Oh Yeeaahh!

Yeeahh!It’s been about a year now since I first started thinking about creating some kind of definitive documentation about my approach to designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool. I spent a few weeks last summer putting a lot of those thoughts down on paper, but nothing much became of them.

Then, a few months ago, in preparation for a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference, I started thinking about how to visually represent the problem-solving process that I go through when designing new interfaces with grid layouts. At first, I started thinking about disassembling and then reassembling one of the designs in my portfolio. But that seemed as if it wouldn’t be quite satisfactory, as I wanted the ability to talk openly about all the different factors that go into a design solution, without worrying about offending colleagues or clients.

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Missing Class at SXSW

SXSW 2007Here’s where I come clean a bit and stop vaguely assigning blame to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival panel participants as a faceless group. The truth is that I’m guilty of exactly what I outlined in my previous entry — the unconscientious lack of preparation and conversational inexactness that can torpedo a panel discussion. And worse.

On Saturday afternoon, almost immediately after doing a two-person, twenty-five minute lecture with Mark Boulton called “Grids Are Good,” I joined my former colleague and business partner Chris Fahey on his panel, “High Class and Low Class Web Design.”

It goes without saying that the concept of class is a touchy topic. In a series of blog posts last year, Chris wrote at length about why we, as designers, don’t talk about class, and why we may be operating within the constraints of class-mindedness without realizing it or acknowledging it. These were complex, ambitious and thoughtful articles, and if you work in Web design and have interest in this subject, you’d do well to read them for yourself.

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Panels and Growing Pains at SXSW

SXSW 2007As a way of making up for the fact that I did very little (read: zero) blogging from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival this year, I’m going to try and offer a somewhat hefty post this evening about it. Rather than recounting all of the individual events that occurred between late last Friday evening, when I arrived, and Monday afternoon, when I left, I’m going to sort of give a high-level summary of my major complaints about this year’s festival content and how I, personally, contributed to that problem. This entry is going to be so substantial, in fact, that I’m going to split it into two parts. Read on for the first, and be sure to read the second when you’re done.

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