Category Archives: Web Design

Election Night

Elections Coverage at NYTimes.comAfter all the build-up, everything comes to a head tonight. I mean, yeah, it’s Election Day and all, but I’m talking about our election coverage package over at NYTimes.com, where’ve spent weeks putting together a solid offering of results data. I just had a quick look around at the competition, and I gotta say, I think our designers really pulled it off; it’s the best looking presentation for elections results on the Web tonight.

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Return of the Friday Free-for-All

Fri 03 Nov 2006Hey, it’s time for the Friday Free-for-All round-up again! Just kidding, this is the first one ever. A round-up blog post isn’t something I usually do, but what the heck, right? These are a few things I’ve been keeping in Mori that I’ll never be able to turn into full-fledged weblog entries before they go stale.

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What Kind of People Are These?

AIGAWe were lucky enough at AIGA New York to get Jeffrey Zeldman to do a Small Talk event of his own a few weeks ago. It was a big success, but I still consider that event just one step in a larger effort to make AIGA an organization that’s more conducive to the practice of interaction design. After all, Jeffrey᾿s appearance, while a quietly momentous occasion in its own way, wasn’t the first time we’ve brought folks who work online in front of the chapter’s membership — among others, Joshua Davis has spoken in the past and Matt Owens will be appearing at our upcoming Passion/Payoff Student Conference in just a few weeks.

Effecting change takes more than just getting a few recognizable names to talk to chapter members, though. The trick, I think, is producing a sustained effort in which the kinds of events and content that are applicable and appealing to digital designers are treated on a peer level with those geared towards designers working within AIGA⁏s more traditionally recognizable discipline areas. That’s harder.

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When All’s Said and Done

Despite an ugly night of non-stop rain, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk event for AIGA New York went off without a hitch this evening. In fact, it went great; Jeffrey’s always entertaining, and he gave a spirited, insightful and often hilarious talk on the nature of selling great work to clients. The subject was a perfect match for the mixed audience of Web designers and print designers, and I think everyone got a little something out of it, regardless of how they earn their design dollars.

Just how many of each kind of designer attended, it’s hard to say. During one question, Jeffrey asked for a show of hands, and it looked like most of the room was populated by designers who work primarily online. Still, this is a salient question for AIGA that I’m keen to get an answer on. As I mentioned last week when I was promoting this event, we’ll be surveying the attendees for their opinions starting tonight, so if you attended, check your email.

As promised, we’ll be giving away some prizes to randomly selected survey respondents: two copies of Jeffrey’s “Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition),” each of which have been signed and dated by Jeffrey to commemorate tonight’s talk, and a free season pass to all four of next spring’s Small Talks.

Speaking of future Small Talks, we have three more coming up before the end of the fall 2006 season: Marc Joseph in November, Peter Arkle and Amy Goldwasser in December, and Emmanuelle Linard in January. All of these events take place in the beautiful venue generously provided for us by Bumble and bumble, and all of them are not-to-be-missed if you enjoy listening to incredibly sharp people talk about design.

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When All’s Said and Done

Despite an ugly night of non-stop rain, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk event for AIGA New York went off without a hitch this evening. In fact, it went great; Jeffrey’s always entertaining, and he gave a spirited, insightful and often hilarious talk on the nature of selling great work to clients. The subject was a perfect match for the mixed audience of Web designers and print designers, and I think everyone got a little something out of it, regardless of how they earn their design dollars.

Just how many of each kind of designer attended, it’s hard to say. During one question, Jeffrey asked for a show of hands, and it looked like most of the room was populated by designers who work primarily online. Still, this is a salient question for AIGA that I’m keen to get an answer on. As I mentioned last week when I was promoting this event, we’ll be surveying the attendees for their opinions starting tonight, so if you attended, check your email.

As promised, we’ll be giving away some prizes to randomly selected survey respondents: two copies of Jeffrey’s “Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition),” each of which have been signed and dated by Jeffrey to commemorate tonight’s talk, and a free season pass to all four of next spring’s Small Talks.

Speaking of future Small Talks, we have three more coming up before the end of the fall 2006 season: Marc Joseph in November, Peter Arkle and Amy Goldwasser in December, and Emmanuelle Linard in January. All of these events take place in the beautiful venue generously provided for us by Bumble and bumble, and all of them are not-to-be-missed if you enjoy listening to incredibly sharp people talk about design.

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Selling Jeffrey Zeldman on Selling

Jeffrey Zeldman for AIGA NY Small TalksHere I was thinking how clever I am. I came up with this idea to conduct a brief interview with Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman to build up a little advance buzz for his Small Talks appearance next Tue 17 Oct for AIGA New York.

Since the Small Talks series is a forum for design leaders to discuss subjects close to their hearts (and not necessarily expansive career overviews) in relatively intimate surroundings (only about a hundred seats are available for each event), I figured it would be a good opportunity for Jeffrey to preview some of the things he’d be talking about, sort of whet everyone’s appetites. And, wanting to make this event as much of a success as it can be, I also thought it would be a great way to help sell some tickets, too.

I don’t know what I was thinking, because Jeffrey Zeldman, clearly, needs no additional salesmanship. Before I even had the opportunity to publish the interview I’m running here today, and just one business day after the event’s promotional poster even went out in the mail to AIGA members, the event has sold out. All the seats are filled. I should’ve known better.

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Listen Up, Adobe

AdobeSeveral weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

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Ripped from the Headlines

NYPost.comAs of yesterday morning, there’s a new NYPost.com, and I like it a lot. It’s miles away from what we do at NYTimes.com, and it’s not exactly my taste in terms of graphic design, but its unabashed appropriateness and surprising sense of wit is kind of irresistible.

Then again, this is just me talking. A few people with whom I’ve expressed my enthusiasm about this site aren’t quite as enamored of it as I am. Like my good friend Liz Danzico, Director of User Experience Strategy at AIGA and editor of the information architecture magazine Boxes & Arrows, for one. Her reaction to my endorsement of the site was, “REALLY?” — all caps and everything.

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AIGA Here and There

AIGAJust a reminder for those in the Baltimore/D.C. area: I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday night at Villa Julie College for the Baltimore chapter of AIGA. I’m going to cover a wide gamut of stuff from what happens at NYTimes.com to my extracurricular projects to my philosophy on design management to a quick tour of my thinking on using typographic grids online. It’s going to be fun; so if you can make it, please come up to introduce yourself.

In other — much bigger — AIGA news, I’m very pleased — ecstatic, actually — to announce that the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman will have a night of his own in mid-October for the New York chapter of AIGA as a part of our Small Talks series. Small Talks is a long-running tradition of the New York chapter, in which we invite a series of highly esteemed design figures to talk about subjects near and dear to their hearts in intimate settings. We purposefully limit the number of seats available to these events in order to allow the speakers to do their magic in as casual and friendly an environment as possible, so book your ticket early before they’re sold out.

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Home Page Heroics

Notwithstanding my own lack of clarity regarding the five year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, I’m not immune to the occasion’s obvious significance. It’s as moving a date for me as anyone, and as it approached, I personally wanted to make sure that the NYTimes.com design team should make our own, humble contribution in honoring it. That’s why I wholeheartedly agreed when one of the designers in my group suggested he put some extra hours over the weekend towards some special presentations of the home page for Monday.

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