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Teach Your Dog to Swim

Like a lot of people, when I first adopted my dog I made a solemn oath not to succumb to the temptations of absurdly over-enthusiastic pet ownership: no dog sweaters, no canine birthday parties, no pet manicures. This was a point of pride more than anything, a line drawn in the sand to convince myself that I am macho and that I can in fact keep it real.

I haven’t completely given up on that oath, but the reality of having a dog is something else entirely: before too long, the dog’s irresistible, ingratiating ways break you down, and you begin wanting to treat him or her essentially like a furry child. It’s a very difficult impulse to resist.

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Photography 101

During the course of obliviously touring Paris, I took about five hundred pictures with my digital camera. For more experienced photographers, especially those shooting digital, that’s not a particularly remarkable number, but for me that amounts to the most shots I’ve ever taken on a single vacation. This is basically a reflection of a new and increasingly serious interest in my camera and how I can get the best shots I possibly can from it.

Never having had formal training in photography, I dabbled for a long time with point-and-shoot digital cameras. As anyone who’s used one can attest, they allow for instant gratification with little or no requirement for actually understanding the inner workings of photography. In that respect, they’re fantastic introductions to the craft.

But in the four or five years I was shooting with these models, I never really got it straight in my head what an f/stop is, for instance, or how to properly meter a shot — I was too easily insulated from the inner logic of picture taking. As a result I continually ran into frustrations in getting the kinds of shots I really wanted. I knew that I’d actually have to learn this craft, but it seemed silly to try and learn it with cameras so clearly designed not to teach it.

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Interview at The Weekly Standards

The Weekly StandardsTo faithful readers of this weblog: if you stick with me, you have my pledge that you will not have to read about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion in perpetuity. At least I hope not. Looking forward, I hope to get famous (or at least infamous) for many more projects as interesting and as influential as this one, but in the meantime, I’m humbled by the fact that at least some people continue to find it interesting.

One of them is James Archer who, aside from being the founder of Fortymedia, is the publisher of The Weekly Standards, an online magazine focused on the real world practice of standards-based Web design. He’s just published an interview with me which discusses at length — you guessed it — the redesign of TheOnion.com.

But wait! That’s not all you get with this article because, for absolutely no extra money, James has thrown in a major added bonus: a very thoughtful, fair and insightful critique of the redesign as a whole by none other than Garret Dimon. Even if you scroll right past my own rambling answers to James’ questions, don’t miss Garret’s comments.

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Unaware Over There

Trip to ParisI’ve been back from Paris since last Wednesday night, but I spent the first two or three days battling a jet-lag-fueled exhaustion so acute it hurt. It gripped my spine, shoulder blades and neck in the same way that I histrionically and baselessly imagine the bends must treat its victims. Not fun. I’m closer to normalcy now, but I’m still waking up very early in the morning and going to bed very early in the evening, which I admit isn’t unpleasant.

Until yesterday, I was in no shape to blog, but I’m not sure I had all that much to say about Paris anyway. That is, apart from the obvious, which is that it completely justifies its reputation for being redolently gorgeous and romantic, at once historically overwhelming and inspiring… if you conveniently ignore the civil riots taking place at the edge of the city.

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European Vacation

These days, I seem to be doing less blogging and more getting out of the house, which includes leaving tomorrow for a one week holiday in Paris, France. Joy and I are going there to visit my father, who moved there late last year, returning decades after having grown up there in his teens and early twenties.

I’ve been to Paris four times, each visit separated by at least five years, and I’ve enjoyed each visit quite a bit. It’s hard to resist Europe in general, but I’m wondering if France can really top my visit last year to Italy — our trip to Sicily was one of the most thoroughly enjoyable getaways I’ve ever had (so enjoyable, it seems, that I never got around to properly blogging about it). I was reminded of this recently when I watched the Criterion edition of Pietro Germi’s “Divorce, Italian Style” — hilarious and well worth the rental, definitely. Anyway, I’m sure Paris going to be fantastic all the same — I have very little cause for worry.

We’ll be gone for a week, with a side-trip to Amsterdam, but at this point, having both been so busy just trying to clear our plates to be able to leave, we have no agenda. If you have any interesting ideas, please let me know. Until then, the posts here will be sporadic — or at least very continental.

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Fame and Infamy

Any publicity is good publicity, I keep telling myself, after getting unceremoniously Slashdotted for an editorial I wrote about Slashdot itself — my article went online this morning over at Publish.com. I thought it was a thoughtful opinion piece on Slashdot’s pending redesign and the seductive tendency of CSS to focus purely on aesthetics to the exclusion of architecture, but CmdrTaco disagreed, apparently. The comments thread quickly turned to excoriating the work I proudly did on redesigning The Onion, which is unfortunate and unfair, I think, but if the worst problem I have in life is raising the ire of Slashdot readers, then I’m doing pretty good. Anyway, I still think the editorial is worth a read; please let me know what you think.

In a more positive bit of notoriety, Dave Kellam of Seal Club asked me to participate in his 5Q project, in which he asks “designers, artists and other Web-monkeys five questions on earth-shattering topics usually unrelated to their field.” This was the easiest and funnest interview I’ve ever done, and it will take you less than five seconds to read if you’re interested: it appears here. Dave also did a nice job of throwing together a design expressly for my questions and answers — how can I not dig the Rauschenberg-esque use of Mister President as a design element?

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Television without the Television

iMac G5Today, Apple announced the addition of new video capabilities to its one-two entertainment punch of iPod hardware and iTunes software, satisfying a long festering demand for portable video and providing an inevitable method for buying video content. They’re significant first steps in monetizing broadband content and I think they’re cool, but they leave me basically nonplussed.

What’s got me in a lather, though, is the new iMac G5, which is tantalizingly, frustratingly close to a great media center… but still miles short of what I had in mind. Where is the TV tuner functionality, first of all? If there’s something glaringly missing from this offering that in so many respects desperately wants to be a television, it’s the ability to actually be able to use it as a television.

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Thinking about The Times

The New York TimesWhen Behavior was working on our redesign of The Onion, we would frequently look to The New York Times for hints on how a publication should present itself online, how content should be organized, how the user interface to an archive of articles should be manifested, etc. In so many ways, The Times is a de facto standard that leads the way in best practices: the decisions they make in developing their user interface can effectively validate a design convention.

For instance, their recent decision to provide, from articles, access to all the paper’s sections in a DHTML pop-up menu is a convincing argument for a navigational method that might previously have met with skepticism from any client I proposed it to. In my experience, the fact that “the Times does it” is proof enough that a convention is widely understood and acceptable.

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Paragraph in The New York Times

ParagraphRun out and get a copy of today’s New York Times and turn directly to the Sunday Styles page for a big feature article all about Paragraph, the writers’ space recently opened by my girlfriend. It’s a huge, early win for her and her partner: an in-depth piece that talks about writers’ spaces in general, but that prominently features Paragraph and quotes from both Joy and Lila. I’m kind of beaming, if you can’t tell.

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Groupthink Made Easy

Writeboard37signals released Writeboard today, the latest release in what’s surely shaping up to be 37signals Office — a line of indispensable productivity applications that all happen to be intimately and prohibitively hooked into one another. So, look out Microsoft.

I’m only half kidding about that last bit, but it is true that Writeboard is now open for business and, being 100% free and almost completely great, I’m sure there will be plenty of business to be had.

The product is best described as a collaborative, versioning online text editor, and at first I thought it was the super-elegant wiki creation tool that I’ve been anticipating for a long time. As it turns out, Writeboard purposefully eschews wiki-linking (too “techy,” Jason Fried told me) and instead favors a reductive, straightforward approach to allowing people to jointly create documents.

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