I Wrote a Book

I’ve been in the Bay Area all week for work, and I’ve been meaning to post this news since Monday when I finally made my deadline: my forthcoming book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design” is now officially complete and in the hands of my publisher, New Riders. According to the listing over at Amazon, it’ll ship in early December, so you can pre-order your copy today and have it in time for the holidays. At some booksellers the current pre-order price is over a third off of the cover price, plus if you buy it through any of these links, its humble author gets a little kickback: Amazon (US), Barnes & Noble or Borders.com.

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More on iPad Magazines

I want to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to my post from yesterday, “My iPad Magazine Stand,” in which I laid out my thoughts on why most of the current crop of iPad magazine apps have dim prospects for long-term success. The thoughtful comments left here on the blog as well as the steady stream of RT’ing on Twitter have been terrific. It reminds me how lucky I am to get consistently intelligent and lively conversation in response to what I write. For a blogger, there’s nothing better. (It also makes me glad as heck that I didn’t follow my original instinct; when I finished my first draft of that piece on Monday, I actually decided not to publish it, fearing it was too shapelessly reasoned.)

In fact, I had wanted to jump into the conversation myself earlier but I’m under two deadlines at the moment so life is kind of hectic. Plus, I often like to see comment threads play themselves out without my interference before I engage — I find that the general direction of a conversation evolves more naturally if I hold back from potentially derailing it too early. After following along for a while though, there were a few quick things that came up that I felt I should respond to. So this morning I started adding a comment at the end of the thread but, as it got lengthier and lengthier, I decided to publish it as this blog post instead.

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My iPad Magazine Stand

Because I recently left a job at one of the most prominent publications in the world, people often ask me about my opinions on the cavalcade of publications rushing to the iPad — those apps designed and developed by newspapers and magazines principally to deliver their print content — and the chances I see for their success. So here it is.

To start, I think it’s too early to say anything definitive about whether these apps will become lasting delivery mechanisms for print content and brands. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the iPad and its forthcoming competition, particularly about how user behavior will evolve as these devices become more integrated into daily life. So while I may use some definitive language in this admittedly very long blog post, I freely grant that the future is a mystery to me as much as anyone.

Actually, in conversations with people I know at various publications, I’ve been quite surprised by stories of strong advertiser interest in these apps. Anecdotally, publishers report heavy demand for advertising space, and in some cases apps have sold out of their ad inventory through the end of the year or even further.

That’s an encouraging indicator, but I think it may be more a sign of a bubble than the creation of a real market for publishers’ apps. According to Advertising Age, the initial enthusiasm for many of these apps has dwindled down to as little as one percent of print circulation in the cases of some magazines.

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UX Magazine: Daniel Burka on Gaming Dynamics in User Experience Design

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

An audio interview (and transcript) with the former creative director at Digg who is now working on a gaming startup. By now it’s obvious to everyone that gaming is the next great frontier for user experience design. Burka has some interesting insights to offer on what this means for the field as a whole.

“I think the idea that Web applications are now becoming mature enough that we can start thinking about joy, and about surprise, and making a much more rounded experience than just one that’s usable, I think that’s really exciting… there are a lot of places we’re going to see game ideas put into applications in ways that we’re not going to see it and say, ‘Hey, that’s just like a game.’ So it’s going to be in much more subtle ways and much more disparate ways than building a full integrated game into an application.”

I think that’s exactly right. Read more here.

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J.K. Rowling’s Plot Spreadsheets

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The author and mastermind of the whole Harry Potter universe uses plain old notebook paper and a ballpoint pen to develop the intricate plot structures of her books. Down the y-axis, she lists chapter numbers and a month-based chronology, and along the x-axis she lists various attributes of each chapter like title, events and even prophesies integral to each segment of the book.

I think this is fascinating and I’m so curious to know what other authors use similar, low-fidelity planning methods. Also, it goes to show that even in a multimedia age, most good ideas start with a pen and paper. More about the spreadsheets here.

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MailChimp: Designer Templates

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Here’s another project that I’ve been involved with that went live this week — and this time I actually did some design work on it. Several months ago the awesome mailing list service MailChimp invited several designers to create premium templates for their paying customers. Aside from myself, there are designs from Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Elliot Jay Stocks, Dan Rubin and several others. We each produced three templates: one for a newsletter, one for product announcements and one to promote an event. Here are two of mine:

Have a look at all of them here.

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Design Observer App for iPhone

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Here’s one of the several projects I’ve had my hands in over the past several months: the Design Observer iPhone app debuts this morning over on the App Store. The app lets users download a wealth of the world’s best design commentary on the go. I played a bit part in helping to guide the whole process, but the credit really goes to the good folks at Small Planet Digital in Brooklyn who designed and developed the app in conjunction with Betsy Vardell and (of course) Bill Drenttel over at Design Observer.

You can read more about it here or you can download the app on the App Store for the awesomely low, low price of free.

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