Category Archives: Design

Elevator Trek: The Next Generation

Among many modern innovations that we have at the new Times building , we’re using a fancy method of managing elevator ridership. Rather than having riders push a directional button (up or down) take the first elevator car that arrives — which is what practically every other elevator bank in the world does — ours takes a different, more ambitious tack.

At our building, a rider pushes a button on a keypad before getting on an elevator to tell the system what floor she’d like to go to. The system then directs her to a specific car which, in theory, will also carry other riders going to that same floor. The idea is to get riders to their floors faster by ‘batch processing’ them, so to speak, rather than serially processing them.

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Design Advice for Your Personal Life

There’s a good interview with Erik Spiekermann over at the design blog Ideas on Ideas. Spiekermann, the famous designer, typographer, co-founder of Meta Design and now principal of Spiekermann Partners always has something interesting — often divisive, frequently inspiring — to say about our profession.

There’s one quote from the interview that caught my attention: “I have a bad history of neglecting my private life. One of the main reasons my first wife divorced me was the fact that business always took precedence over anything else. I have often had to leave her and my son in the middle of a vacation and go to see a client.”

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Nudge Your Elements

For those who haven’t come across it already, earlier this year I made a fairly complete summary of my approach to designing online with a grid, presented in conjunction with Mark Boulton at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. There’s one crucial idea buried in that slide show, though, that I felt was important enough to pull out into its own blog post, if only so that I can have a URL to which I can point people when I’m explaining it. Here it is…

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Get Fresh Tonight

Folks, just a reminder: Fresh Dialogue 23 is tonight at the Haft Auditorium at F.I.T.. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this year’s theme is “Designing Audiences,” which will examine how designers and design consumers are both getting all up in each other’s faces and what not.

We’re going to be showcasing some great talent that you’ll be hearing lots about in the coming years0 designer and illustrator Stefan Bucher, Eric Rodenback of Stamen Design and game designer Katie Salen. And, of course, the event will be moderated by the amazing Ze Frank who, if you haven’t seen him in person before, is worth the price of admission alone. There are a few seats left available (Haft Auditorium is relatively huge) so you can show up at the door tonight at 6:30p. Don’t miss it, just don’t!

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Are Design Blogs Killing Design Writing?

Though I posted it to this site’s Elsewhere section, I want to take a moment to point out Rick Poynor’s recent article for Print Magazine, “Easy Writer.” Since its publication, this piece has stirred up a little bit of controversy because it can be fairly easily read as an indictment of design blogs and their allegedly low standards for serious writing and criticism about the practice and art of design. Right or wrong, it’s an important essay that bears a closer look. At the same time, it’s worthwhile to take at least a passing glance at the response to Poynor’s article by D. Mark Kingsley at the design blog Speak Up, too.

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Thinking and Driving

Living in New York, I can easily get by with rarely ever driving a car. Which, when I think about it, really accounts for the fact that I’m not dead.

That’s because I’m afflicted with a particular kind malady that a friend and colleague of mine calls “transportation narcolepsy.” That’s a condition in which, whenever I board a plane, train or automobile, I’ll fall asleep, almost instantly — or at least struggle to stay awake.

It’s the steady, vibrating motion of most mechanized transportation — the hum of a car on the road, the regular propulsion of a train on tracks, the muted rumbling of jet engines on a plane — that knocks me out. I’m surprisingly baby-like; rock me back and forth a little and I’ll pass right out. (It’s compounded by the fact that I rarely get enough sleep to begin with.)

This past weekend, though, I rented a car during my visit to California and discovered that having a G.P.S. unit on my dashboard is a surprisingly effective way to keep me awake. I also discovered a little something about what it takes to hold my attention.

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To Wrap It Up, I’ll Take It

Here’s one of my favorite design innovations ever: there is a subtle, dotted grid pattern printed on the backside of Hallmark gift wrap that serves as a guide as customers cut away the necessary amount to wrap presents. This allows you to shear away an amount of paper that’s much closer to what you actually need to wrap a gift, and to easily do so at more or less right (i.e., ninety degree) angles — in both cases, you save paper, which is good for you, the environment and Al Gore. Everyone wins.

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The Soft Underbelly of Hardware

CanoScan N1240UWhy is the software that ships with digital hardware so frequently bad? When you buy a scanner or a printer, for instance, the software included in the box that allows you to interface with that hardware is, virtually without exception, some of the most poorly designed and difficult to be found anywhere.

I was reminded of that this evening when I spent a fruitless hour trying to reinstall scanning software for a CanoScan N1240U that I’ve had for several years. This software is categorically horrific. Even its most recent versions seem as if Canon is living in a Mac OS 9 world; scanned files cannot be named with spaces, and are restricted to thirty-two characters in length. The interface is hopelessly out of date (even though it was never particularly consistent, even, with Mac OS 9’s look and feel) and difficult to use. What’s more, the software comes in two obscurely named parts: CanoScan Toolbox and Canon ScanGear — can you guess the difference, and intuit which must be installed before the other? Neither could I.

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I’m into Their Early Stuff

Giampietro+SmithI’m flying out to California to see my sister today, but if I weren’t, I’d definitely be going to the Apple Store in SoHo at 6:30p, where Rob Giampietro and Kevin Smith of the design studio Giampietro+Smith will be speaking and taking a few questions.

This is the first installment of Design Remixed, a series of talks developed by AIGA New York in collaboration with Apple (a parallel series exists in San Francisco, produced by that chapter), and there will be an introduction by the inimitable Liz Danzico. Plus, admission is absolutely free with the purchase of any 8-core MacPro! Just kidding, it’s free for everyone, even if you’re not a Mac fan whatsoever.

Rob and Kevin will show a small selection of their many, many beautifully designed projects, going in depth on the motivations, challenges and inspirations that brought about the end results. It’s going to be terrific. This is a young studio with a big future; they’re doing some of the most intelligent work in the field today and they’re barely getting started. If you want to see what the early part of a long career looks like, this is your chance. As you can probably tell, I’m extremely disappointed in my own inability to plan my trips sensibly enough so that I could be there tonight, but alas, I didn’t. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made in life, is all I can say.

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Popularity Contest

Webby AwardsNominations for this year’s Webby Awards are out, and I’m here to shamelessly plug a couple of favorites. First off, NYTimes.com is up for an award in the somewhat odd category of Best Home/Welcome Page. Suffice it to say, I’d encourage everyone to vote for everything Times-related, including our excellently written The Caucus, up for Best Political Blog; DealBook, our indispensable breaking news outlet covering the world of high finance; NYTimes.com Real Estate, our highly addictive index and marketplace for homes you can and can’t afford; and These Times Demand the Times, the companion site to our marketing campaign that debuted last year, which is up for an award in the category of Best Copy/Writing.

But that first award I mentioned for Best Home/Welcome page is the one I’ve got my eye focused on most keenly. It would be a very satisfying affirmation of the work we all do at NYTimes.com to have our front door, so to speak, recognized for all the hard management, debate and tireless tweaking that goes into it; it would be nice to get it, is all I’m sayin’. So please go cast your vote.

Also, I want to cite Design Observer, up for for best Culture/Personal Blog, as another nominee that I think deserves special attention. (It has no affiliation with The New York Times.) Though not without its flaws — I sometimes take issue with its reserved embrace of the conventions of online publishing — it’s nevertheless a remarkable site. The fact that this kind of critical design thinking is published regularly and for free is still hard to believe even though the site is in its fourth year of publishing. Over that time, it’s come to occupy a unique and indispensable position in the blogosphere as a platform for some of the most engaging, most provocative and, crucially, most accessible serious design discourse around. They have my vote.

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