awesome. Still, it would be really nice to win, so if you can spare the time to vote for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Finally, you have two opportunities to come hear me ramble on about design: First, in just a few weeks I’ll be appearing in London at The Future of Web Apps conference (one of Ryan Carson’s many influential Carson Systems projects), where I’ll be talking about everything I know (and some things I don’t) about the topic of “Managing User Interfaces.” I’m pretty excited for that. I’ll also be doing a so-called ‘power session’ at South by Southwest Interactive in March, which will offer up for public appropriation everything I’ve ever appropriated myself about designing with grids. Mark Boulton will be sharing the stage with me, too, to provide the real substance. And of course, I’ll be available for hanging out afterwards, which after all is the real point behind the conference, right? Hope to see you there, or somewhere…

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Illustrate Me for December

Illustrate Me for December 2006I haven’t forgotten our deal: once a month, I ask a designer or illustrator to create artwork to accompany the prior month’s archives, cutting loose in any fashion he or she desires to add a little bit of life to these pages. And in turn you, dear reader, take it in wholly and enthusiastically, even if each piece’s overall awesomeness leaves you too speechless to leave a comment on this blog. For a refresher on this arrangement, you can start at the November 2006 or October 2006 archives and work your way back to see all the wonderful work produced over the past year.

It may be nearly an entire month late, but I’m finally living up to my end of that for my December 2006 archives. (The fault for this truancy is mine entirely, not the artist’s.) This month, I was able to convince my good friend Mike Essl, who is the Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, to contribute what’s turned out to be the most aggro entry yet. It’s a shake ’em up, in-your-face change of pace from what we’ve seen before, and I dig it loads. You can see it here.

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Optimizing for Design Unusability

Nicholas Felton of the New York design studio Megafone does some beautiful work, but the piece that’s really caught my eye is his Feltron 2006 Annual Report. Not a corporation, “Feltron” is Felton’s nom de guerre, under which he publishes, I suppose, personal projects and experiments. It’s hard to say because, like many designers’ indulgences, there’s frustratingly little information available at Feltron.com.

Doesn’t matter. Because this ‘annual report,’ a follow-up to a similar project he did at the end of 2005, is a work of delightful inventiveness. Using the pro forma conventions and banalities of corporate annual reports, Felton summarizes the notable trivia of the past twelve months of his life: the number of days he spent on vacation, the amount of time he spent on jury duty, the many remote geographic locations visited, and even a summary of plants he’s killed. All of it is executed in the kind of highly detailed diagrammatic vernacular that designers tend to fetishize — “info-porn” is the term — and with Felton’s precise, disciplined and, here anyway, his nearly unfailing aesthetic eye.

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New Boxes Are Here

Boxes and ArrowsThe long-awaited new design for Boxes and Arrows, the venerable online information architecture magazine, went live earlier this week and it’s… um, it’s different. Very different.

Of course, it’s hard for me to give an objective assessment of this new look’s graphical merits. Way, way back in August 2004, I pulled a feverish all-nighter (with my former colleague, Chris Fahey) to knock out a competing design that I hoped would be selected as the new face for the magazine. I’m still very fond of what we pulled off, but, obviously, our proposal did not prevail.

Still, I’d like to think that even without that conflict of interest, I’d have much the same reaction as I had when I first saw this revision: the new Boxes and Arrows lacks certain traits of executional elegance that I value in well-designed interfaces. I’m talking about some basic stuff here: consistency in typographic conventions, semantic clarity in graphical elements, disambiguation in interface constructions, continuity with prior branding art… it’s a mess, and it will win no beauty pageants.

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Network Once, Socialize Anywhere

This just in: social networks are awesome. But.

If it isn’t here already, we are, in all likelihood, counting down to the end of the first phase of social networking, that stage in the Internet’s maturation that will be remembered for its behemoth social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. Thirteen days from today, the end of the year, would be as good a time as any to mark the official closing of the era.

These networks will continue to thrive, no doubt, and continue to be influential. But it seems to me that next year what we’ll see is the emergence of the post-social Internet, in which the tools of social networking take on the qualities of ubiquitous givens, and in which the previous style of expansive, cross-demographic digital hubs like those mentioned above are going to be joined by a score of smaller, more focused niche networks catering to narrower tastes.

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Round-up Time!

I’ve been fighting what’s apparently a twenty-four hour bug since midday yesterday. Shivers and aches pained me all through the day and into night, and I didn’t even know if I could make it through a whole day of work today. But I underwent sustained, Cold-Eeze-powered counter-attack, and I feel loads better tonight, remarkably. Zinc is the magical cure for all my threatening colds, I’m finding.

Actually, I’m not back completely at one hundred percent. I’m still tired, and bound to my couch for the most part. But, at the very least, I have my senses about me enough to want to clear out some blogging items that have been hanging around for a while. So this is going to be another round-up style post. Get ready for random.

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