Category Archives: Design

Square Dancing

Five BoxesHerewith, five boxes drawn with Microsoft PowerPoint on a document Slide Master. All of the boxes are .25-in. square, according to the program’s Format AutoShape dialog box, which allows users to specify these values precisely — in theory. The boxes are also all spaced exactly a quarter of an inch apart from one another and they all reside exactly .3-in. from the top edge, again using Format AutoShape.

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Ecto Plurbius Unum

EctoAlways late to the party, I finally took out some time last night to install the various libraries on my server that make it possible for me to run ecto, the desktop weblog editor and management program. It’s nice, very slick and I can see why it’s gained such a devoted following among advanced weblog authors; it sports some features — like its very handy Upload Manager — that vastly simplify working with Movable Type. Already it looks well worth its US$17.95 price tag, in spite of the fact that its globe icon is so generic I sometimes find myself staring at my Dock, not able to focus enough to identify it.

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Flirtations with Fame

Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.

First, the prolific Mike Rundle has posted an interview with me at Business Logs, in which you can learn more about my secret origins, recent Web standards stirrings at Behavior and the future of weblogs as we know them (caveat emptor). Combined with a dollar bill, the answers I give to Mike’s questions may not get you more than a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth poking around the Business Logs Web site, where they’re trying to use weblogs to bring real business benefits to the organizations that are forward-thinking enough to capitalize on this still-evolving medium.

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New Work from Work

I’m still looking for that balance between feeling like I’ve accomplished a good day’s work at the office and feeling calm, relaxed and rested. I can’t seem to get there, but they say journey and reward are one and the same. Along the way, we’ve been pretty busy over at Behavior, and while my own head has been down and focusing on my own projects and challenges, I’ve been negligent about posting about some of the other stuff we’ve been doing.

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Face the Press

Someone over at the Gray Lady just discovered typography, if David Dunlap’s piece on the 9/11 memorial cornerstone is any indication. Unexpectedly, the article devotes 1,000 words to discussing the use of Gotham — a beautiful typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and distributed by The Hoefler Type Foundry — as the principle face for the cornerstone. The photo caption is unintentionally hilarious: “Gotham… is distinguished by the uniformity in the width of its strokes and the absence of embellishments like serifs.” Really!

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Hell Is Other Liberals

Hell Yes!If you were looking for a thought-provoking opportunity to “investigate how graphic design, visual persuasion, and the media will influence the 2004 election,” you would probably have walked away disappointed after this evening’s “Hell Yes!” event, sponsored earnestly by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

To their credit, the organization made it perfectly clear that the panel session would be biased in favor of liberal politics and, specifically, against the policies and track record of the Bush White House. So in that sense, I should have had lowered expectations for the content of the presentations, but I still felt like the whole affair had a sour taste to it.

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The Design of Everyday Briefings

Presidential Daily BriefingsGreg Storey posted an interesting and thoughtful exercise on information design last month over at Airbag.ca, in which he suggests that a better sense of design might have benefitted the Bush administration in August of 2001, when they apparently underestimated — or wantonly disregarded — a series of warnings that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had intentions to attack the United States.

His post is altogether earnest and well-intentioned, and I applaud him for it. The point he’s making is a good one that designers have been trying to get the world at large to understand — and with increasing seriousness — over the past few years: good design can have monumental impact on the effectiveness of information. Still, I can’t help but be a smartass about it.

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Bookkeeping for Dummies

QuickBooksMy award for the worst interface in a best-selling, market-leading software application goes to Intuit’s perversely inelegant QuickBooks. This bookkeeping program is more or less ubiquitous among small-businesses, in spite of its opaque and unfriendly design, which I find to be really amazing because it’s truly, profoundly awful. As the finances at Behavior have gotten more and more complicated, I’ve been finding myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to figure out QuickBooks’ hidden corners and idiosyncratic organizational structure. For someone who has only a cursory understanding of accounting, I find that almost nothing I click on behaves as I expect it to, and it provides no clear metaphors for understanding how to navigate through a company’s finances. Even fundamental behaviors like scrolling and searches are unpredictable, having been half-heartedly implemented or incompetently reinvented by Intuit’s software designers. I just can’t say it enough: this program sucks.

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Board to Death

phpBBFor several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

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