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.

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.

I spent a good forty-five minutes this morning debating over whether or not to buy myself a palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager, the latest hardware incarnation of what’s still colloquially known as a ‘Palm Pilot.’ It’s bigger, stronger and faster than the Palm OS device I used to carry, and sports a 4GB micro-drive that offers the promise of a deep and vast repository of teeny tiny documents that I need desperately for some reason or other. There’s something sexy and alluring about its metallic form factor, and an unexpectedly good deal on it at Buy.com led me to start rationalizing new reasons why I really need one.

Ultimately, after doing some consumer research at Cnet, I came to my senses and remembered the reasons why I’ve stopped using a PDA entirely. First, I always found synchronization between Palm devices and my Macs to be rather unreliable and lackluster. Even with the availability of Markspace’s The Missing Sync third-party ‘bridge’ software, I’m not convinced that there will ever be completely seamless and reliable PDA synchronization — at least until Apple releases its own, Apple-branded iPDA.

Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day, which is a good excuse for me to fawn over my mutt for a bit. Naturally, I brought Mister President with me to Behavior to celebrate the event; it᾿s a two-mile hike from my apartment to the office, and I enjoy it a lot, though I’m not so sure he does. Actually, he comes to work with me fairly often, and by now he knows it’s his job to just sit still and not bother anyone, so he’s no longer so eager to head out the door with me on weekday mornings. I like having him here with me, though to be honest, it’s sometimes difficult to juggle clients, manage a business and a keep an eye out for a dog’s natural and immutable propensity for digging up trouble.

Every time I complain about Adobe Photoshop’s handicapped suitability for web production, people tell me to give Macromedia Fireworks a try, so today, I finally did. I spent a few hours in the program re-creating a layout that originated in Photoshop, and, after acclimating myself to the new application’s interface, I was generally pleased. It is indeed faster and more flexible in terms of shifting elements around, and it does in fact match a web designer’s frame of mind better than does Photoshop — I’ll almost certainly use it as the primary comping tool for my next project. However, I’m still not completely sold on Fireworks as the solution for all the problems that web production presents to a designer.

Already, I’ve seen “Batman Begins” twice, which gives you some indication of how I feel about the movie. I wanted to write a long review of it, but time simply won’t permit it — and there’s no dearth of glowing reviews available elsewhere — so I thought instead I might comment on the context in which this new interpretation has debuted.

Watch the very end of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of “Batman” and you’ll see just one of many, many examples of why I found very little of redeeming value in the last major hurrah for this franchise. The scene provides that movie’s resolution: Jack Nicholson’s miscast and misplayed Joker has been vanquished (after a ridiculous showdown in which he shot down the titular hero’s plane with a handgun!). Gotham City’s mayor, district attorney and police chief are addressing a crowd on the steps of an overwrought City Hall set, publicly reassuring the citizenry that the danger has passed.

After trying many times to regulate the manner in which Web site production is organized on the many design teams I’ve led, I’m still not at peace with the amount of control that should be imposed on other designers. On the one hand, everyone works in a unique manner, and it’s counter-productive to shoehorn a single, unified and overly detailed process on designers, who are typically free-thinkers when it comes to this working style. This I accept readily, but there are some things, admittedly low-level things, that I find it hard not to at least want to control.

There are more profound — and touchier — examples than this, but the one that has me preoccupied lately is the relatively trivial matter of organizing Photoshop documents. By and large, most designers approach the construction of a Photoshop document in an ad hoc manner, creating new layers as they are needed, not always naming them properly, or defaulting to Photoshop’s automated, serial numbering scheme, which happens to be generally devoid of meaning. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of Photoshop documents are created in this way, and more often than not without negative consequence.

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

Any kind of commentary I can offer on Apple’s decision to switch to Intel will hardly be as original or insightful as what you can readily find elsewhere on the Web. But it’s a significant enough event that, as someone who can’t shut the heck up about Macs, I would feel remiss in not commenting on — even in the midst of my crazy-ass work schedule.

Now that Mac OS X Tiger has given us yet another variation on window chrome — the user interface ‘parts’ that frame windows in the operating system — I got to thinking about how they all work together. Well, to begin with, I’ve more or less given up on the idea that there truly is any kind of overarching strategy at work between the various styles of chrome offered by Apple. For instance, there’s no clear reason to me why the Finder is adorned with brushed metal or that Mail 2.0 looks completely foreign from its logical close cousin, the Address Book. Even saying there was, at one point, some kind of tidy logic governing chrome styles, that original concept has taken yet another debilitating body blow.