New Boxes Are Here

Boxes and ArrowsThe long-awaited new design for Boxes and Arrows, the venerable online information architecture magazine, went live earlier this week and it’s… um, it’s different. Very different.

Of course, it’s hard for me to give an objective assessment of this new look’s graphical merits. Way, way back in August 2004, I pulled a feverish all-nighter (with my former colleague, Chris Fahey) to knock out a competing design that I hoped would be selected as the new face for the magazine. I’m still very fond of what we pulled off, but, obviously, our proposal did not prevail.

Still, I’d like to think that even without that conflict of interest, I’d have much the same reaction as I had when I first saw this revision: the new Boxes and Arrows lacks certain traits of executional elegance that I value in well-designed interfaces. I’m talking about some basic stuff here: consistency in typographic conventions, semantic clarity in graphical elements, disambiguation in interface constructions, continuity with prior branding art… it’s a mess, and it will win no beauty pageants.

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Biggie Installs

In the past week or so, I’ve had to update or install new versions of software from Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Having undertaken these tasks more or less in succession, I noticed something I’d never paid conscious attention to before: how the sizes of their progress screens — the dialog boxes that visually track the completion of each software installation — also served as visual indicators for the character of each application.

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