Archives

Four for iPhone

iPhone AppsLet’s face it, I’ll probably never create an iPhone application of my own. I don’t have the time, for one, and even if I did, I haven’t got the programming talent. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas for some applications. And because I’m one of the lucky few who have a blog, I’m not just going to let these ideas go to waste — no, I’m posting them right here instead. To be sure, none of them are game changers, but all of them would find a place on my iPhone’s home screen if someone out there makes them.

Continue Reading …

+

Frakkin’ Stupid

There must be something good about “Battlestar Galactica,” because in spite of how basically crap I find it, I tune in faithfully every week (though sometimes, like this evening, I do so belatedly thanks to the convenience of my DVR). Usually, I spend the hour sneering or rolling my eyes as the episode unfolds; the show is fascinating to me as an intersection between an old guard of cheap and not particularly good television making, and a new frontier of narratively — though not intellectually — complex and ambitious television writing.

Actually I think that I want to like it. But week in and week out, the show fails so spectacularly in its chintzy sets, its hyperbolic scripts, its crushingly serious sense of its own importance (has anybody ever cracked a joke on this show? If so, has anybody ever laughed?), that I can’t turn away. It’s too easy to compare it to a car crash that you can’t turn away from. It’s perhaps more accurate to compare it to watching a car that you know is going to crash.

Imagine some futuristic, fantastical auto dreamed up by some crazy genius. Except this mad inventor forgot to attach one of its front wheels, or just couldn’t afford to pay for the tire. Undeterred, the car careens down the street anyway, a kind of souped up, time-traveling Delorean with its wheel-less front bumper violently dragging along the ground, scraping a frightening wave of sparks off the ground as the metal chassis screams in agony. Sooner or later this thing is going to collide with a telephone pole. That’s what “Battlestar Galactica” is to me. How can I not watch?

Continue Reading …

+

Keynote for Print

Here’s how much I like Apple’s Keynote presentation software. I just used it the way I might have used QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign: to create a document intended not for the screen or projection, but for printing, and being held in one’s hand.

The document is my final, outgoing treasurer’s report as I finish up my two-year term as a board member for AIGA New York. (My work isn’t quite finished yet, though, as I’m moving on to the national board.) When I started to create the report, I originally tried to use InDesign and Illustrator, but the prospect of using those lumbering programs seemed slow and tedious compared to Keynote, where all of the charting and graphing tools are built right into the application and are lightning fast.

Continue Reading …

+

Great Numbers, Not So Great Design

Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish — a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist — maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.

Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical. For design to work as a business, it almost always has to scale to some degree. The smaller the scale, though, the more efficient the practice of design; transmitting ideas among a small number of people is much more effective than transmitting them among a large number.

Continue Reading …

+

Please Don’t Hold Our Job Board Against Us

Are you a designer in need of a job? Well, we need designers at the NYTimes.com design group, almost as bad as we need a new interface for our job board. Sometimes the board works, and sometimes it doesn’t, so when I post this link to a description for a position I need to fill soon, you’ll have to forgive me if happens to not be functioning properly when you click on it. Enterprise software is like that.

Okay, to be honest the board is terrible. But that shouldn’t reflect poorly on the job opportunity — the opportunity is a really great one. We’ve got a really, really terrific team and we’re doing fascinating, challenging and very rewarding work. And we also happen to be working at the greatest news company on the planet. In my opinion.

I could actually run the full description of the job here, but I’ve learned in the past that people tend to submit their résumés regardless of their suitability to whatever bullet points I point them to. Usually, they just respond to the title, which in this case is “Web Designer.” Still, I’ll supplement it here with this advice: if you’re a fantastic Web designer, then we want you. And you really have to be fantastic. I’m serious. Also, you have to be clever enough to be able to figure out how our crazy job board works.

Continue Reading …

+

Out of the Box Thinking

Seagate FreeAgentGenerally, I think it’s great when companies adopt a bit of the customer-friendly approach to designing and packaging products that most of us have come to associate with Apple. I’m talking about the premise that, even after the consumer has handed over her money for a physical product, the process of opening up its packaging and using it for the first time should be as seductive and reassuring as was the experience of having been sold on it in the first place — if not more enjoyable, even.

Take, for example, this external hard drive that I bought recently from Seagate: an inexpensive model called the FreeAgent. I’ve never thought of Seagate, a well-respected hard drive manufacturer but not a particularly friendly brand, as being very consumer-focused, but I have to admit they surprised me. Mostly.

Continue Reading …

+

Subscribing to RSS Theory

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen that’s full of rubber bands, pens, take-out menus, birthday candles, miscellaneous kitchen utensils, string, magnets and all sorts of other junk? That, to me, is what my RSS reader feels like. No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending chunks of time here and there trying to clean out the drawer, so to speak, organizing the many, many feeds that I’ve haphazardly stashed inside various folders and subfolders within NetNewsWire. My goal has been to group them into some sort of hierarchy that will allow me to make better use of them, to cluster them together logically. Not necessarily by content type, but rather in use-oriented ways, like how often they’re published or how often I tend to read them.

The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me. I acknowledge that some customization is often — if not always — necessary to get the most efficient use out of any given software. But moreso than with most classes of software, it’s my feeling that RSS readers shortchange users with only half of the features we need to get the job done.

Continue Reading …

+

My Time Away from Blogging

For like two weeks I’ve been tinkering with a draft of a new blog post, but I can’t seem to get it done. As time goes by, I get more and more skeptical of whether or not I can bang it into good enough shape to somehow qualify as a sufficiently worthy ‘comeback post.’ To plausibly excuse my little hiatus away from blogging, I feel compelled to return to the fray with nothing less than a screed that’s somehow good enough. Whatever that means, I haven’t quite got it, I know.

Not to say that I’m taking all of this so seriously. In fact, I think I’m taking this weblog less seriously than I have before. I admit sheepishly that there was a time, a few years ago, when blogging was one of the most important things in any given day of my life. And sometimes, often enough to be regrettable, it disproportionately dominated my priorities when it really shouldn’t have.

So there are a lot of reasons I’m not blogging right now with quite the alacrity that I have in the past. My day job is busier than ever at the moment, seemingly (and piled on, this week anyway, with extracurricular questions and answers). The weather’s turned nice in New York, too. Finally there’s daylight when I climb out of the subway from my evening commute, and I can wear a tee-shirt to walk Mister President even when the thermometer hits the day’s lows — which I would rather do than sitting in front of my computer. Also, I finally realized: living life is more important than blogging about design.

Continue Reading …

+

Talk to the Hand…That Art Directs

Was there something you wanted to ask me about my day job as design director at NYTimes.com? If so, you should head on over to the site — or just send an email to askthetimes@nytimes.com — and pose your query, because all week long I’ll be answering reader questions in our regular “Talk to the Newsroom” series. I’m going to try my best to come across competently, but if you really want insight into the way The Times works, be sure to peruse the previous installments in this Q & A series in the archives, too.

Continue Reading …

+

Online Apps Turn Me Offline

In my search for some kind of memory-enhancing, panacean note-keeping application, I’ve had to confront again what is becoming an increasingly common conundrum: do I want a solution that lives on the desktop or on the network?

Despite the significant leaps forward seen in online applications in recent years — Google Docs and the 37signals suite of apps, to name just a few — I still find most of this stuff slower, less efficient and less integrated with the way I prefer to maintain my own personal information ‘cloud’ than desktop software.

Given the choice, I’ll almost always opt for the native speed of an application written in Cocoa, the ability to call it up with suddenness and satisfaction via Quicksilver or from the Mac OS X Dock, and seamless, peer-level cohabitation with the data stored inside my Mac OS X Address Book, iCal other local data resources.

Continue Reading …

+