Funny to see fonts personified though I’m not sure if I agree with Comic Sans as superman…
The desktop, literally
Matt / July 22, 2008, 4:14 pm
“Layered Desktop,” by Gabriel Radic.
The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion.
For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder in a new Finder window, creating a cascade of windows that quickly became unmanageable? That was a literal interpretation of folders on your actual desktop. Fortunately, we now browse the contents of multiple folders within a single Finder window, an activity that doesn’t transfer to the stack of folders sitting next to me.
I found the wallpaper above really interesting: someone created a solution for organizing desktop icons which makes your computer screen look more like a desk, even though the design trend has been to move away from such literal interpretations. It’s not right or wrong—lots of people find it useful, judging by the comments—it’s a creative solution to a desktop organization problem.
The “tight collaboration” that created TimesPeople
Matt / June 25, 2008, 12:32 pm
Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:
TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.
From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)
Managing 50+ blogs on nytimes.com
Matt / April 23, 2008, 9:42 am
From Khoi Vinh’s ongoing Q&A session:
Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we’ve created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.
The challenge is even more complex when you consider that, though each blog has its own needs, the vast majority must be based on a single template (within WordPress, our Web log publishing system) that manages all of the blogs together. As you can imagine, that requires that the template be very versatile and that our designers be very nimble.
So by virtue of the fact that we’re constantly launching new blogs, we’re also in a perpetual state of revision and refinement. We’re fine-tuning the typography, adding new features to the right-hand column, incorporating new kinds of media content into the articles, etc. All of which is work that may then be reflected back on the other blogs.
I find this really remarkable. I can’t help but wonder how difficult it was to get stakeholders to agree to the constraints of a single Wordpress template. By standardizing the blog creation process, they now have an agile publishing system that imposes creative constraints but has been able to grow rapidly with nytimes.com.
Imagine being the guy in charge of maintaining these blogs though.
Read this post in Safari 3.1
Matt / March 19, 2008, 11:59 am
Safari 3.1 (released yesterday) offers support for some new HTML & CSS features. There’s a demo on MacRumors.
One of the most exciting, I think, is downloadable font support — you can link to actual font files from the CSS instead of having to use the common “web safe” fonts.
All of these features are just eye candy until Firefox and IE support it, but it offers a little glimpse into the future of web design & development.
Apple’s design process presented at SXSW
Matt / March 12, 2008, 1:44 pm
Via BusinessWeek. Many of Apple’s unique design methods are discussed in this article, but this one caught my eye:
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.
10!
design or walmart
Caleb / February 7, 2008, 11:23 am
A website from Graydon Parrish, a painter, and Mikhail Simkin, an electrical engineer at UCLA, Donald Judd or Cheap Furniture challenges people to choose between the work of Donald Judd and furniture from Walmart. It’s an interesting concept to challenge one’s idea of design and attention to detail.
This reminds me of a time I went to my friend’s aunt house and said I thought something on her wall was from Ikea. She got very offended and yelled at me saying that it was from an Italian designer in the 70s and that she had paid a lot of money for it. I never assume something is from Ikea anymore.
Sadly, there is a dead give away to tell what the pieces are. I won’t tell you, but I got 100% right on the first try.
Lettering Grows in Brooklyn
Caleb / January 26, 2008, 3:23 pm
For all you typophiles out there, Paul Shaw, a calligrapher and typographer highlights the dying hand-lettering of Brooklyn. I’m partial to the ones in Greenpoint (mostly cause of my GP pride), but the things he has to say about Havemeyer and other parts of Williamsburg are nice too. (via laugharn)
Feltron 2007 Annual Report
Matt / January 17, 2008, 6:05 pm
Linked from this post on Adaptive Path’s blog: Feltron 2007 Annual Report. It’s a personal year-end review, visualized and designed instead of written.
Account sign-in mistakes to avoid
Matt / January 14, 2008, 11:28 am
From Jared Spool’s excellent webiste, User Interface Engineering. Check out the links for detailed descriptions of each mistake:
Account Sign-in: 8 Design Mistakes to Avoid
- Having a Sign-in In The First Place
- Requiring Sign-in Too Soon
- Not Stating the Benefits to Registering
- Hiding the Sign-In Button
- Not Making “Create New Account” or “Forgot Your Password” a Button or Link
- Not Providing Sign-in Opportunities at Key Locations
- Asking for Too Much Information When Registering
- Not Telling Users How You’ll Use Their Information
8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in
- Not Telling Users the Requirements for Username and Password Up Front
- Requiring Stricter Password Requirements Than The NSA
- Using Challenge Questions They Won’t Remember In A Year
- Not Returning Users to Their Desired Objective
- Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong
- Not Putting A Register Link When The Sign-In Is An Error
- Not Giving the User A Non-email Solution To Recover Their Password
- Requiring More Than One Element When Recovering Password