Category Archives: Web Design

Four to Six Weeks

ExpressionEngineAnybody still paying attention to what blog publishing system I’m using here at Subtraction.com probably figured that my previously mentioned intentions to switch to ExpressionEngine have foundered. Not so. Behind the scenes, I’ve been erratically but intently working on porting the entirety of this site over to that more modern publishing system.

Between all of the other interests competing for my free time, it’s taken a lot longer than I would have liked, but it’s on its way. How long will it be before it launches? Well, what’s that that they say when you need to order a part from the warehouse? Four to six weeks. Or something.

Aside from just being busy all the time, what’s taking so long is that, as I’ve rebuilt the functionality of this site (with invaluable contributions from EE expert Adam Khan), I’ve also been re-thinking a lot of the way the site works. I’m not changing the basic look at all; this is not a redesign so much as a reworking, and casual visitors may not notice much of a difference at all.

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Email As a Bridge or a Wall

People who know a lot more about the future than me tend to predict that someday soon that we’ll use software through voice command or even through dimensional gesturing in the style of “Minority Report.” Maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t. But my favorite alternative — or rather supplement — to the windows, mouse and pointer paradigm of controlling software is here today and it’s underrated: messaging. SMS on my phone, for sure, but definitely email.

Like most people, I’m sure, I spend the majority of my day in front of my email program. So when I can do something outside of the natural capable boundaries of email using that same, highly familiar interface, it feels like a real win.

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And Muxtape for All

MuxtapeIn some respects, I think Muxtape, the popular site for creating so-called “MP3 mixtapes” is a triumph. Ostensibly a tool for creating personal playlists from nominally legal music tracks, it is in actuality very much a piece of social software. Except that the traditional trappings of social software — buddy lists, presence management, intra-membership messaging, etc. — are almost entirely missing. In a sense, it’s a kind of anti-Facebook, and in that functional asceticism, it’s really kind of a marvel.

On the other hand, minimalism has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. To be sure there’s real beauty to Muxtape’s enormous and simple music playback interface — its single-tasking posture may yet turn out to be as iconic as the original Google home page — but it’s also frustrating.

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Spacing Is Everything

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.

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Online Apps Turn Me Offline

In my search for some kind of memory-enhancing, panacean note-keeping application, I’ve had to confront again what is becoming an increasingly common conundrum: do I want a solution that lives on the desktop or on the network?

Despite the significant leaps forward seen in online applications in recent years — Google Docs and the 37signals suite of apps, to name just a few — I still find most of this stuff slower, less efficient and less integrated with the way I prefer to maintain my own personal information ‘cloud’ than desktop software.

Given the choice, I’ll almost always opt for the native speed of an application written in Cocoa, the ability to call it up with suddenness and satisfaction via Quicksilver or from the Mac OS X Dock, and seamless, peer-level cohabitation with the data stored inside my Mac OS X Address Book, iCal other local data resources.

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Revving Up ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngineNot long after I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had that feeling familiar to most everyone who similarly relocates: “This is great. Why didn’t I do this sooner?” Once you’ve given up today’s Manhattan and its generally not-worth-it hassles, you understand how much more livable life is across the East River.

Well, I’ve got something like that feeling again right now, as I take the very first steps towards porting this site from Movable Type over to ExpressionEngine. (This is part of my recently stated desire to resolve the general slowness on this site.) It’s a daunting transition — especially for me, someone with more ambition than free time or technical facility.

To my surprise however, given a few short hours, I’ve gotten much further in getting ExpressionEngine to replicate my existing functionality than I thought I could. I literally started with zero knowledge of the software at the beginning of the week, and with less than six hours’ worth of labor, I’ve hobbled together a rough but serviceable, EE-powered re-creation of Subtraction.com.

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High-Fidelity Stereoscope

U2 3DYou could describe me as a somewhat reluctant fan of the Irish rock band U2. I was a big fan as a kid, but these days I only sporadically enjoy their music, and as they get older the band members’ penchant for dressing like dads just escaped from a Hot Topic store makes me cringe more and more. Still, I buy every new album they put out. I don’t really listen to them all that much, but I buy them. It’s something I do mostly out of habit and some vague idea that I may as well own all of their albums; I bought my first U2 record (cassette tape, actually) when I was fifteen or sixteen, I think. Oof. That’s twenty years of forking money over to these clowns.

Last night I threw another sixteen dollars on that pile when I went to see “U2 3D” at the IMAX theater at Lincoln Plaza. As an entertainment product, this movie is exactly as advertised: the Irish rockers filmed in concert, projected in three dimensions hugely against IMAX’s signature concave screen.

It’s not an unentertaining film, I’ll admit, though there was certainly more than enough of Bono’s hammy gestural histrionics to make me glad it only ran about ninety minutes long. I guess it helped that I knew all of the songs, too, but the real attraction — the only reason I was tempted enough to travel all the way uptown on a Monday for it — was the buzz I’d heard about this movie being a visual breakthrough.

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The Story So Far

Last year, I spent a good deal of time talking about how print designers often fail to realize that the shift from analog to digital media also represents a shift from narrative to behavior — a fundamental change in the language and purpose of graphic design. That’s still an important concept, I think.

But after looking at portfolio after portfolio over the past two years while recruiting talent for an employer that still places a high value on narrative, I should shade this argument further: the future of this profession is not predicated simply on a one-way shift from the sensibilities of analog to the sensibilities of digital.

It’s a two-way street. Granted, the majority of the shift is incumbent upon the analog-minded. But there is a tremendous amount of storytelling that needs to be told in digital media, too, and a tremendous amount to be recovered from the craft of art direction, a discipline that is seemingly stranded in the analog world.

My complaint, right now, is that the majority of storytelling that happens on the Web is based in the interactively rich environment made possible by Flash. Flash has its uses, and I have no particular disdain for the medium. But its unique value is becoming less essential over time even as native tools like CSS and JavaScript become more capable.

Actually, I should rephrase this argument: not enough Web standards-minded designers are thinking narratively in the way that our Flash-fluent colleagues are. The vast majority of practitioners of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript are almost exclusively dedicated to behavioral work — interfaces and templates. There’s very little narrative design being done with these tools, and that’s a shame.

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Our Books, Our Shelves

Even though it’s only November, I’ve been sitting around thinking about next year, specifically about what I’m going to do with it. As I indicated recently, my plan is to scale back on the number of speaking engagements I’ll do in 2008. Partly, I want more time at home and less time at the mercy of the airlines. And partly my plan is to spend at least some of that time writing a book. (I’m nervous even saying that here because who knows if I really have it in me to actually finish writing a book, to say nothing of getting it published.)

What kind of book, you might ask? Well, I’ve decided that it’s not going to be a book about typographic grids, in spite of what modest sums of notoriety I’ve achieved with regard to that subject. Beyond what I’ve committed to blog posts and extemporized at conferences so far, I just don’t think I have much more to say about grids. They’re a valuable and fascinating tool for design, but I feel that, for now anyway, I’ve reached an upper limit on my ability to add to the discourse.

What other subject, then, for this so-called book I’m allegedly planning to write? It’s something that’s still germinating, so it would be premature to go into detail on it now. If and when I get further down the road with it — and if I get a sufficient, confidence-building head of steam — I fully expect to be drafting at least parts of the manuscript in public view on this blog. So not to worry; if it ever becomes a real thing and not just me talking aimlessly, then you’ll get more posts about the book than you care to read about right here.

However, without going into too much detail, I can offer one high-level idea of what kind of product I’m going for: it should be the kind of book that simplifies the shopping experience at your local Barnes & Noble bookseller.

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Something’s Missing in Web Design

Two mildly controversial and seemingly unrelated blog posts were written last week that you shouldn’t miss. First, on Tuesday, Armin Vit asked “Where are all the ‘landmark’ Web sites?” over at Speak Up. His contention is that we have yet to see examples of Web design in the fashion of “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster; Paul Rand’s IBM logo; Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters; Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map; [and] Kyle Cooper’s ‘Seven’ opening titles.” In short, Armin claims that the practice of design online has yet to produce its own canon of seminal and iconic works that can stand their own in the history books of the profession.

Then, over at our very own A Brief Message on Thursday, interaction designer extraordinaire Dan Saffer argues that making stuff is better than making stuff up. “It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur,” he asserts. “Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself.” It’s a provocative argument that seeks to let a little air out of the notion that designers have more to offer as thinkers and planners than as craftspeople.

Naturally, I have an interest in pointing folks to Dan’s excellent article because of my involvement as publisher at A Brief Message (keep clicking on those ads, folks). But I refer to it here not just out of self-interest, but also because I think that, though uncoordinated, both of these posts actually tackle the same issue from different vantage points. Or, rather, I should say that Dan’s post, in a roundabout way, provides an answer to Armin’s post.

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