Category Archives: Design

Work in Progress

AIGANon-disclosure agreements and a general respect for our clients’ privacy generally preclude any mentions of current Behavior projects here, but I’m going to make an exception of a sort for the work we’re currently doing for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Since late last summer, the AIGA has been working on a major overhaul of their core Web sites, and we’ve been privileged enough to take part in redesigning one of the major hubs of aiga.org &#40I’m not going to say exactly which one). We’ve had the pleasure collaborating with my pal Naz over at Weightshift, and to design alongside the likes of Flat, which has made for one of the most interesting design processes I’ve been through. After some hiccups, I think we’re getting close to a really sharp solution, one that draws not only on the work of our aforementioned peers, but also on some of the ideas we started playing with on Gain and the work I’ve been doing here on Subtraction.com. There’s a long way to go, but I’m pretty excited about it.

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Posters for President

PostersIt was a charming idea for The New York Times Magazine to commission nine prominent graphic designers to design posters for one of the nine Democratic candidates vying for the presidential nomination, but charming is exactly the problem. Each designer drew a candidate’s name from a hat, so there was no deliberate synergy in politics or artistic temperament, which may explain why most all of these posters are so flat and lifeless, but it doesn’t explain why, first of all, almost none of these designers really bothered to address the central challenge of the exercise, and second, why a disproportionately high number are all drawn from the same source.

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The Road Runner Ahead

Road RunnerWhen the first previews of Mac OS X’s “Aqua” interface made their way around the Web, I remember a designer friend of mine pronounced them to be “ass.” This was in the midst of a rage for a pixel-based aesthetic that fetishized jaggy fonts and graphics tied intimately to the display limitations of computer monitors.

Many designers then looked down upon any design element that was anti-aliased, shaded or that cast a shadow of any sort, and yet it’s since become apparent that this is the future of interface design. Soon afterwards, Windows XP copied much of the same aesthetic, and Windows applications like the recent version of AOL and new programs like Picasa have whole-heartedly embraced this direction.

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The Art of Crappy Album Covers

Album CoversSomething about “The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were” really rubs me the wrong way. This project, which challenges “100 established graphic and fine artists” to produce album covers for their favorite musicians is like an exercise in small-mindedness, judging from the artists’ generally bathetic selections and the mostly unassuming — and often ridiculously off-base — designs produced in honor of these musicians. Forgetting for a moment the subjective matter of judging these works, I think what really irks me is the fact that fifty of these designs were shown at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, easily the most ridiculous institution I can think of.

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Snapshot of the Photographic Web

My latest assignment at Behavior is developing a portfolio site for a commercial photographer, so I spent a lot of time today looking at various photographers’ Web sites for research. There’s no shortage of these to be found online, which means there is a fairly well-established orthodoxy of ‘best practices’ — slick Flash animation, non-scrolling presentation areas (often in daughter windows, minimal true interactivity, the same three or four major sections — but it also means that many of them are more or less indistinguishable from one another.

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Seriously, Folks

Rarely can one can equate anything that a designer does during the course of a normal workday with a potentially prosecutable offense, but Mitch Mosallem, a former executive vice-president of graphic services at Grey Worldwide, managed to confound that common sense by landing himself in jail for about six years. According to Adweek’s account of the affair: “Mosallem pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with former salesmen at The Color Wheel, a New York-based print production house, to rig bids and overbill Grey clients such as Brown & Williamson on print work.”

It’s weird to see something as basically innocuous as graphic design have such disastrous consequences, isn’t it? What’s so disconcerting about Mosallem’s situation is that it’s almost the stuff of made-for-TV movies, and yet imagining designers in any scenario worth of popular entertainment — whether a life-threatening situation or a weepy melodrama — is generally an exercise in absurdity (all apologies to Mosallem’s family for the very real misfortune they’ve suffered). Take a graphic designer out of the context of graphic design and place that person in a much more serious context — like corporate embezzlement — and it somehow becomes difficult to take him or her very seriously. Why is that? Is there something inherently ridiculous about the job I’m showing up for every day? Should I become a fireman?

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Let Your Logos Loose

LogosEvery company should have a page like this one, in my opinion. I’m saying this because I spent a good chunk of my day today trying to assemble presentable versions of over two dozen logos to appear in a presentation for a client. For three hours, I hunted down replacements for a host of logos swiped from Web sites at small sizes and scaled up to ungainly proportions by the magical un-prettifying powers of Microsoft PowerPoint. It would have made my life much easier to be able to find an officially sanctioned version of, say, the Lycos logo — at a decent scale and against a clean, white background — rather than having to manually retouch the one tucked into the upper left hand corner on the company’s home page.

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Point Break

PowerPointA good chunk of my day today was spent designing an investor presentation for a client using the supremely inaccurate Microsoft PowerPoint — first on Mac OS X and then on Windows XP — a process which is best likened to assembling a model airplane with oven mitts on. There’s a lot left to be desired in all of the Microsoft Office applications, mostly owing to fact that counter-intuitiveness seems to be the suite’s guiding design principle, but I have a special complaint for PowerPoint. Not only does it do a poor job of crystallizing a thorough thought process, but it’s remarkably unfaithful to user intentions.

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Good Day for Muléh

MuléhNew work from Behavior: this evening we launched a redesign for Muléh, (pronounced moo-lay) a D.C.-area retailer specializing in imported, high-end furniture. It’s certainly not the largest scale site we’ve ever done, but it’s a lot of fun launching smaller sites as well — the path from concept to completion is much less circuitous. Muleh.com is almost 100% XHTML Transitional 1.0-compliant, relying entirely on a simple CSS file for layout; we’ll be tweaking things here and there over the next several days to get it up to code. The site is also driven by the endlessly handy Movable Type, which was the perfect light-weight content publisher for a do-it-yourself kind of client who didn’t want to learn a complex CMS. Now I go to sleep.

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