Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pink, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out. Visit site »
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;) Visit site »
The Northtemple Journal of Design is a periodic design journal, published online and in print, on topics covering the entire field of design. Starting this month, we’ll publish articles twice a month online, written by members of our team of 29 designers, as well as guest authors and design experts. Every quarter we will collect the past quarter’s articles and publish them in a more permanent medium.
Sounds like a plan. Cameron wrote the first article, and it’s great. Visit site »
Some great typesetting rules here. Most of them don’t really apply to the web (that is to say, they should, but we simply don’t have the control to allow for them), but there are a few that do. I was particularly excited by the rules for emoticons, which I’ve always wondered about. I’d created this rule for myself; I’m glad to see someone else agrees:
A smiley may coincide with a closing bracket (given that it is preceded by an opening one :-).
(Note to Sara Flemming: your ass-backwards open-paren-colon smileys destroy all meaning these rules may have had (:). See!?
Via Dan Mall. Visit site »
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out. Visit site »
From Jeremy Keith’s live blog of Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk at An Event Apart San Francisco:
It’s hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you a web designer.
Yes. Yes. YES! Visit site »
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design. Visit site »
My good buddy JB drops a new personal site on us. As you’d expect, it’s full of great typography and illustrative flourishes. Awesome job, Jina. Happy birthday, and I’ll see you in Sydney! Visit site »
In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece. Visit site »
Probably nothing you don’t already know here, but they’re good reminders, nonetheless. Visit site »
Michael Heilemann says that pagination widgets should always point left for older stuff. I’m not sure I agree — but I totally se his point. It’s a tricky thing to solve with things like blogs, as they’re naturally in reverse chronological order. I know I’m not consistent about it; I tend to just do what feels right at the time.
To illustrate the problem, consider two scenarios: a blog has “next” and “previous” page links. I would say “next” should pointing to the right, so left is newer stuff. Now, a daily archive page shows all the content posted on one day, and has links to “next day” and “previous day”. I would say “next day” should be on the right, meaning left is older stuff. Clearly, this results in inconsistent interfaces (in one scenario, older stuff is to the right, and in the other, older stuff is to the left). What do you think? Should this be consistent? Visit site »
The great Massimo Vignelli:
Personally I feel I no longer have anything to share with the so-called graphic design of today: not the concept, not the typefaces, not the layout—nothing. Therefore, I conclude that I am no longer a graphic designer, but an information architect, and from now on that is how I will describe the meaning of my work and the scope of my activity. For me, to be an information architect means to organize information in a way that is essentially retrievable, understandable, visually captivating, emotionally involving, and easily identifiable. Information should be semantically rooted, syntactically correct, pragmatically efficient. It doesn’t work otherwise.
This is very similar to the Seth Godin bit I just posted. Vignelli seems to be trying to distance himself from the brand-whore, trend-driven aesthetic world the public thinks of when it things of “design”, and he’s doing so by re-framing himself as an information architect. But really, he’s always been an information architect, and information architecture is design. Massimo can certainly call himself any damn thing he pleases at this point — but personally, I just wish the public understood that design isn’t purely aesthetic-driven, so we didn’t have to resort to calling ourselves something besides “designers.”
Sidenote: it’s interesting that a term, “information architecture”, which came almost entirely out of web and interactive work, is now being applied to someone who does almost entirely print and static work. I love it when language works like that. Update: Wilson Miner tells me this article was probably written before the therm “information architecture” become some predominantly associated with the web. My bad. Visit site »
Seth says:
I think architecting something is different from designing it. Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a bauhaus, white space, font-driven, Ideo-envy way of thinking about design. So I reserve “architect” to describe the intentional arrangement of design elements to get a certain result.
Here’s the thing: “design” also means “the intentional arrangement of elements to get a certain result.” Architecting something is not differnet than designing it. The problem is, as Seth alludes to, one of perception. People think design is about aesthetics, when it’s not. Therefore, we’re forced to come up with alternatives like “architect” to use, instead. I do it all the time. Frankly, though, I’d much rather just find a way to educate the public on what design is. Visit site »
A terrific post by Stan on the role of graphic design on the web. What do you think? Is web design graphic design? Get to Jason’s site and join the discussion. Visit site »
Helen Walker’s designinterviews.com has been redesigned. If you like reading what smart web designers the world over have to say, check it out. Visit site »
If you’ve ever been curious what $12M can get you in downtown Seattle, here’s your chance. Want. Visit site »
Nathan Smith gets input from several buddies of mine, including Anton Peck, Jared Christensen, Patrick Haney, and Jenna Marino, on their preference for either Fireworks or Photoshop. The comments are definitely an interesting read, so I encourage you to check it out. I think it’s important to keep some perspective, though: the only people who really care whether you use Fireworks or Photoshop are other designers. Clients couldn’t care less. Debating the pros and cons can be fun for us design nerds, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter what you use — keep that in mind. Visit site »
Quite possibly the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. Want. (But why are there no photos of the kitchen?!) Visit site »