Category Archives: Web Design

The Many Crimes of Internet Explorer

Internet ExplorerSome people just think that my efforts to warn Internet Explorer users that the fidelity of this site is compromised when viewed in that Web browser is just a showy way of picking a fight. Maybe a little. But I’m being genuine when I say that the way Subtraction.com renders in I.E. is maddeningly imperfect, and I just haven’t the time or patience really to try and troubleshoot the problems. What I do have time for is a nitpicking catalog of those imperfections.

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Miss Manners Guide to Opening Links in New Windows

New Window IconAt work we had a debate late in the day today about whether the links to projects in our portfolio should, when clicked upon, open up in a new browser window. My feeling is that, no, they should not, citing various usability recommendations against the practice (more here and here), and also the fact that the way the Web is evolving, popping up new windows is a practice most often used in hard-sell situations (insert links to any given hard core pornography site here).

Personally, it annoys the heck out of me when a Web site opens up a new window, as I think it’s bad manners and has the feel of amateurishness. But I admit that viewpoint could be just a combination of a skewed, blog-centric view of the Web (few if any weblogs open links in any new windows, by my count) and my own personal capacity for stubbornness.

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New, Improved Original Flavor!

Version 7.0This is it, the site is launched. As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll send out an email announcement and update the feeds so the new posts will start showing up in news readers. Not everything works perfectly yet, but it’s mostly here. If you’ve been patiently waiting for this day, I thank you for coming back.

Things have changed around here fairly dramatically, but I’ve tried to keep some sense of the old design. For comparison, here’s a post from last year with the Six.5 design, and here it is again with the version 7.0 design. Different but the same, right?

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love I.E.

Internet ExplorerUsers viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice just above the navigation that says, effectively, that that browser won’t “display this site quite as it was intended.” This is obnoxious, I know, but when I made a game plan to produce this redesign, I deliberately chose not to take too seriously the way it would look in Microsoft’s still-dominant Web browser.

This is partly because it’s loads easier to design for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and OmniWeb, and with so little time with which to make the redesign a reality, I decided to save myself an additional 20% heartache and pretty much ignore IE.

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Grid Computing… and Design

The layout grid I used for Subtraction Six.5 was improvised and inconsistent — I hobbled it together without much consideration or foresight, more interested in getting something finished than building something that would continue to make sense as I got more and more serious about the writing I post here. Over time, by virtue of repeated use, I became increasingly and lamentably invested in its tremendous shortcomings. When you make fairly liberal use of illustrations in your posts, you essentially wed yourself to the particulars of the CSS you’ve established, creating graphics of a certain width or ordering content in a particular method. It works in the short term, but it presents problems when you sit down to redesign.

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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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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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Inflation Architecture

At a somewhat casual information architecture event put on by NYC-CHI at Remote Lounge on the Bowery last night, I heard the featured speakers — a recruiter, an “information design consultant,” information architecture managers from Organic, Avenue A/Razorfish and Hot Jobs — give their views on ‘What’s going on with I.A. in New York.’ Their comments were fairly illuminating, but I balked when one of them mentioned that he’d seen some under-qualified I.A.s charge as much as US$125 per hour and some over-qualified I.A.s charge as little as US$75 per hour. The last bit, he said almost in a scoffing manner, and the audience, twenty or thirty I.A.’s from all over the city, seemed to nod in agreement — US$75 is way too little.

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