It’s been so long that I’ve been wanting to write this weblog entry that I almost don’t even know what to say anymore. So I’ll be blunt: earlier this year, Behavior was fortunate enough to have been selected to redesign the online edition of The Onion. Our assignment: a major overhaul of the satirical newspaper’s online presence from top to bottom, and to help their Web team open up the entirety of their online archives — previously subscription-only, now freely available to everyone, gratis. A huge undertaking.

That wasn’t the whole of it though, as we were also enlisted to perform a comprehensive overhaul of The Onion’s pop-culture review section, The A.V. Club, including a complete rethinking of the way that publication expresses itself online. It’s never garnered the attention that the satirical content has, but the A.V. Club is sometimes my favorite part of the paper — in any given week, they run some of the most intelligent and engaging reviews you’re likely to read on any new movie, album, book or video game.

We actually launched the A.V. Club several weeks ago — you can see it now at — AVClub.com — but wanting to keep things hush hush until both redesigns went public, we kept it mum. The Onion, by its nature, was more complex and more involved, and we’ve spent the intervening weeks working with their Web team to make the new site a reality at a pretty intense rate. And now, tonight, it’s finally done; it launched earlier this evening and you can go see it at TheOnion.com.

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The New York City Campaign Finance Board sends out a voter guide in advance of every election, and after I get it in the mail, I usually put it on a table and tell myself a little white lie about how I’ll read it well before the polls open on Election Day. But I never do, partly because, in the past, those guides have been dryly designed and uninviting — they don’t exactly promise a page-turning experience.

For this year’s primary (coming up on 13 Sep), the board tried something different — actually injecting a bit of engagement into the design. You can get a sense of the look at the NYCCB’s new approach at the Web site, which isn’t a bad representation of the printed guide at all, but it pretty much just looks like a regular Web site.

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A colleague and I, while on a long day trip to Washington, D.C. via train today, found ourselves in need of connectivity en route. We had work to do and files to exchange, but with the Eastern seaboard still unwired for the tens of thousands of commuters crawling between D.C. and Boston daily, we were stuck.

Then I remembered the long-standing but frequently ignored feature of the 802.11x wireless standard that allows the creation of ad hoc networks. Mac OS X makes this feature exceedingly easy to enable: just select “Create Network…” from the AirPort status menu, enter a name for the network and you’re done. We were instantly able to exchange files via iChat’s Bonjour messaging protocol, and my colleague was able to use his browser to effortlessly view PHP-enabled work on my hard drive, thanks to Personal Web Sharing (I never thought I’d get so much use out of Mac OS X’s built in Apache Web server, but it’s fast becoming my favorite feature ever, especially in conjunction with Marc Liyanage’s dead simple PHP installers.) On the way back this evening, we were even sharing music libraries across the aisle via iTunes’ built-in music sharing feature. The twenty-first century is here.

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All of the blood, sweat and tears that I put into designing that form in XHTML and CSS last week is coming to some good. After much continued fussing, I finally got it to render reliably and consistently across several major Web browsers, so at the very least, my labor satisfied the challenge at hand. But, having heard with near unanimity the general frustration that people feel about forms, I thought I’d do the civic thing and release a genericized version of my work — and let others freely borrow, steal and/or adapt it for their own needs.

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Here’s how much tiny user interface cues can matter: this afternoon, I spent about five minutes scratching my head in front of an Open dialog box in Adobe Photoshop, trying vainly to locate the files I’d saved several months ago to a particular folder. They just weren’t where I expected them to be.

The dialog box was displaying the contents of the folder in list view, and I had clicked on the Date Modified column to sort most recently modified items last. At least that᾿s what I thought I had done; the triangle icon was in fact in the correct mode — pointed end at the top, wide end at the bottom. But apparently, some kind of preference file had been corrupted, and the list was actually sorted so that the most recently modifed items appeared first.

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The black art at the heart of information design in XHTML and CSS is wrestling forms into some semblance of orderliness. In building a small site for my girlfriend (more later), I spent about three times the effort that should be necessary for getting a handful of standard form fields — name, address, phone, email etc, — lined up properly. It was a relatively straightforward job in Safari, surprisingly difficult in Firefox, and just hopeless in Internet Explorer. Fields were misaligned, clearing oddly, refusing to conform to declared widths… painful.

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Of the three network news operations, I’ve always found ABC’s to be the most serious and comprehensive: I’ll never forget watching former “World News Tonight” anchor Frank Reynolds during the confusion that immediately followed the failed attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981. His mix of command and empathetic frustration was a model of adulthood for me; for a long time, well before the advent of cable and the sham of Fox News, I thought television anchors were men of honor, that they earned a level of respect on a nightly basis to which young people should aspire.

I felt that way about Reynolds’s successor, Peter Jennings, as well. He took over the nightly news duties in our household at about the time that I first started understanding that there was a world out there and that it worked in peculiar, foreign ways. My father and I would watch Jennings together every night, and as the anchor revealed the names of new countries and people to me, my father would explain their hidden back stories. I learned a lot from those evenings, both about what lay beyond our shores and what was so important about what lay within them. As a result, I always preferred Jennings’s urbane, worldly delivery over his rival broadcasters, by far. It didn’t bother me much when Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather left their posts earlier this year, but I felt heartbroken and despondent last night when I learned that Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer.

There’s something broken about the way typeface licenses work. First, in my dozen or so years of working in professional design studios, I would say that most of those digital environments have habitually ‘pirated’ typefaces — or at least regularly violated licensing agreements — by more or less copying and distributing fonts wantonly. Everyone knows this.

For better or worse, the type industry has chosen not to crack down on this behavior by imposing unwieldy digital rights management or other draconian schemes on the market. Compared to the increasingly onerous anti-piracy measures for traditional application software, little attention is paid to preventing the proliferation of unlicensed typefaces, and by and large most designers enjoy the benefits of such a lax approach. But that rampant piracy has a negative effect: it keeps prices for quality typefaces high, or at least high enough to inhibit frequent designer adoption of new ones.

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It’s been forever since I’ve used a traditional form factor mouse — whether with one, two or more buttons — as my day-to-day input device. At the office, I have a small Wacom Intuos tablet, which helps me traverse the 2,560 pixel-width of my dual monitor setup; it’s great. For my home setup, I’ve relied on some model of Kensington-branded trackball device for over a decade; right now, I have a four-button Turbo Mouse 5.0 that I bought in 1998. Believe it or not, it runs over Apple’s long-obscolesced ADB technology, and I use a Griffin iMate ADB-to-USB adapter to get it working with my modern, USB-only Macs.

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A couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet on a brand new Treo 650 smartphone, partly in anticipation of possibly getting assigned to a lengthy stint of jury duty. Imagine how dumb I felt when, in response to the heightened security brought on by the recent bombings in London, the courthouse forbade the entry of mobile phones equipped with cameras. And, naturally, I was selected last week to sit on the jury for a week-plus case. Even the best laid plans of mice and mobile phones, right?

In a way, it was actually a relief to be relieved of my mobile phone, but I can’t deny that it would have made my time away from the office more productive if I’d had my Treo 650 with me. It makes me lament the relative scarcity of Subscriber Identity Module technology, or SIM cards, at least in the United States. The idea that I could pull out a SIM card from my Treo 650 and insert it into a camera-free mobile phone — while also transferring my actual mobile phone number and contact database — is enormously appealing.

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Among the fifty or so potential jurors who reported along with me to the courthouse for jury duty last week, I noticed there was a surprisingly large number who identified themselves as designers. I was in the candidate pool in three jury selection processes, and I heard maybe a dozen people state their occupation as packaging designer, art director, interactive designer, web designer or just plain graphic designer. When it came time for me to answer the judge’s questions, I could only answer sheepishly that I was yet one more of the same.

This is Manhattan, after all, where we have what is probably the densest assembly of design professionals on the planet, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody to find a disproportionate number of design professionals in any gathering. I have a deep and abiding respect for the trade and its art, but every time I hear someone, including me, identify himself or herself as a graphic designer, it makes me cringe a little.

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