Design
Underline text in Adobe Illustrator CS
I am stunned. Let me explain.
I have been using Illustrator since version 6 or so to mock up web pages, it is my wireframing tool of choice. The two biggest defects have always been a lack multi-page support and no way to underline text.
The workaround for the former was to either create a giant canvas and use page tiling (good for printing), use a different file for each page (good for linking into InDesign), or use layers (good for sharing items across pages in the same position, e.g., a navigation bar). I use a mixture of layers and files depending on my needs.
Not being able to underline was always the real issue. I realize it is not typographically “correct” because it actually means italics, but thanks to Mosaic that ship has sailed. Plus, why does Adobe allow underlining in InDesign and Photoshop but not Illustrator? This is inexplicable to me.
The workarounds for underlining were unappealing at best. The hardest solution was to manually place a 1pt line under the text you want underlined. The problem of course, if you change the copy, you need to change the line. To say this is a pain is one hell of an understatement. The easier solution was to use a different color and leave it at that, alas this (obviously) didn’t work when printing in black and white, but it was the easiest (and the one that I always used).
There are a few other workarounds that I’ve investigated but discarded. For example, I found a plug-in that automagically adds the 1pt strokes to selected text objects, but it doesn’t work in Illustrator CS and costs $25, so forget that. Plus, it doesn’t solve the editing text problem. At a previous job someone created a font that looked like Verdana and had the underlining as part of the design. But it was buggy, resulted in postscript errors, and didn’t work for sharing files with other people who didn’t have the font.
But forget the workarounds. Problem solved. Well, it is still a workaround, but it at least a clean one.
It turns out that Illustrator does support underlining, but doesn’t provide a command to do it. Is this like disabling the blink tag in HTML to prevent people from making bad pages? Adobe doesn’t want people to underline text out of some desire to improve design?
Enough background—time for the solution.
It turns out that if you paste underlined text from Photoshop into Illustrator the underlining comes with it. You can use the eyedropper to apply the text properties, including underlining to other text objects.
But this is where it starts getting good, with Illustrator CS, Adobe introduced character styles. You can then define a style for underline that you can then apply to other objects with one click. Plus, if you can make the style just underline, and not color, typeface, size, bold, italics, etc. Just a clean, one-click “make underline” button. Clicking the “no character style” style will remove the underline, without altering any other text properties.
To get you started, I’ve created an Illustrator file with just the style. Just open the Character Styles palette, click the little triangle and select “Load character styles…”, select the supplied Illustrator file, and you’re good to go!
Download the file: Underline text in Illustrator.
Update: Douglas Bowman improved on my solution by deleting a bunch of other text properties that I neglected to remove. Now it longer applies kerning, case, tracking, etc. The file has been updated for your downloading pleasure. Take that, Adobe.
Update #2: Doug points out an issue, but has a workaround for the workaround. I’ll let him explain it:
I discovered that within a bounded text box, the underline gets it’s color from the first character in that text box, not the character the style is applied to. And yes, that’s specific: the first character. Second character and on doesn’t matter or have any effect. So if you have underlined text that’s a different color than the first word (character) in that paragraph, you can create a space as the first character, set it’s horizontal scale to 1% or any percentage that stays unnoticeable, and give the space the color you want the underline within that paragraph to be. Fun, huh?
Update #3: Yet another update. Doug has done a great job of documenting the whole underlining trick.
NO COMMENT
I’ve been meaning to come up with a separate blog for interesting links that I like but don’t have much to say about, similar to Jason Kottke or Todd Dominey. However, I couldn’t find a way to easily fit it into my blog template (a cop out, I know), but then I thought it might be more fun to actually push the content to people. Thus a mailing list.
I’m calling it NO COMMENT and it will focus on what I like, primarily, design, typography, architecture, NYC, gadgets, and photography. The frequency will initially be daily, unless there’s nothing good on the web (yeah right), or I don’t have the inclination (more likely).
I will also create an RSS feed shortly for those that are interested.
If you’re interested, drop me a line. Use that cute little mail icon in the navigation bar above.
Eye Candy, Part 2
Phantom Research Foundation is a collection of artists, designers, and musicians. That’s all well and good, but they have a beautiful Flash site. I’d go as far to say that it has the best navigation I’ve ever seen. Stunning. The site is designed by Gizma, which also has a great little Flash site. Small and simple, but great feedback and interaction.
John Friksson has a pretty nice portfolio site, notable for its retro use of horizontal scrolling. I feel like it is 1998 again. The work is pretty good too.
Stockholm Design Lab is a Swedish design firm with a pretty nice, but simple, site. No big deal I thought, until I noticed that they did the identity for SAS airlines (including their aircraft exterior design), packaging for IKEA, and branding work for Sony Ericsson. In short, some pretty impressive clients. I’m very jealous.
Eye candy
A few links have been cluttering up my inbox:
- Billy Bussey has a pretty out there Flash/Quicktime site with lots of 3D goodness. I can’t decide whether I like it, but it is damn impressive.
- Georg Schlosser, an Austrian photographer, has a great portfolio site. The site itself is a little funky, but well worth it. [via Superfluous Man]
- Continuing with the photography theme, Michael Zeppetello has some absolutely gorgeous concept and art shots.
- The Commarts Interactive Annual is online. Some highlights include Eric Myer, Typorganism, and Fly Guy. I still need to go through the rest…
Flash resources
After whining yesterday about the inability to view the guts of other people’s Flash, I went hunting on the Web. And of course there are a variety of resources that include downloads of actual Flash files. A few that I’ve found that look promising include:
Does anyone have any good resources?
Reverse engineering Flash?
I’m finally getting around to learning Flash. It has been ages since I’ve played with anything similar—Director 3 (or was it 4?). Just getting used to the different drawing behavior is tough, it is certainly not the same as Photoshop or Illustrator.
The biggest problem for me is the lack of “View Source”. Learning HTML, CSS, or JavaScript is pretty easy because you can learn from others. With Flash? No such luck. Once cannot reverse engineer anyone else’s work. How are you supposed to learn? It’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take me to do something remotely interesting or useful. I’m not optimistic.
One step forward, two steps back
Well, Orbitz did a site refresh recently. Damn. They were flight reservation site of choice and they went ahead and ruined it.
Despite being the evil consortium of all the major airlines, I used them for one reason: great interface design. The matrix display for flight results was perfect. It allowed you to wade the thousands of flights efficiently and quickly. The new design, while still using the matrix display (which incidentally, is trademarked), has ruined the flight search results.
Autumn in in the air
Bryant Park.org has been updated to reflect the fall season. You have to love CSS. We created two alternate style sheets (one for fall and one for winter) and by simply uncommenting a single line in the master CSS file you can update the color palette for the entire site.
Changing the color of type and fields of color is easy, but when coupled with using CSS to replace text with images, you can really give the site a new feel. So for example, we placed the logos as well as the background images for the header and footer in the appropriate seasonal style sheets. This allows for a relatively large graphical refresh without anyone mucking around with the relatively crazy underlying CSS file.
In case you missed it, here’s what the home page looked like during the summer (JPG, 250k), but you’ll have to wait until snow is in the air to see what the site will look like in winter.
Skipping class just got harder
UMass/Amherst is doing something pretty cool with WiFi in their larger lecture halls. Professors can take polls to which students respond to by pressing keys on a WiFi transmitter. The responses are then collected on a laptop, presumably allowing the teacher to change their pace in real time if there are too many right or wrong answers.
The downside, of course, is that skipping class just got a little trickier.
Gucci.com
I’ve been working on Gucci.com for the last 12 weeks and today it has gone live.
MOMENT’s role on this project was to basically take a very good “brand image” site that had a very limited e-commerce offering and redesign the site’s commerce areas to support Gucci.com’s growing revenue goals.
The major problem with the old site was that it was one giant Flash movie. That meant no back button, no bookmarking of pages, no auto-fill on forms, no printing—in short, a completely non-standard browsing experience. While Gucci is not a standard company, doing e-commerce requires that certain conventions be followed.
That said, we needed to make sure that the site felt like a luxury site. We kept the overall visual design, but tightened it up. The key to the solution was a hybrid Flash/HTML site. MOMENT did the HTML and Infornographic did the Flash work.
The site uses CSS for layout, but uses HTML instead of the preferred XHTML. The reasons for which, I will explain in a future post. I found a couple of crazy bugs in Safari that I need to create test cases for, plus a very bizarre image preloading problem in IE PC.
We did prototype testing, user interviews, and more. Expect a full case study soon, but in the mean time, take a look around, and check out the $3000 shoes.
I am death with a high-end flyswatter
I hate flying insects, though I do not have a regular old flyswatter around the house to combat these annoying things. I do, however, have a Phillipe Starck “fancy pants” flyswatter called “Dr. Skud”. I bought this device not to actually swat flies, but rather I thought it was a cool design—free-standing, with a wonderful Mona Lisa-esque face.
I have had it for 6 years or so and never used it for its purpose. Apparently, I’ve never had a flying insect problem in my house. That changed today. I had no less than four, including a monster that was the size of a nickel. Since I didn’t have a commoner’s weapon, I used my high design version. Well, it worked like a charm. I was able to smite three within five minutes, though alas, my white whale, in the form of a large fly, escaped out the window before I could dispatch him. We will meet again, and I will emerge victorious with my trusty ally, Dr. Skud.
Alright, that was a little flowery. Though this event did remind me of when I purchased Dr. Skud in the first place, which actually gave me a wonderful introduction into the different personalities of those engaging in multi-disciplinary design. How so? Well, three people saw my fly swatter after I opened the package. An industrial designer, an interaction designer, and a programmer.
The first to spot it was the industrial designer. From 15 feet away he spotted it and cried out: “What is that? It is beautiful!”, he then walked over and waxed poetic about its form.
The second, the interaction designer, started to question the design saying that the tripod base didn’t look stable enough and would fall over (all too true, it turns out) and doesn’t fit in your hand comfortably. He also pointed out that the small holes in the face would get filled with “fly guts” and would be a pain to clean (I avoided this problem by washing it right away).
In the midst of this lengthy usability and design critique, the programmer walked up and said “Stupid. Either you have flies or you don’t, a flyswatter does nothing to change the situation.” He then he grumpily walked away.
Turns out he’s right too, because a fifth tenth fly just flew in the window as I typed this. Dr. Skud? Get ready.
Apple and VW sitting in a tree…
One of the only interesting parts of the Baseball All-Star game was seeing the Apple commercials. Well, sort of. I saw the G5 commercial and what I thought was an iPod commercial, except it was actually for VW. Buy a Beetle and you get a free iPod.
I always thought that VW and Apple had very similar brands. They obviously have a large overlap in demographic, but more importantly they both have a strong focus on design. Its almost as if they were the same company, if Apple made a car or VW made a computer… But it is probably the advertising that really does it—lots of whitespace.
Blast from the past
Two of my old co-workers from MAYA, Mike Higgins and Bill Lucas wrote an article for the Design Management Journal entitled Digital Carvings: Brand Totems for the Emergence of Infocentricity, ($5 for non-members).
Though I haven’t worked at MAYA for more than four years, that place was an integral part of my design training. Carnegie Mellon did little, my first job did even less, but my tenure at MAYA taught me just about everything I know about design, information architecture, usability, etc., and Bill Lucas was one of those did the teaching. If it wasn’t in Pittsburgh, I might still be there.
This article, while a bit on the geeky side, talks about their information-centric interaction paradigm in the form of Regex, a descendent of Visage, a product that I worked on and off for three years.
While I haven’t done much with true info-centricity in the MAYA sense, I have taken the design philosophy behind it and used it in every project I have subsequently worked on. It is the idea that you should never design any sufficiently complex system at the page level. Rather, design the DNA (or LEGO bricks) and then build the site from these building blocks. I’ve been calling this “modular design”. I really need to get motivated to write down my own thoughs on modular design, Bill, you may have inspired me yet again.
Whatever happened to serendipity?
A great presentation on moblogging by Adam Greenfield of v-2.org. He was one of the organizers the first conference on the topic.
As for me being a moblogger, my phone is now camera equipped and I can use mfop to post to my site, but it just doesn’t seem to work out. Whether it is due to not having a keyboard, or just not having anything interesting to say in transit, I just haven’t had the inclination to do much of it.
Now, when my dream phone comes out I might act differently. For the record, my dream phone is bluetooth-enabled, iSync-compatible, has a decent digital camera, has WiFi, GPRS, tri-band GSM, and PDA functionality. Most importantly, it needs to have a thumboard for real text entry. There are a variety of phones out there that have most of these features/acronyms but none have them all. Of course, it needs to be well designed too—it can’t look like Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone.
Oh, and in passing, Adam mentions that Peter Merholz coined the term ‘blog’. I had no idea that was the case because Peter certainly hasn’t claimed that distinction that I am aware of. Good little factoid, if true.
I’m turning Japanese
This has probably been around a while, but I just discovered that you can view my site in Japanese. The translator can’t seem to handle typographic quotes or Javascript, but it seems to work fairly well since my entire site uses system text instead of text in graphics.
Gin can be beautiful
A absolutely stunning 60-second art/branding piece (MPEG, 16.5mb) about my favorite alcohol, Bombay Sapphire. It was created by Psyop and here is an article about the concept. [Thanks, Elias]
Flash in a flash
Tony Garcia’s photography is great. I wonder what kind of camera he uses and how much photoshop magic he does. The interface for the photos and the transitions are really nicely done too.
My real question relates to the speed of flash sites on a Mac. This site in particular is very fast and responsive, but many other Flash sites I visit are glacially slow on the Mac. There are certainly people out there that say the plug-in is to blame. But what are some people doing to overcome it?
[Photography link thanks to Superfluous Man]
Those crazy Dutch…
Body Movies is a huge art installation in a public square in Rotterdam. The movie is really long, but worth it. Who pays for this stuff? Will they pay me? [Thanks, Brendan]
Design according to Ive
An interview with Jonathan Ive, head of industrial design for Apple, on the design of the new PowerMac G5. The new design has many people comparing it to a cheese grater. I’m not sure they’re wrong, but I’m confident that we will come to love this design.
The design reminds me of when each new BMW 3 series comes out. I always love the current design, but when the new model comes out, I wonder what they were thinking? Why did they ruin such a beautiful design? But yet, I always end up loving the new model. And then the cycle repeats. Design should do this. It should anticipate and move the current design aesthetic forward. Mad props to Jonathan Ive and Apple.
The bubble hasn’t burst in London
A very, very extensive and cool case study (PDF, 7.9mb) about the redesign of BBC.co.uk. The project is pretty amazing from a process point of view. It reminds of the extensive “Discovery” phases we did at Sapient. Great work, great insight, and often, a great waste of money. When the bubble burst, Sapient stopped this sort of work. No one would pay for it and we were back to desiging using our skills and intuition. Ah, the good old days. [Thanks, Michael]
Pillaging kottke.org
Lots of great links at Jason Kottke’s site, I guess having three people editing your site really improves signal to noise.
Anyway, first up is Jason’s response to the fact that a post of his about the Matrix: Reloaded has spiraled to 700 comments (or ~125,000 words, or 1.2mb), accounting for 5.3 gigabytes of bandwidth.
Second, we have memes. Hans Nyberg notified PreSurfer and kottke.org about a beautiful panoramic of Mt. Everest. Those two weblogs were powerful enough that the meme spread to 200,000 visitors in 24 days.
But wait, there’s more. The New York Times has an article about “Urban Nomads”. Or as Jason Kottke says, “Gutter Trash”.
Quick digression: I was going to donate a crappy sleeping bag (given to me by Sapient for three long years of hard service) to Salvation Army. Unfortunately, the Salvation Army isn’t that close to my house, so I was going to carry this thing 15 blocks on the way to work. Well, as I was walking through Thompkin’s Square Park, one of these “urban nomads” says “Nice sleeping bag. That’s nicer than mine.” I then thought that giving this punk my sleeping bag would be a decent thing to do. Cutting out the middle man (or in bubble jargon: “dis-intermediation”). Anyway, this jerk doesn’t even say thanks and runs off to tell a buddy about his new sleeping bag.
Alright, back to the task at hand, one more Kottke link to comment on. Apparently, there is a phenomenon called “flash mobs”. The idea, executed with Mission Impossible-like precision, is to create an inexplicable mob in a location for 10 minutes only and then disperse. Wacky stuff.
Props
I just found out that Elias of Infornographic fame, did the flash for that cool GE “Inspiration at Work” ad campaign that I saw a while ago. As long as I’m giving Elias props, here’s Shifty, a great game he designed and programmed.
40 years of design & advertising
The content isn’t too deep, but this timeline of design and advertising has some choice design icons.
Steve Jobs meets the Segway
This account of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos in a meeting with the Segway people is the first non-annoying article I’ve read about this device. Steve Jobs is classic Steve Jobs. Definitely worth a read. [via kottke.org]
Spring cleaning
I found a folder on my computer called “URLs” that had a bunch of old links that I apparently meant to do something with at some point. All of them are old, some are funny and others are useful. Enjoy.
- Huh?—We should introduce some of this language to momentnyc.com
- An interview with Jan-Christoph Zoels, an IA Director that I used to work with at Sapient. Now he’s teaching at the Interaction Design Institue in Ivrea, Italy.
- Photoshop tennis
- Ear Drum is a sound design firm in the UK. Their site is great.
- Gamasutra is a video game design site.
- Image Dive is a design firm whose site has some sweet, yet very simple, Flash work.
- Making the Macintosh offers a history of the Mac.
- Straight Face is a (long dead) series of columns on interface design.
- Designer’s Republic is a nice flashback. Dot com era arrogance at its finest.
- Logotypes.ru offers some bootleg company logos that can be handy in a proposal writing crisis.
- The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, plus the “Making of”.
Whose site are you reading?
Using default designs for publishing a personal Web site is a really, really bad idea. Take for example, Steven Johnson and Peter Merholz. They (probably) have a large overlap in audience and yet they both use the same default, out-of-the-box Movable Type “Georgia Blue” stylesheet.
Why is this such a problem? Well, beyond the fact that Peter Merholz is a better designer than that. I was reading Peter’s newly launched site and after I was halfway through a long entry, I had a brain lapse and thought I was reading Steven Johnson (who I read much more often). It was a very strange, and disorienting, moment.
This is a lack of attention to “brand” taken to a ridiculous extreme. Back in the day, I thought branding was a load of garbage, but I’m a believer today. Diffentiation is an important usability consideration.
An Annotated Manifesto for Growth
I just stumbled upon Deal Allen’s brilliant annotated version of Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.
I saw Bruce Mao speak once at the Cooper Union when he was pitching his book, Life Style. He was so overbearing as he pontificated about the glorious role of the designer as deliverer of truth (or some such nonsense, I forget). His speech was so great, everyone fell asleep. But hey, you could get the book with one of 5 different fabric colors/textures. Plus, he wore a jacket made out of one of them.
Escher lives!
Water flowing uphill? Now if we can a drawing of a hand to draw itself we’d be all set.
Unleashed
The Web site for Bryant Park has gone live. Is uses CSS for layout and valid XHTML. We are thrilled with the results. Go play.
Catching up to the Web
Alright, a few links landed in my inbox while I was away:
Our good friends at Honest have launched a magazine that is actually printed on dead trees. Too bad I wasn’t back in time to attend the launch party.
Crazy kids. Hektor.ch shows some fun with spray paint, computers, and a dash of MacGuyver. It looks like something out of ITP. Be sure to watch the movie. [Thanks Brendan for the pointer.]
A fantastic Honda commerical for the UK. I’m a sucker for Rube Goldberg machines, but this beats anything from The Incredible Machine. Just beautiful. [Again, thanks Brendan] Update: Here’s an article about it. Apparently the whole things was actually filmed (though in two parts), not computer generated (other than to link the two). Damn impressive.
7designers has a somewhat hokey site, but the production values are quite high. Fun to play with.
Adapt to me
Marc Rettig’s Interaction Design History in a Teensy Little Nutshell (PDF, 3.1mb) is a great presentation about the evolution from people adapting to technology, towards technology doing the adapting.
The news in type
Some type experiments using the war in Iraq as the source material. Some of these are pretty clever. Especially since he claims he does the whole thing, concept to HTML in 30 minutes.
Of course, the first comment on Typographica is by some ass that offers no constructive feedback.
You can not contain Tufte
Tufte takes a few shots at Boeing about the Columbia disaster.
Don’t mess with Paul Rand
UPS is rolling out a new brand and logo. A swoosh? Dimensionality? What the hell is going on here? If I had a logo designed by Paul Rand, I sure as hell woudn’t mess with it.
I suppose the rationale is that UPS is about more than just delivering packages. While I’m sure that is true, you do not have to fuck with a great logo to convey that message. Companies reinvent themselves all the time, a logo does nothing directly. The trick is to deliver on the promise. If you do that, the logo will stand for whatever you want it to.
And trying to make your logo look like a car emblem can not be the answer. Unless, of course, you make cars.
Google + Apple = Good
I just discovered a great little design nuance in Safari. We all know about the Google integration which is wonderful. The subtle improvement that I had not noticed, is that after you search via the search bar, whenever you bring up the find within page dialog, it is pre-populated with the search term you entered into Google. Very smart.
This is exactly the time saving UI tricks that we need more of.
Behind the Typeface
It what will likely be one of my final posts using Blogger, I present: Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black.
Can opening credits be better than the movie?
Fun site. These are the guys that did the opening credits to Catch Me If You Can.
Lovingly, handcrafted pixels
Cuban Council is a small interactive design firm. Beautiful site.
Thanks to Brendan.
I never thought I’d miss the old banner ad
The New York Times is going to start using half-page ads. My favorite quote:
“We’ve found that readers do not mind advertising, they just don’t want it to disrupt their experience.”
Hmm. I would say that a half-page animated gif might disrupt my experience.
Those that ignore history…
With the tragic destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, I was reminded of the chapter devoted to the Challenger exposion in Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations.
While it is far too early to think that the information was available before launch to warrant postponing, I can’t help but wonder whether it is possible. Tufte makes a compelling case that it was an information design problem that resulted in the Challenger exploding.
Incidentally, Tufte also makes the point that merely calling it the “Shuttle” is part of the problem. The name connotes a simple and routine trip from NYC to Boston. I wonder how many people even knew that the Shuttle was in orbit before yesterday’s catastrophe? Space travel deserves more respect.
Persuasive IA
A good article on “persuasive (information) architecture”.
I’ve had this idea that there is a book waiting to be written on this topic and should use Las Vegas as the backdrop, in the spirit of Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas. Combine the techniques that casinos use to encourage you to gamble, retailers use to get you to buy, and Web sites get you to buy/register/subscribe and I think you have a useful book.
I’ll probably get to it sometime in 2014.
Aim here
Amusing UI innovation. I actually saw an example of this once in an airport, but I don’t remember where. Oh yeah, it works too.
Big brother listens to your radio
Michael sent me this article about dynamic billboards. The privacy concerns are fairly huge?they say that they won?t use the data at the individual level, but do you believe them?
But my question is this. Why go through the hassle of scanning radios to do this? Why not just use one of the myriad of polling/sampling/interviewing techniques to get the demographics of drivers and then use the dynamic billboards to deliver targeted advertising? While I agree that the demographics of drivers change throughout the day and week, I don?t think they change over the course of a month or year. You certainly don?t need to resample every hour.
The larger issue of course is tailored advertising in the physical environment. Most recently this was depicted in Minority Report. This is going to happen people. Deal with it.
Steel is a man’s best friend
Wow, I’m a sucker for vintage metal furniture.
Who are you?
A good primer on reputation as it applies to digital reputation systems.
Thanks to BBJ for the pointer.
More “cruft”
Continuing from my last post on interface cruft, here?s a critique of the OS X “Finder” (in quotes because it only resembles the finder from OS 9).
I confess that I’ve been assuming that the clunkiness in Apple’s newest operation system was just the by-product of rewriting a complicated piece of software that had evolved over twenty years. But now I worry about who is steering the UI ship over there.
Interface cruft
Absolutely great article on interface cruft. With all the attention on the Web, people have sort of forgotten about the crap that we put up with in our operating systems. Well, perhaps not forgotten, but since only a few can work at Apple or Micro$oft, we focus on what we can control—Web sites.
More fiddling
Sigh. Another attempt to define IA. Which, of course, has caused another round of arguments.
I view this all as nothing more than fiddling while Rome is burning. Again the issue is about a moniker. “Information architecture” vs. “Experience Design” vs. “User Experience”. Listen up people! Who cares? We’re all designing for users. There’s enough people that aren’t so what’s with all of the infighting? Take all of us that are explicitly designing for users and put them in a room. How would you describe what they do? Pick a term. Any term. I don’t care.
Half of this is about semantics (e.g., “Can you really design an experience?”) the other half is just turf-battles (e.g., “I know taxonomies and site maps and I care about users, that stupid graphic designer over there knows nothing”).
There is a range of the general to the specific in this whole designing-for-users-space. Specific includes creating taxonomies, site maps, navigation schemes, information graphics, laying out forms, etc. More general includes a bunch of activities like participatory design, business process design, ethnographic research, interaction design, etc. Then you have a whole bunch of considerations that some people care about to varying degrees: “brand”, “technical constraints”, “business needs”. The point is that they are all necessary and different people may be responsible for each, but I would argue that they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing—making a usable/useful/desirable experience for users. Or at least one that doesn’t suck.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of buzzwords, but the point is that we have a bunch of people designing for users. These people come from a variety of backgrounds, with a variety of skill sets, and varying proclivity to engage in “punditry”. It is no surprise that no one knows how to define the thing. But who really cares? Come up with a term that you and your client understand and use it. This whole thing has become rather tiresome. Of course, I continue to get sucked in.
Wearing out the web
The BBC has redesigned their homepage. It incorporates this very cool feature of adding a patina to areas you often use (the background color changes for areas you visit a lot). This has long been need in computing. Kudos to the design team.
Thanks to BBJ.
Modern nomads
This exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt called New Hotels for Global Nomads seems like a winner. One hotel that I’ve stayed at looks to be featured (Saint Martin’s Lane in London).
Take the 6 to philoye.com
I just discovered NYC Bloggers. I love the idea of rooting the online world in the physical environment. The’ve organized the 1528 blogs by subway line.
My only problem is that I don’t have my own subway stop. I’m roughly equidistant from three stops, the F at 2nd Avenue, the 6 at Astor Place, and the L at 1st Avenue. Such decisions.
Not all telemarketing is bad
I just got a telemarketing call from AT&T Wireless. But here’s the deal, I wasn’t annoyed by it. Why? Because the call was actually relevant. Here’s a rough quote:
“Mr. Oye, I’m calling on behalf of AT&T Wireless. We have just installed a bunch of cell towers on 9th Street in the East Village, and also we’d like you to know that, with your credit history, you are eligible for two free cell phones if you start service.”
Targeted, relevant advertising can be a good thing. Witness the text ads on Google. Of course it was all for naught as I recently signed up with T-Mobile (and loving it).
Minimalism
Minimalism is the topic for today. Textbased.com features the Minimal Web Project and a forum.
Should I submit my site? Minimalism was definitely my guiding principle, well, that and making sure I didn’t embarass myself with my “real” designer friends.
So Dutch it kills me
Jurriaan Schalken has a great personal/portfolio site called Directiondesign. Check it out.
The Flash version is particularly good, in that it has selectable text. I had no idea that was even possible (Flash 6?). I think I have to pick up Flash at some point.
He also describes how he designed his site. Very cool.
Shameless
Compare Sapient.com to Jason Lee Jones.com.
This is damn impressive. What I especially love is his claiming credit for United.com. But he did get his big break creating PDFs for Clement Mok, so maybe I’m just jealous.
Ah, this brings me joy.
Oh, here’s another copy.
A rant
I need to rant again about the sorry state of affairs that is the american telecommuncations industry. Why, oh why, can’t the telcos get along when it comes to text messaging?
If I want to send a text message to someone from the web, I need to know whether they even have it and what provider they use. Then I can go to either the Verizon site or whatever to enter my message. If I send a message to a phone number at the wrong provider (I enter a Verizon number at the AT&T site), it goes into the ether, never to return.
Of course, all of this relates to the fact that we don’t use SMS. Everywhere else in the civilized world, all the telcos interoperate when it comes to text messaging. There are even third party SMS sites like smsmebaby.com that let you send messages, create distribution lists, etc.
However, all may not be lost. It looks like Verizon is going to interoperate with SMS. The fact that there is a Web site that follows all this gives me hope.
Though nothing excuses Sprint PCS. I can receive messages, but I can’t reply to them from my phone. What the hell is that? I’m going to drop them as soon as my contract ends.
I am not an idiot. I swear.
I hate it when a computer interface makes me feel stupid. I’ve been using Citibank online banking for three years now. And up until today I thought the only way to get a listing of your past activity (ATM transactions, deposits, etc.) was by downloading a .csv file into Excel. Apparently, you can view the transactions onscreen, but the link was hidden for me.
Why? Because, the site inexplicably uses black as its link color. This wasn’t a huge problem for me in the past, because all other links were obvious by virtue of placement. However, I never guessed that they would put links in data tables. I’ve been wasting time for three years. Arrgh.
EZPass sucks
We finally made it back to NYC. What a nightmare. It took three days of waiting on stand-by to get on a plane.
Obligatory design musing: New York and Australia both have electronic toll collectors. The difference? In NYC you have to go through the toll booth at 5 mph. In Australia? Dedicated lanes that you drive through at the standard highway speed limit (100 kph) with no toll booths at all. Vastly superior. In fairness, I am comparing a new highway in Sydney to an old one (the entrance to the Holland tunnel), but still…
Navigating a supermaket
Whenever I visit another country I make sure to check out a supermarket to see all the bizarre items (like mustard and ketchup in one bottle in Brazil). Sorry to say, globalization has made the Sydney store the same as everywhere else. The only weird thing is Vegemite but everyone knows about that at this point. By the way, Vegemite is nasty.
However all was not lost. They did include some cool signage.
You know when you’re hunting for one item in a grocery store but don’t know which of the 14 aisles your product is located? The standard strategy is to read the signs that indicate the contents of each aisle. The problem is that they put the damn sign halfway down the aisle, so you have to walk the width of the store to see each sign.
This particular store figured out a solution. Nothing high-tech, just a triangle-shaped sign at the ends of the aisles that could be read from anywhere in the store. Smart.
Getting the details right
Two interesting domestic design differences between Australia and the USA. In Australia all power outlets have switches on the plate. While it isn’t very convenient if you were to plug in an overhead light, it is nice because it is predictable (you don’t have to randomly flip switches to try and isolate how to power an outlet) and because it saves wear and tear on the plugs. Nice.
Notice, however, that the switches are backwards. Up is OFF and down is ON. It takes some getting used to, though the Aussies thoughtfully included an orange indicator for the on position.
Now every traveler’s favorite topic: the toilet. Other countries besides Australia may do this, but it is new to me. There are two flusher buttons instead of the one standard lever on the American toilet.
Why you ask? The icons on each button represent “half-flush” or “full-flush”. Brilliant. It puts the responsibility of saving water into the hands of the user. None of this forced low-volume crap. When you need a serious flush, you need one. Instead of hanging around for 3 minutes for the tank to refill because some moron (perhaps you) put in a brick to lower the water usage. Power to the people!
Information transparency
We walked around Melbourne yesterday. The outskirts of the city looks a lot like New Orleans—lots of old buildings and wrought iron fencing.
I found two great examples of “information transparency.”
 |  |
First, throughout downtown Melbourne there are displays that show how many parking spots are available at each lot. Rather than drive around and finding nothing but “Lot full” signs, you instead drive on the main road until you see a display that points to a lot with spots. Very cool.
The second example was on the tram. There was sign that showed tram performance for the previous month. (e.g. on-time performance). As an added twist, if they fall below their published targets, pass holders get discounts.
Both of these are great examples. The London Underground showing the time until the next train is another. Why don’t we do more of this?
Dancing about (information) architecture
Over the last year or so, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that everything written about information architecture, experience design, interaction design, etc. was pure academic bullshit. I still read and appreciate the applied stuff but everything that is posted to SIG-IA and most trade magazines and sites is just whining. “We need a definition of information architecture”, “why won?t clients listen”, and the like. Its all nonsense.
I had started to believe the (para)phrase “Talking about [design] is like dancing about architecture”. Then all of a sudden someone comes along and actually writes something intelligent about the whole mess. Jesse James Garrett wrote a piece called ia/recon, in which he argues for the separation of the discipline “information architecture” from the title “information architect”.
He has a couple of great quotes:
“Research benefits architecture most when it seeks to define the problem we must solve. Research benefits architecture least—and can actually produce bad results—when it seeks to define the solution itself.”
and…
“I have hunches. Of course, it’s not enough merely to have hunches. They have to be good hunches. My hunches have to be better than the hunches my clients have—that’s why they hire me. ”
Amen brother.
Avast ye matey…
Music “piracy” is back in the headlines again. First with Disney CEO Michael Eisner ripping the computer industry in general, and Apple in particular, for fostering the stealing of music. Steve Jobs then responded with a salvo of his own, ironically while accepting a Grammy for technical achievement in music. Its all very petty and amusing. What the record execs need to understand is that the train has left the station and there is no way of getting Pandora back into her box. Digital music is here to stay. If the industry doesn’t come up with a pricing model that is fair and doesn’t include the notion of music as a license that expires unless you keep paying, it is dead.
This all reminds me of a speech that Courtney Love gave in which she blasted the record industry. I had always thought that she was a blithering idiot, but in this speech she was clear and articulate about all the issues in this controversy. Basically, the music distributors are the pirates exploiting the musicians. The fact that the label owns the copyright for a song instead of the artist is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. Compare that to the writer of a book who owns the copyright and licenses it to the publisher. The musician needs to go direct to the listener and digital distribution offers the means to do so.
Name one industry where the consumers love the suppliers, but both hate the distributor? I would quite happily pay the artist money directly. Someone, please give me the method to do so.
Watching my back…
I don’t know about the title, but as a flash experiment the The Man Project is pretty cool. A little surfing in his site reveals that he is 18. Should I worried about my future when kids are pumping out this kind of stuff?
Name that font
I went to see Royal Tenenbaums tonight. Great movie, great acting, great directing, yadda yadda. I can never spot a typeface, but was that Futura everywhere? Not only in the credits, but also in the movie itself?
Update: A little google searching reveals that Futura is director Wes Anderson’s signature font used in all of his movies. I found a good trivia page on TRT and here’s someone that isn’t a fan of Wes Anderson’s movies (note the typeface). Here’s an article on obsessive filmmaking including the use of Futura in TRT.
Tooting my own horn
The Morgan Stanley Individual Investors site went live last weekend. Overall, it is pretty faithful to our design, which is really impressive since we didn’t do the implementation. I’ve been extremely lucky in terms of the number of projects that have actually gone live. Well, other than the LEGO fiasco (case study to come).
So that’s what they’re called…
A plethora of Treemaps. I never knew what these things were called, but they are pretty cool. Useful? I don’t know, but they’re fun to play with. SmartMoney’s version was the first I had encountered, and while it is fun, I’m not sure anyone uses it to do actual work.
Prada SoHo? Not a fan.
Prada, property, praxis is another article on the Prada store, but this one seems right on the money. Koolhaas should have foreseen the crush of people that would be at that store. There’s nothing fashionable about the L train at 8:30am, nor is there anything fashionable about watching a few hundred people stand on top of each other while gawking at $1000 pairs of socks.
Beauty is in the eye of the jealous
Tuning The World is a beautiful site. I love it when a site makes me jealous.
Digital Atlas of New York
The Digital Atlas of New York City is pretty cool. The design is poor but it is an interesting site showing data in NYC from the 1990 and 2000 census. The site has maps on population, ancestry, race, income, education, commuting, etc.
Unfortunately, they are just a bunch of static maps, but they’re cool nonetheless.
I am impressed
I decided to get a new PowerBook G4. I ordered it from MacConnection at 12:30am, Thursday night (Friday morning), and it just eleven hours later. Amazing.
The machine? Unbelievable. Beautiful. The details are amazing. Keep in mind that I’m upgrading from a iMac (rev B), so I may be easily impressed. The industrial design is top notch. The little touches are great, for example, the AC adapter glows yellow when charging or green when done.
This was my first attempt at playing with OS X. The early verdict is positive. While is very beautiful, the usability for the most part is… adequate. My biggest complaint is that windows are either open or in the Dock. This is decidedly different from Win 95/98/2000 where items, whether minimized or maximized, are accessible from the task bar. What this means is that if you want to change to another window, you first must decide whether it is in the dock or open. After hunting in the dock, you then have to start moving windows out of the way to get it to come forward. Very, very odd.
Otherwise, it is impressive. You have to love the vector graphics. Everything is so damn beautiful. When you boot up in Classic (OS 9), it is just so damn clunky. The only other comment I have is that OS X is… smart. It knows how to do stuff that Windows or OS 9 would just flounder on. Just plug in an ethernet cable and it works. That is design.
At Apple, designers rule. And for the most part, it is an elightened dictatorship. I’m highly impressed.
Bookmark this
I just received yet another order from Amazon and I’m wondering just what happened to the Amazon bookmark? I’ve spent well over $4000 at Amazon over the years, and I’ve come to rely on having them. Ah, the bubble has truly burst when the bookmark division has been slashed.
