Archives

New Shell for AOL

imageIn advance of being spun off from Time Warner next month, AOL debuted new corporate branding yesterday, rolling out not just a revised logo but a visual system with a bit of a twist to it. Using a modicum of cleverness, the company’s new look is in fact a kind of visual randomizer in which a new, mixed-case typographic mark “Aol” (instead of the previous initialism “AOL”) is superimposed on top of various whimsical, silhouetted images.

Continue Reading …

+

Font Hunt

Giving back to Twitter department: earlier in the month I asked people who follow me on Twitter for recommendations for new typefaces.

What I was looking for was an alternative to the typeface Klavika, which I quite like; it’s among the very best fonts that have been released in the recent past, in my opinion. Inconveniently for me, I somewhat subjectively regard Klavika as having been ‘claimed’ by a friend of mine who uses it more consistently and more effectively than I do.

So I wanted something of my own, something similarly contemporary and similarly strong in its forms, a real workhorse of a typeface that I can call to duty during those times when Helvetica won’t do. I got back tons of replies, and I thought I’d present my favorites here for those who might find themselves on a similar hunt.

Continue Reading …

+

Introducing Basic Maths, a Theme for WordPress

Things that have been keeping me from blogging: raising a brand new baby, having grown-up time with my girlfriend, walking my dog, holding down a day job and, now finally revealed: working on Basic Maths, a brand new theme for WordPress that I designed with my friend Allan Cole.

After months of plugging away at in during whatever free time we’ve been able to find, we’re finally releasing it into the wild today, to coincide with WordCampNYC 2009. (In fact, I’m heading over to that conference later today, and Allan will be speaking there early this afternoon, so if you’re there, be sure to say hello.) It’s available right now for purchase at this link — for a limited time only, it costs just US$45, which is less than half the price of other, far less awesome WordPress themes, if you ask me.

Continue Reading …

+

Watching Yankees Spending

New York YankeesLast Wednesday The New York Yankees beat the Philadelphia Phillies to win their twenty-seventh World Series. After a nine year title drought, the victory predictably thrilled Yankees fans like myself while also re-igniting the old complaint that the franchise is a bully in the baseball market, that the team uses an obscenely resourceful payroll to effectively and unfairly buy championships.

Actually, the pilot light for that particular criticism never goes out, whether the team has won or lost its most recent bid for the World Series (or even when they make no post-season appearance at all, as happened in 2008). For almost a decade, the Yankees have consistently maintained the highest payroll in Major League Baseball while failing to bring home a World Series title, and during that time the grousing took the form of ridicule. What Yankees fans heard then was: “See? You Yankees can’t buy championships, even with all of your money.” What we hear today is: “See? You Yankees just buy championships with all of your money.”

This is not a coherent line of argument, but then again it would be naïve to look for any motivation here other than envy, because the logic at work is so suspect. It’s pretty safe to say that a good number of those who hate the Yankees because of their payroll are unabashed capitalists, too; they’d be very unlikely to begrudge the fact that the highest valued, best performing organization in any given market also led that market. That’s not just capitalism, it’s the way capitalism is practiced in America.

Continue Reading …

+

Personal References

I get a very minor mention on page fifty of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio’s new book, “Graphic Design, Referenced,” but that’s not why it’s worth blogging about. Rather, this book is notable as an ambitious and largely successful attempt at capturing the current state of graphic design, or at least its current state as seen through the uncommonly thorough gaze of two young, talented and already influential designer-editors.

Vit and Gomez-Palacio, operating under the name Under Consideration, were responsible for the now shuttered but once widely-read design criticism site Speak Up, where they played a key role in shaping the graphic design conversation over the past decade. Now, in “Graphic Design, Referenced,” they’ve capitalized on their rather breathtaking ability to pull off massive editorial feats with a kind of contemporary history of their chosen field, a beautiful, page-turner of a tome that aims to be “A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design.”

I received my copy in the mail not long ago and was frankly astonished when I opened it up. I was vaguely aware that they had been working on a book, but I had no idea that they had aimed so high. So I felt compelled to find out more and struck up an email conversation with Armin, a friend of mine, to find out more.

Continue Reading …

+

The Meaning of Photoshop

Whether France’s proposed Photoshop retouching notification law is a valuable idea in the interest of the public good or a misguided example of government overreaching, I can’t say. But I’m pretty sure that it’s a debate worth having. In case you hadn’t heard, earlier this month fifty politicians put a law in front of French parliament under which digitally manipulated images would bear the somewhat rueful label “Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person’s physical appearance.” The goal is essentially one of public health and consumer expectation: don’t try looking like this at home.

Continue Reading …

+

Our Craigslist

Wired MagazineThe cover story for the September 2009 issue of Wired takes a look at the current state of Craigslist and the challenges it faces as it continues to evolve. In a sidebar, the magazine’s amazing art director Scott Dadich invited several designers to re-imagine and redesign Craigslist itself.

In addition to inviting contributions from SimpleScott, who was the former design director at BarackObama.com, Matt Wiley of Studio8 Design, and Luke Hayman and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, Scott was kind enough to ask me for my take as well, and I leapt at the chance. I conscripted two colleagues from my design team at NYTimes.com to help me: Anh Dang who provided an invaluable sounding board for the information architecture and interaction design, and Paul Lau, who helped turn around the visual design literally over a weekend. You’ll see the mock-ups we submitted on page 104 of the magazine or, here at this link.

A magazine sidebar of course has a finite amount of space in which to show and explain the ideas that went into this design. Thankfully, someone invented blogging, which is not similarly space deprived — and so I shall now use the medium to indulge myself accordingly. Here, then, is a closer look at the mock-ups we submitted.

Continue Reading …

+

Conversation Pieces

The other night I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller “The Conversation” for the first time, I realized, in at least fifteen years. In the intervening decade and a half it had always stayed in my mind as one of the most delicately effective, nearly pitch-perfect movies I’d ever seen; Coppola had just come off of making the first “Godfather” and would go on to direct its even more ambitious sequel right afterwards, so “The Conversation” fell right into that sweet spot in his career where he truly was, as his sister Talia Shire put it, “The best director in the world, period.” There’s not a beat in this movie that doesn’t seem perfectly timed, that’s executed with anything less than tremendous care and wisdom and, more than anything else, that’s emotionally accurate. It’s a bull’s eye of a film if there ever was one.

Continue Reading …

+

MobileUs

MobileMeApple’s MobileMe is such a shoddy, poorly implemented product that I’m long past hoping that any complaining about it will help the situation. It is what it is, and I make my own bed every year when I renew my subscription to it.

At the same time, I also feel that there is a nontrivial subset of the Macintosh population who, like me, are beholden to MobileMe, who rely on it and continue to renew annually in spite of Apple’s flagrant neglect. Some might say that we should vote with our wallets and leave the service altogether. But for whatever personal or professional reasons, MobileMe is the best solution we have. For those folks, I kind of think we owe it to one another to fill in the gaps that Apple leaves.

Continue Reading …

+

NetNewsWire’s Stinkin’ Synching

RSS readers used to be amazing, wondrous portals into a novel, rich trove of original content. When that was the case, when they were still new and our expectations for them were relatively low, the leading Mac OS X application for aggregating them was NetNewsWire and I used it loyally.

But as RSS evolved and the sheer volume of feeds I collected became more and more of a management challenge, I began to sour on NetNewsWire. It may have started strong, but its development momentum lazily petered out, its gaps in functionality growing more egregious every six months or so. Today I regard it as a not particularly good application at all, and it sits on my virtual junk heap of software that just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — evolve along with its users’ needs. Especially with recent revisions, wherein its developer has apparently focused on cosmetic changes to the program at the expense of true improvements, I regard it as a squandered, mishandled opportunity.

Continue Reading …

+