Game On

Fri 14 Nov 200805:31 PM

Wanted: Trashy Design Magazines

Wed 8 Oct 200811:09 PM

The mailman delivered the latest copy of Eye Magazine to my door last week. As design periodicals go, it’s hard to beat Eye for being both historically illuminating and contemporarily challenging; few continually published design magazines are as well-written issue after issue as is this one. It’s edited and printed in the United Kingdom, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so uniformly gorgeous, too — the British take their design press a bit more seriously than we do. That also partly explains why subscription issues arrive neatly packed in a protective cardboard sleeve. These magazines are so exquisitely printed (and priced) that readers tend to cherish each issue.

None of which is to belittle American publications. Among others, I also subscribe to the domestically edited and produced Print Magazine, which despite its name, had something of a renaissance under the remarkable, decade-long stewardship of Joyce Rutter Kaye that concluded only a few months ago. Print, which has always set a high standard for design journalism, had for decades opted for sobriety in its presentation. To be fair, the magazine was always beautifully designed. But in recent years especially it has approached its page layouts with a palpable freshness and vigor, and now regularly looks spectacular. When my copy arrives in the mail, I tend to leaf through it eagerly but gingerly.

Graphic Design Goes to the Games

Thu 21 Aug 200811:32 AM

Fuwa, Mascot for the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The Unbearable Lightness of Art Supplies

Tue 19 Aug 200802:29 PM

There has been some changing of the seating chart at my office recently, and in the process, I’ve seen some of my colleagues — art directors on the print side of the organization — moving the contents of their flat files back and forth along with their seats. Watching them do this in the background, I realized that since we first took up residence in our our new building last year, I’ve barely paid attention to those file cabinets, which store critical samples of printed pages and reference material in wide, shallow drawers. But for a print designer, they’re critical tools.

In fact, I realized, it’s been years since I’ve paid attention to or felt the need for flat files at all, to say nothing of ‘traditional’ art supplies of any kind. This is what it means to practice design on the Web, I guess. On the digital side of the business, we’re admittedly still a long way away from a paperless office, but we’re getting there. I rarely ever print out my own work these days, and I’ve made it a habit to throw away nearly every single piece of paper handed to me by colleagues before the end of that same day — and I can’t recall a single time that practice has made it harder for me to do my job the next day.

That Old Time Software

Fri 15 Aug 200810:35 AM

Not long ago I downloaded a new productivity application that recently emerged from a prolonged beta period. Finally, the 1.0 version had arrived, and I was eager to get my hands on it, play around with its features and see what it had to offer. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

To be fair, this application, which shall remain nameless, had clearly been designed with great attention to detail. Its interface is not unattractive and its fit and finish is commendable; you wouldn’t be remiss in regarding it as a completely professional product.

However. I kept staring at it, and kept clicking on interface widgets and pushing buttons, but the more I explored, the less likely it seemed that I would ever really master it. I’m sure that its workflow makes sense, that with some investment in time, a user could realize some significant benefits from it. I just had a hard time thinking that one of those users would be me.

Highly Demographic Language

Tue 12 Aug 200801:14 PM

In a recent blog post, my friend Chris Fahey raises the question of whether or not an interface designer is a salesman. In a way, he’s tackling more seriously a subject that I wrote about three years ago in a post titled “Window Dress for Success,” in which I only half-jokingly inferred possible marketing motivations from the then-proliferating varieties of chrome in Mac OS X applications.

In his post, Chris cannily argues that it’s the designer’s job not only to create a solution that is easy to use, but also to create a solution that looks easy to use. He writes:

“A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).”

With some qualifications, this statement about the role of designers — and especially, from where I sit, the role of interface designers — strikes me as insightfully true. As I somewhat cheekily suggested in that June 2005 post, it’s my opinion that interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.

The Message Comes in Medium

Mon 23 Jun 200811:15 AM

Lost in Spacing

Thu 19 Jun 200801:15 AM

It’s always surprising to me the things I continue to learn about the delicate art of presenting design ideas. Yesterday, for instance, while proving my theory about the power of spacing in interface design, it was made very clear to me that messing with email interfaces is a bad idea.

Or, at least, it became apparent that, as a way of demonstrating how a more discerning application of negative space might improve Gmail, altering the number of email messages presented in the interface created an unnecessary distraction. By adding more vertical height to each message in the list, I effectively pushed a small but significant number of messages below the screen’s ‘fold.’

That particular change proved too contentious for many readers, which makes sense. People get very attached to applications as integral to their daily lives as Gmail, and any suggestion of reducing its efficiency — even if other gains are offered — are unlikely to be met kindly. Changing that variable, for better or worse, was not the point of the argument I was making; I should have known better to have avoided it, but of course all things are clearer in hindsight.

Spacing Is Everything

Tue 17 Jun 200809:45 PM

If it’s true that in comedy, timing is everything, then in design, I say that spacing is everything. Or at least it counts for a heck of a lot. This is especially true for Web design, and especially true again for the design of interfaces, which is what the bulk of Web design boils down to. The number of pixels separating elements in an interface plays a critical and frequently underestimated role in the orderliness of that interface.

This is an idea that nags at me all the time, mostly because I see so many instances when a more nuanced attention to spacing could benefit a design at virtually zero cost. And it ’s something that comes to mind especially when I look at the school of Web design that prizes functionality so highly that the deprecation of form becomes a virtue. The argument over whether usability does or does not have to come at the cost of aesthetics is so contentious and frequently debated that I won’t go into great depth with it here. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe they’re mutually exclusive. They better not be, anyway, because that’s what my whole livelihood is based upon.