Category Archives: Design

Deliciously Indulgent

Delicious LibraryOver at Ars Technica, there’s a terrific review of Delicious Library, the hotly-tipped new media collection management software just released last week. It’s actually a fantastic review, the kind that manages to give a larger context to its subject, and shows how Delicious Library is a testament to the dramatically different mindset of Macintosh programmers. I wish I could find the time and the skill to write that kind of review, but in fairness to myself, John Siracusa’s many other articles for Ars Technica clearly demonstrate that he has a singular and probably God-given talent for ambitious, far-reaching essays on technology. Some geeks get all the breaks.

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Picture Books

Last night I took about 180 snapshots with my new Nikon D70, trying to get a handle on the way the thing works. It was a blast; I was up until 2:00a tinkering, experimenting and poring through books. The books themselves have been a revelation, too. On Naz’s advice, I went looking for an older photography reference that would help me get up to speed on the basics, rather than something brand new off the shelf at a mega-sized bookseller.

He said there were some brilliant layouts to be found among the forgotten photo texts out there, and he was right. I’m enamored with one that my girlfriend took out for me from her school library: the first edition of Barbara London’s “A Short Course in Photography.” It’s a masterful example of traditional design in the modernist school, featuring a page grid executed with a gritty, low-level genius. Though I have a bias towards all things digital, there is a warmth to this book — the black ink on these pages is blotchy and malformed, and the typography and diagrams all lack the inhuman precision and passionless perfection in their edges that can be had effortlessly with today’s design and production techniques. Sometimes it’s nice to see that.

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InDesign We Trust

Adobe InDesignThe past two days, I’ve been spending more time than usual in Adobe InDesign. While I’m still no fan of designing for print (or the process of it, anyway), I’m really finding that I enjoy using InDesign as a tool. Maybe it’s because I kind of grew up using QuarkXPress, but I find the mode of thinking that a layout program like InDesign uses to be very intuitive. The program’s style sheets feature is a good example; defining and using these text-styling rules is exceedingly simple and logical. It makes we wish that there was a way of manipulating Cascading Style Sheets similarly. Of course, CSS is far more powerful a medium than InDesign’s style sheets, but there must be a way to balance its raw power with InDesign’s brand of plainspoken logic.

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Do I Have to Draw You a Map

MapsSetting aside this awful feeling for a moment: here are a few of my favorite electoral maps — from an information design perspective, not from an electoral math perspective — from this Election Day just past. It’s mildly interesting how the various news outlets and independent sources each tackled the challenge of visually assessing how the country voted. I say “mildly” because as a design problem, the electoral college is almost banal in its limitations. There are only so many ways you can show this data.

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The Shadow Knows

Shadow of GuiltSometimes, in the course of fulfilling obligations to friends or family, you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever, not in a hundred years. Like, you might find yourself somehow agreeing to build a little Web site for your girlfriend’s uncle, who is a just-published novelist trying to promote the recent release of his first ever book, a small-press thriller about murders and arson and suspense and stuff. And that book might feature a cover design which you yourself never would have art directed, whose typography and illustration style might be pretty far afield from the visual style and design rules you yourself prefer. It happens, you know. But you make the best of it and try to deliver as competent and effective a product as you can, something that does its job well, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your own particular interests. And then you just launch it, like I did today with ShadowofGuilt.com… and you take a little bit of pleasure in knowing that, at the very least, you helped out someone you know personally, rather than a huge megacorporation, for a change. What’s more, it’s nice knowing that the whole thing (all three pages of it!) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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Building the New This

Subtraction LogoOkay, so fifteen months later, I’ve begun a major redesign for Subtraction.com. I’m pretty satisfied with the progress, though I admit it’s going slow enough that I’ll be surprised if it’s all done by Halloween. The new overhaul will maintain essentially the same information architecture that you see here from a site and page perspective, but I’ve made some usability improvements so that it will be easier to read, which has become increasingly important to me as I get older — I’ve started that inevitable old codger’s shift away from a young designer’s fascination with teeny, tiny text.

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Citizen Daddy

Citizen ChangeA few weeks ago I mentioned that Behavior helped Sean “P. Diddy” Combs launch Citizen Change, his voter registration initiative with an extensive, Flash-based multimedia show that accompanied his press conference. Today, I’m happy to say that we’ve just re-launched CitizenChange.com too. It just went live, like, this morning — after a ton of blood, sweat and tears from our design team (I wasn’t a part of it, but it was easy to see that those folks worked their tails off, and with terrific results). Go check it out.

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Talking Points on Keynote

KeynoteI’m beginning to think that I’ve given up the world of Web design for a career in business presentation graphics. For five weeks now, I’ve been making a regular Friday presentation using Keynote, Apple’s would-be PowerPoint killer. By now, I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of the ins and outs of both this program and its Microsoft-published competitor. Everyone knows how frustrating PowerPoint can be. But switching to Keynote is more like trading in a bag of a hundred problems for a bag of about fifty — it’s an improvement, but it’s not a solution.

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New Boxes, Same Arrows

Boxes and ArrowsWell-respected online information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows announced an open redesign contest last month, the deadline for which was extended until just this morning. I found this out last Friday, when my Behavior colleague, Chris Fahey, suggested that we try to put together a submission.

Initially, I resisted the idea of taking part in this, mostly because of all the work that it was going to involve. The I.A. documents they provided were appropriately high-level for an audience of devoted, would-be contestants ready to finesse every little detail for themselves. For me, on the other hand, they were sufficiently lacking in detail that I knew it would take me a huge chunk of my weekend to sift through all the brain challenges required to get a coherent set of comprehensives designed.

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