Category Archives: Design

The Other Times

The Times of LondonOne question I get from time to time is, “What do you think of so-and-so’s redesign?” People ask me this about many sites of all kinds, but most often, the inquiry regards the redesign of a news site of some sort. As it turns out, my position as Design Director at NYTimes.com suggests that I might have a halfway interesting answer.

To be honest, I don’t like to comment on our competition, mostly because I think it’s inappropriate for me to make remarks that could so easily be confused as an official New York Times view on what another news outlet is doing online. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on what they’re doing, I just think it wouldn’t be productive of me to air my thoughts publicly (catch me in private if you really want to know), even if those opinions are generally positive — and they frequently are, as lots of companies in the online news space are doing exciting work.

I do make an exception, though, for those instances where I think a competitor has really hit it out of the park, and when I like a design enough to be effusively positive about it. One example of this, from last September, is the discussion between Liz Danzico and myself over last fall’s redesign of The New York Post’s site. It’s not without its flaws, but I still stand by my contention that it’s a nearly pitch-perfect expression of that paper’s brand and journalism. Nicely done, I say.

Today I want to talk about another example of a newspaper that, I think, is doing really wonderful work online: The Times of London’s recent redesign beautifully translates (versus simply transferring) its broadsheet aesthetic into something vibrant and native to the Web.

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The Wii as Salesman

WiiSince its debut late last year, there’s been no shortage of adulatory commentary about the Nintendo Wii, which is probably the reason I’ve abstained from writing about it here.

Suffice it to say, I think it’s a home run of a console, a real breakthrough device that has expanded our collective idea of what non-gamers — regular people — can expect from video gaming. I know, because while I’ve long been a huge technology enthusiast, video games had left me cold for about fifteen years. Before the Wii was introduced, I never gave a serious thought to owning a PlayStation or an Xbox.

Now I own a Wii. Or rather, my girlfriend does, because I bought one for her as a gift in February. We play it regularly, and we consistently marvel at its elegant learning curve and high degree of fun. It’s a wonderful example of smart, empathetic design.

But I think I’ve found a flaw in it: it has the wrong form factor.

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Lately at AIGA New York

AIGATime for a quick round-up of matters relating to AIGA New York, of which I am a board member. When last we left our story, I had endeavored to bring more digital design into the fold when it comes to programming the New York chapter’s events. We started last fall with a Jeffrey Zeldman Small Talk which was quite successful, I think.

Things have been a little quiet since, but only because it’s taken some time to cook up some more interesting things. First off, we’re nearing the final stages of a new redesign of the AIGANY.org Web site. You may recall that I sent out an open call for New York-based design studios interested in helping us with this project last August. I got disappointingly few replies to that call, but as it turns out, one of the respondents — a terrific shop called Kind Company — was the perfect fit. Look for a brand new site from them soon.

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Making Your Site Look Like Mine

Even with all the email that I receive, I’m still the kind of person who finds it very difficult not to reply to a message that someone has sent me, especially if the sender has posed a question of some kind. As a result, I often find myself writing familiar replies to queries that come in over and over, from different people. These are generally earnest questions about the way I work, where I draw inspiration from, advice on design, etc.

I’m more than happy to provide answers and to give something back in my small way, but it’s becoming a harder and harder job to pull off. I have a continual backlog of emails flagged for follow-up, and catching up feels like a kind of treadmill sometimes.

So I’m going to start, here, publishing an occasional series of blog posts covering answers to some of those frequently asked questions. When I get around to it, I’ll collate them and post them in an evergreen spot on the site.

The question I want to tackle in this inaugural post is commonly posed something like, “Can I use the design of Subtraction.com for my site?” Variants include, “Can I make a WordPress theme (or similar template) from your design?” or, “I just redesigned my site and it looks a lot like Subtraction.com, do you mind?”

The answer to the first two questions is “no,” and the answer to the last is, “yes.” But with comments.

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Oh Yeeaahh!

Yeeahh!It’s been about a year now since I first started thinking about creating some kind of definitive documentation about my approach to designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool. I spent a few weeks last summer putting a lot of those thoughts down on paper, but nothing much became of them.

Then, a few months ago, in preparation for a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference, I started thinking about how to visually represent the problem-solving process that I go through when designing new interfaces with grid layouts. At first, I started thinking about disassembling and then reassembling one of the designs in my portfolio. But that seemed as if it wouldn’t be quite satisfactory, as I wanted the ability to talk openly about all the different factors that go into a design solution, without worrying about offending colleagues or clients.

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Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

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Stripes Are Out

AdiumOne of my favorite features in the recent 1.0 release of the Adium instant messaging client is a low-level visual alteration in the display of multiple selections in the contacts list. In previous beta releases (which I’ve used faithfully for some time), when you selected a contact in the list by simply clicking, that name would be highlighted with a gradated color bar. It’s nothing unusual. In fact, it’s perfectly in keeping with the Mac OS X look and feel.

If you selected multiple names, though, that same colored, gradated bar would be repeated once for each selection, creating what I found to be an undesirable Venetian blind effect. True, it’s not so visually offensive that I ever thought much about it, but it wasn’t going to win any awards, either.

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Writing and Sizing Twitter

Twitter LogoFor some time now, everyone’s been crazy for Twitter, a kind of hub for digitally checking-in with your friends, where everyone alerts one another of what they’re up to, sometimes as frequently as from moment to moment. If that’s a bit of an obscure description, it’s because there’s nothing else quite like it. Actually, ‘cute’ may be the best and most succinct descriptor I can come up with.

More Web service than Web site, I had a hard time remembering to post the short, punchy updates that are Twitter’s principal currency until the advent of Icon Factory’s free, desktop-based Twitterific utility for Mac OS X.

Twitterific puts a persistent kind of ‘heads up display’ right on your Mac OS X screen so that your friends’ posts are immediately available, and that you can easily add new posts yourself. No more having to load the Web site, or remembering to visit that tab in your browser where you’ve got Twitter.com running.

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Two or Three Things You Know About Me

With apologies to Jean-Luc Godard.

What is it about podcasters that allows them to make what looks like such a difficult medium seem so effortless? Brian Oberkirch is a great example: he’s the brains and voice behind the consistently fascinating and highly professional Edgework podcast, in which he hosts terrific dialogues with some of the best creative minds on the Internet. Last night he interviewed me via Skype at 10:00p EST, and he had the completed podcast episode up and available for download by 10:00a this morning. Wow, how do they do it? Anyway, it was a blast to talk to such a pro; Brian really knows how to run an interview. Have a listen and let me know how badly I stammered.

In other news, please vote for Subtraction.com in the 2007 Bloggies competition, where I’ve been very, very generously nominated for the “Best-Designed Weblog” category. That’s a huge honor, and I’m totally touched. I’m up against some formidable competition — not the least of whom is Veerle. I couldn’t possibly be saddened to lose to someone of that stature, because her blog is so clearly awesome. Still, it would be really nice to win, so if you can spare the time to vote for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Finally, you have two opportunities to come hear me ramble on about design: First, in just a few weeks I’ll be appearing in London at The Future of Web Apps conference (one of Ryan Carson’s many influential Carson Systems projects), where I’ll be talking about everything I know (and some things I don’t) about the topic of “Managing User Interfaces.” I’m pretty excited for that. I’ll also be doing a so-called ‘power session’ at South by Southwest Interactive in March, which will offer up for public appropriation everything I’ve ever appropriated myself about designing with grids. Mark Boulton will be sharing the stage with me, too, to provide the real substance. And of course, I’ll be available for hanging out afterwards, which after all is the real point behind the conference, right? Hope to see you there, or somewhere…

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Illustrate Me for December

Illustrate Me for December 2006I haven’t forgotten our deal: once a month, I ask a designer or illustrator to create artwork to accompany the prior month’s archives, cutting loose in any fashion he or she desires to add a little bit of life to these pages. And in turn you, dear reader, take it in wholly and enthusiastically, even if each piece’s overall awesomeness leaves you too speechless to leave a comment on this blog. For a refresher on this arrangement, you can start at the November 2006 or October 2006 archives and work your way back to see all the wonderful work produced over the past year.

It may be nearly an entire month late, but I’m finally living up to my end of that for my December 2006 archives. (The fault for this truancy is mine entirely, not the artist’s.) This month, I was able to convince my good friend Mike Essl, who is the Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, to contribute what’s turned out to be the most aggro entry yet. It’s a shake ’em up, in-your-face change of pace from what we’ve seen before, and I dig it loads. You can see it here.

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