Weekend Weblog Work

Sun 17 Jul 200508:56 PM

I don’t get to do it very often, but this weekend I sat down and took care of some maintenance on Subtraction.com. The first order of business was to get the majority of the pages on the site to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict — finally. This modest goal had been made inadvertently difficult by my frequent inclusion of links to New York Times articles. In order to provide stable links to articles that might otherwise be removed from the Times’ public archives over time, I process nearly all of them with Aaron Swartz’s invaluable New York Times Link Generator.

Unfortunately that free service produces validator-hostile URLs; if before today you had run a typical page from the Elsewhere section through the W3C Validator, you’d get about a jillion errors back. So I installed Nat Irons’ excellent Amputator plug-in for Movable Type, which allows me to automatically reformat those NYT links so that they will fly through the validator, and with only a bare minimum of edits to the Movable Type publishing templates. Fantastic.

How to Get Started in Design

Fri 15 Jul 200512:09 AM

At the very beginning of a design project, before any boxes have been drawn or pixels have been pushed, there’s the nerve-wracking ritual known as ‘the kick-off.” For larger engagements, clients may set aside as many as four or five full days to sit down with a design team and impart as much knowledge as possible, and it’s up to the design team to make that time worthwhile. To me, this has always been one of the most difficult — and least documented — parts of the design process, because it demands a confluence of skills that you can’t pick up in front of a computer screen. To run a successful kick-off, you have to ask probing questions and carefully parse the answers that come back, taking into account corporate culture and stakeholder agendas. You have to be an assiduous gatherer of information while also a gentle tutor in best practices. And on top of it all, you have to be able to guide conversations and keep things lively, while transitioning issues logically and productively. I’ve done it about two dozen times in my career, and every time I sit down to plan one, it’s almost like starting over from scratch. Really, what makes kick-offs truly difficult is that each and every one is different.

1996 Tears

Wed 13 Jul 200511:02 PM

The City in Seventy-Seven

Tue 12 Jul 200501:45 PM

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

Get Yer Invoice On(line)

Fri 8 Jul 200503:56 PM

We need an upstart challenger to bring simplified, elegant interaction design to the consumer financial software market and, in no uncertain terms, to completely upset the dominance of Intuit. That company’s industry-leading software is powerful, useful and ubiquitous, but it’s also clunky, overly-accreted and no fun to use. I have a contemptuous relationship with their business accounting package, QuickBooks, whose menu item for closing an accounting file is labeled — I’m not making this up — “Close Company,” and I have only moderately more affection for its personal accounting package Quicken.

So I’m happy to see the talented folks over at Firewheel Design produce a product like Blinksale, a soon-to-be-released, Web-based invoicing tool for small to medium size businesses. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at its extremely well-designed interface, and picked up its basic principles in literally just a few minutes — five minutes from log-in to sending out my first test invoice. All told, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

The Road Ahead

Thu 7 Jul 200512:34 AM

How to Design Faster, Maybe

Wed 29 Jun 200511:37 PM

From a perspective of sheer design labor, the most difficult part of bringing a new Web site to life is production. At that point where the major design challenges have been resolved (what the home page and a few other key pages look like, how the site feels) and when those resolutions have been approved by the stakeholders, designers then apply that solution across all the constituent parts of the site: marketing pages, content pages, forms, search interfaces, etc. Typically, this is done with Adobe Photoshop or, recently for me, Macromedia Fireworks, in a fairly painful process of rendering “flat comps”; creating static, visually accurate representations of what the XHTML should render while also suggesting, rather awkwardly, how the interface will respond to user interactions.

Does this sound like a drag? It is, especially for sites with dozens of pages, like the ones we often do at Behavior. It’s not so much that the work itself is drudgery. It’s not; in fact, this work is the crucial evolution between concept and reality, when the design ideas put forward in early comps are expanded and embellished upon to create a fully-fledged system of interrelated parts. In production, the design becomes real. What’s a drag is how much effort it takes to build all of these flat comps; you could spend weeks trying to address all of the design problems that a site presents and iterating on those solutions continuously before even getting to the first line of XHTML. I’ve done that.

Vote Gets a Vote

Mon 27 Jun 200508:26 PM

Several folks have emailed me about this, but I just got my hands on a copy of the I.D. Magazine 2005 Design Annual last night; Behavior’s design for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy was lucky enough to receive a Design Distinction award. I had actually heard about this a little while back, though I wasn’t even sure what “Design Distinction” might mean. Now that I have the annual in front of me, it’s turns out to be something like a runner-up position, just a step above ‘honorable mentions.’ We’re in good company, too — the Museum of Modern Art’s gorgeous Tall Buildings, designed by the sharp minds at For Office Use Only, also received a commendation, which is very flattering.