Nudge Your Elements

Wed 6 Jun 200707:06 PM

For those who haven’t come across it already, earlier this year I made a fairly complete summary of my approach to designing online with a grid, presented in conjunction with Mark Boulton at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. There’s one crucial idea buried in that slide show, though, that I felt was important enough to pull out into its own blog post, if only so that I can have a URL to which I can point people when I’m explaining it. Here it is…

Pages Are the Problem

Tue 8 May 200708:01 PM

The names we give things can be so important because they can cause so much havoc. The fact that we call the basic organizing unit of a Web site a “page,” as in “Web pages,” has made the lives of Web designers immeasurably more challenging, and it’s a disservice to those coming to the Web from the world of print, too.

I’m not going to propose an alternative to the term page here — I may as well tape a “kick me” sign on my back if I’m going to venture in that kind of folly. I just thought it would be useful for me to articulate the confusion that I’ve seen that’s arisen from this particular terminology.

The Other Times

Wed 11 Apr 200701:04 AM

Lately at AIGA New York

Wed 4 Apr 200701:17 AM

Time for a quick round-up of matters relating to AIGA New York, of which I am a board member. When last we left our story, I had endeavored to bring more digital design into the fold when it comes to programming the New York chapter’s events. We started last fall with a Jeffrey Zeldman Small Talk which was quite successful, I think.

Things have been a little quiet since, but only because it’s taken some time to cook up some more interesting things. First off, we’re nearing the final stages of a new redesign of the AIGANY.org Web site. You may recall that I sent out an open call for New York-based design studios interested in helping us with this project last August. I got disappointingly few replies to that call, but as it turns out, one of the respondents — a terrific shop called Kind Company — was the perfect fit. Look for a brand new site from them soon.

Layers Cake

Mon 2 Apr 200711:05 PM

One sure sign that you’re getting old is when you notice yourself stubbornly refusing to move up to newer versions of your software. For instance, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop version 7.0 more or less since it was first released. And though this version was released five years ago in 2002, and though I own a full version of Adobe Creative Suite ( newer, but no spring chicken, itself), it’s still the version that I prefer to launch every time I sit down to work in front of my Intel-based iMac.

I realize that, compared to more recent editions, version 7.0 is quite feature-limited. But in some ways, I prefer those limitations, especially its inability to nest layer folders. I know, that’s a little nuts, but I find that being restricted to a single level of layer folders helps me keep all the constituent layers in my files organized. I’m the kind of obsessive nut who likes to properly name every layer in my files, and to keep them neatly organized; I’ve found that nesting those folders works against that.

Most of all, I stick to Photoshop 7.0 because it’s fast. It boots up almost as quickly on my aging 12-in. PowerBook G4 as it does on my much newer, much faster iMac, which lets me work on the same files whether I’m at home or at work. I’ve long considered the secret to using Adobe software to be to run older versions on newer hardware, and this is my primary evidence that doing so works.

Making Your Site Look Like Mine

Tue 27 Mar 200711:02 PM

Even with all the email that I receive, I’m still the kind of person who finds it very difficult not to reply to a message that someone has sent me, especially if the sender has posed a question of some kind. As a result, I often find myself writing familiar replies to queries that come in over and over, from different people. These are generally earnest questions about the way I work, where I draw inspiration from, advice on design, etc.

I’m more than happy to provide answers and to give something back in my small way, but it’s becoming a harder and harder job to pull off. I have a continual backlog of emails flagged for follow-up, and catching up feels like a kind of treadmill sometimes.

So I’m going to start, here, publishing an occasional series of blog posts covering answers to some of those frequently asked questions. When I get around to it, I’ll collate them and post them in an evergreen spot on the site.

The question I want to tackle in this inaugural post is commonly posed something like, “Can I use the design of Subtraction.com for my site?” Variants include, “Can I make a WordPress theme (or similar template) from your design?” or, “I just redesigned my site and it looks a lot like Subtraction.com, do you mind?”

The answer to the first two questions is “no,” and the answer to the last is, “yes.” But with comments.

A Hugh Influence

Wed 21 Mar 200711:11 PM

There was such an encouragingly substantive response to my post about the apparently problematic quality differential between panels and lectures at South by Southwest Interactive this year that I felt compelled to do something useful with them. Specifically, I felt that I should share the comments with Hugh Forrest, the indefatigable and remarkably responsive Event Director who somehow manages to move mountains to make the festival happen year after year.

It only seemed appropriate to do so, because Hugh, based on my limited contact with him, has always seemed to be a good guy open to reasonable feedback on how to improve the festival that he’s been involved with for years. So I sent him an email pointing him to the post on Sunday night and received a lengthy and very thoughtful response the very next day.

We exchanged a few more emails, debating the ideas in my original post as well as those from the comment thread, and I found myself in the opposite position from where I’d been before: having shared Subtraction readers’ comments with Hugh, I now wanted to share Hugh’s comments with readers. So, with his consent, I’m going to excerpt a few of his remarks from the email thread here.