Theory and practice of design for interactive media, methodologies, people, studios and companies, projects, technologies and browsers.
Mon 30 Jun
2008
Muxtape and the pros and cons of minimalism. Plus, a Muxtape from me.
Tue 17 Jun
2008
A little spacing could do Gmail a lot of good.
Mon 07 Apr
2008
Is software better when it lives on the desktop or in the browser?
Wed 30 Jan
2008
First steps to a new publishing platform.
Mon 14 Jan
2008
The shift from analog to digital sensibilities is a two-way street.
Mon 12 Nov
2007
Where design books are found at your local bookstore.
Tue 06 Nov
2007
My embarrassingly not-so-brief reply to recent articles by Armin Vit and Dan Saffer.
Thu 01 Nov
2007
Five clichés I turn to again and again.
Mon 15 Oct
2007
A report from my three speaking appearances this weekend, including slides.
Wed 26 Sep
2007
Exactly why do the icons at this site look the way they do? Because I’m no good at iconography.
Tue 11 Sep
2007
A new Message on today’s anniversary, plus a chance to meet one of our illustrators tonight.
Thu 06 Sep
2007
Finding beauty in the very boring world of Web forms.
Tue 28 Aug
2007
What I did with the painfully slow site search on Subtraction.com.
Sat 25 Aug
2007
A special presentation for a series on China at NYTimes.com.
Thu 16 Aug
2007
The road to digital design had better be fun, or it’ll lead nowhere.
Mon 13 Aug
2007
The New York Times Magazine sneaks in a lesson on graphic design.
Tue 07 Aug
2007
An interview with Blueprint author Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy.
Wed 06 Jun
2007
The nuances of aligning elements on a layout grid for digital design.
Tue 08 May
2007
Web sites should not be made up of what they’re made up of.
Tue 03 Apr
2007
Digital goings on for Spring at the New York chapter.
Tue 27 Mar
2007
First in a series of F.A.Q.’s: can you use the design of this site for your own purposes?
Wed 21 Mar
2007
SXSW Interactive Event Director Hugh Forrest responds to readers on this year’s festival.
Sun 18 Mar
2007
The meat of the grid presentations I’ve been making recently, now available for download.
Thu 15 Mar
2007
How I blew it during one of my SXSW appearances.
The difference between panels and lectures at the fast-growing Web conference.
Tue 13 Mar
2007
We like to think of it as interestingness you can eat.
Fri 09 Mar
2007
Who to favor when designing features.
Wed 07 Mar
2007
Interrupting this program for a word from your blogger.
Wed 07 Feb
2007
Sovereign and auxiliary postures and language as factors in updating my friends on what I’m doing.
Tue 30 Jan
2007
Things about me that seem very important right now.
Mon 29 Jan
2007
Just under the gun, December’s Illustrate Me goes live.
Fri 19 Jan
2007
An annual report and the way the Web used to be designed.
Wed 17 Jan
2007
The new Boxes and Arrows should’ve looked better, and that’s not just my pride talking.
Mon 18 Dec
2006
Looking ahead at all the social networks I’ll join in 2007.
Tue 28 Nov
2006
As I recover from a 24-hour bug, get ready for random.
Fri 03 Nov
2006
Possibly the first of a long line of dumping grounds for links I can’t turn into full posts.
Thu 02 Nov
2006
Taking stock of the attendees at Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent AIGA Small Talk event.
Tue 17 Oct
2006
How Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk went over.
Tue 10 Oct
2006
It’s pointless to try and sell the father of modern Web design, but I try anyway.
Fri 29 Sep
2006
With my friend Liz Danzico, a debate on the merits of the new NYPost.com.
Tue 19 Sep
2006
Come see me at AIGA Baltimore on Thu, and then go see Jeffrey Zeldman at AIGA New York in Oct.
Tue 12 Sep
2006
Art directing the NYTimes.com home page on the fifth anniversary of September 11th.
Thu 24 Aug
2006
A free link aliasing utility I built just for you.
Mon 14 Aug
2006
A wealth of opportunities at the New York chapter of AIGA.
Tue 08 Aug
2006
Now available: expanded, editable feed icons.
Thu 13 Jul
2006
Learning to deal with the sincerest form of flattery from an institution of higher learning.
Wed 12 Jul
2006
Wrapping up my appearance and attendance at An Event Apart New York City.
Tue 27 Jun
2006
The divide between the Web design community and the AIGA.
Wed 14 Jun
2006
The moment for reflectivity is here, or maybe it was fifteen minutes ago.
Mon 05 Jun
2006
Six Apart’s Vox is a beautiful work-in-progress.
Tue 30 May
2006
Trying to make the best of an emerging standard.
Tue 02 May
2006
Looking at the way we collect friends in social networking software.
Mon 01 May
2006
For the May 1st Reboot, Jeff Croft hit a home run.
Thu 27 Apr
2006
I’ll be there as a speaker when the rolling design conference, An Event Apart, comes to New York in July.
Wed 26 Apr
2006
Alternative illustration for mainstream fashion.
Mon 17 Apr
2006
All about the row of images running across the NYTimes.com home page.
Mon 10 Apr
2006
A new links section raises some issues with CSS text control.
Mon 03 Apr
2006
Something’s different at NYTimes.com, and it’s only partly my fault.
Mon 27 Mar
2006
Maybe I’ll go to the I.A. summit next year, but why should I?
Thu 23 Mar
2006
The 37signals book “Getting Real” as a casual manifesto.
Wed 15 Mar
2006
In lieu of live blogging, some after the fact bullets on my SXSW experience.
Sat 11 Mar
2006
Just finished talking about design with a bunch of design-heads.
Mon 06 Mar
2006
Design documentation has fallen a long, long way from its golden age.
Wed 22 Feb
2006
Come see me talk about design at this year’s South by Southwest.
Wed 15 Feb
2006
There are four, count ’em four positions I need to hire at my new place of employment.
Thu 26 Jan
2006
Cut off from POP3 access at work, I’m forced to resort to webmail.
Mon 23 Jan
2006
An unexpected honor from the Annual Weblog Awards.
Wed 21 Dec
2005
Alexey Brodovitch and the impoverished state of Web design.
Mon 07 Nov
2005
James Archer grills me on that one big project I worked on recently.
Mon 10 Oct
2005
When you’re a de facto standard for best practices, what can be improved?
Thu 01 Sep
2005
An in-depth look at the complicated layout grid behind The Onion.
Tue 30 Aug
2005
A complete redesign of The Onion’s Web site, and I’m exhausted.
Mon 22 Aug
2005
Borrow, steal and/or adapt this form that I built.
Fri 08 Jul
2005
Billing customers got you down? Try Blinksale.
Wed 29 Jun
2005
The hardest part of Web design is production, and it can’t be avoided.
Mon 27 Jun
2005
I.D. Magazine gives a nod to Behavior’s design for Vote: The Machinery of Democracy.
Wed 22 Jun
2005
Fireworks is better, but the whole damn category of web design software kind of sucks.
Sun 19 Jun
2005
The Web production traps of working with Adobe Photoshop.
Tue 17 May
2005
Coming to terms with remarkable similarities which may or may not be intentional.
When I wasn’t looking, someone stole my Web site.
Mon 25 Apr
2005
Just because I have the power to create a new weblog, does it mean I should?
Fri 22 Apr
2005
Someone’s ripping off somebody’s design.
Tue 19 Apr
2005
What it might be like to get out of a design studio and into a design department.
Mon 18 Apr
2005
Thoughts on Adobe’s announced acquisition of Macromedia.
Mon 11 Apr
2005
For years, I’ve been nursing a daydream of an extended vacation spent learning to program.
Wed 06 Apr
2005
There’s a great design opportunity in wikis — except it looks like someone else got there first.
Wed 16 Mar
2005
There’s a new process in town, and it’s not all bad.
Mon 14 Mar
2005
On the third day, the second report from SXSW.
Thu 24 Feb
2005
The navigation bar that I worked long and hard to perfect, and then gave up on.
Sat 05 Feb
2005
Behavior has two finalists in this year’s Web Awards at the South by Southwest Festival.
Time is a weird phenomenon when you’re holed up in a week-long series of business meetings.
Wed 26 Jan
2005
What is a blog, weblogs as fiction, and other vague, ill-formed ideas about the medium.
Fri 14 Jan
2005
A trick I use for applying unique CSS rules to individual articles.
Mon 10 Jan
2005
Just to prove I’m not just being a jerk, here’s why I.E. gets second-class treatment.
Thu 06 Jan
2005
Is it good manners to open links in a new window? What the heck do you know?
Sun 02 Jan
2005
Welcome to Subtraction Version 7.0.
Users viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice that says, effectively, that the site won’t work.
Fri 31 Dec
2004
A look at the layout grid behind the version 7.0 redesign.
Mon 15 Nov
2004
What’s good about Delicious Library if the software’s no good?
Tue 09 Nov
2004
Though I’m still cold on print, I’ve really warmed up to Adobe InDesign.
Wed 03 Nov
2004
Here are a few of my favorite electoral maps from around the Web.
Tue 28 Sep
2004
Sometimes you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever.
Fri 24 Sep
2004
How much should information architecture be worth in New York City, circa 2004?
Tue 21 Sep
2004
My Firefox usage is growing every day, thanks to two small tweaks I’ve made to it.
Tue 07 Sep
2004
In the process of redesigning Subtraction.com, and dumping BBEdit or skEdit.
Tue 24 Aug
2004
Behavior helps you get your vote on: announcing the launch of CitizenChange.com.
Thu 19 Aug
2004
Thanks and a very important correction on who’s responsible for that Boxes and Arrows entry.
Wed 18 Aug
2004
After a week with the finalized OmniWeb 5, its very impressive feature set is still imperfect.
Tue 17 Aug
2004
For Internet Explorer users, special accommodations are always necessary.
Mon 16 Aug
2004
How I spent my weekend doing a free redesign and liking it.
Wed 11 Aug
2004
Though I just started using ecto, I already have a complaint.
Tue 03 Aug
2004
Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.
Mon 03 May
2004
Wow, what a bust the last week turned out to be, at least for blogging.
Wed 18 Feb
2004
Behavior launches a brand new AIGA Design Forum.
Wed 11 Feb
2004
Evidence that I attended the Design Guard, where I learned how to make slick UI widgets.
Tue 10 Feb
2004
A new version of the resurgent Mozilla project’s Firebird browser was released yesterday under the new name “Firefox,” which seems to me to be an even dodgier moniker than Firebird, but I guess they had a good reason for the...
Tue 25 Nov
2003
The future looks anti-aliased, smoothed out and drop-shadowed.
Fri 21 Nov
2003
The ghosts of a once-high flying dotcom haunts the Internet still.
Tue 18 Nov
2003
Some links from a day of surfing photographers’s Web sites.
Wed 08 Oct
2003
All you have to do to get this Cisco wireless PC card working is download the software. I swear.
Tue 30 Sep
2003
Lots of stock photo agencies try and kick it; only Veer gets it done.
Tue 23 Sep
2003
Here’s a quick complaint about online ticket purchasing for highly popular events: it has a long way to go.
Mon 22 Sep
2003
How I threw away all of the manuals for my home electronics.
Thu 28 Aug
2003
It’s nice to spend the holiday weekend in New York, bu don’t count on Citysearch.
Thu 26 Jun
2003
The immutability of Amazon.com’s tabs.
Thu 24 Apr
2003
For the sake of posterity, a few technical notes on how I built Subtraction.com version Six.5.
Tue 22 Apr
2003
How redesigning my site has influenced how I write, and how I write has influenced redesigning my site.
Mon 21 Apr
2003
Movable Type is among the best software packages I’ve ever used. It has its shortcomings, but you have to dig deep to find them.
Sun 20 Apr
2003
The winners of the WThRemix contest have been selected, though the entries are a bit disappointing.
Most of the major work on Six.5 is done, including transforming the site from fluid to fixed-width layouts.
Thu 17 Apr
2003
Charged with creating a series of interactive wireframes, I’m wondering if there’s a way I can get out of using Visio.
Tue 15 Apr
2003
The newest public release of Safari features the most elegant implementation yet of tabbed browsing.
Thu 10 Apr
2003
Why is it so hard to find good design talent?
Tue 08 Apr
2003
It used to be that I hated Netscape, but now, after diving into CSS and XHTML, I realize how poor a Web browser Internet Explorer really is.
Fri 28 Mar
2003
Behavior is moving its extranets over to Movable Type, and Im pushing my CSS skills.
Sat 22 Mar
2003
Eric Meyer helps you get your head around Cascading Style Sheets.
Thu 18 Jul
2002
Flash drives me crazy, what with its crappy handling of fonts and what not.