Keynote for Print

Here’s how much I like Apple’s Keynote presentation software. I just used it the way I might have used QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign: to create a document intended not for the screen or projection, but for printing, and being held in one’s hand.

The document is my final, outgoing treasurer’s report as I finish up my two-year term as a board member for AIGA New York. (My work isn’t quite finished yet, though, as I’m moving on to the national board.) When I started to create the report, I originally tried to use InDesign and Illustrator, but the prospect of using those lumbering programs seemed slow and tedious compared to Keynote, where all of the charting and graphing tools are built right into the application and are lightning fast.

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Great Numbers, Not So Great Design

Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish — a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist — maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.

Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical. For design to work as a business, it almost always has to scale to some degree. The smaller the scale, though, the more efficient the practice of design; transmitting ideas among a small number of people is much more effective than transmitting them among a large number.

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Please Don’t Hold Our Job Board Against Us

Are you a designer in need of a job? Well, we need designers at the NYTimes.com design group, almost as bad as we need a new interface for our job board. Sometimes the board works, and sometimes it doesn’t, so when I post this link to a description for a position I need to fill soon, you’ll have to forgive me if happens to not be functioning properly when you click on it. Enterprise software is like that.

Okay, to be honest the board is terrible. But that shouldn’t reflect poorly on the job opportunity — the opportunity is a really great one. We’ve got a really, really terrific team and we’re doing fascinating, challenging and very rewarding work. And we also happen to be working at the greatest news company on the planet. In my opinion.

I could actually run the full description of the job here, but I’ve learned in the past that people tend to submit their résumés regardless of their suitability to whatever bullet points I point them to. Usually, they just respond to the title, which in this case is “Web Designer.” Still, I’ll supplement it here with this advice: if you’re a fantastic Web designer, then we want you. And you really have to be fantastic. I’m serious. Also, you have to be clever enough to be able to figure out how our crazy job board works.

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Out of the Box Thinking

Seagate FreeAgentGenerally, I think it’s great when companies adopt a bit of the customer-friendly approach to designing and packaging products that most of us have come to associate with Apple. I’m talking about the premise that, even after the consumer has handed over her money for a physical product, the process of opening up its packaging and using it for the first time should be as seductive and reassuring as was the experience of having been sold on it in the first place — if not more enjoyable, even.

Take, for example, this external hard drive that I bought recently from Seagate: an inexpensive model called the FreeAgent. I’ve never thought of Seagate, a well-respected hard drive manufacturer but not a particularly friendly brand, as being very consumer-focused, but I have to admit they surprised me. Mostly.

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