| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0424_score_one_fo.php | Date: 4/24/2006 9:57 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
This weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.
Cool to the Touch
This thoroughly charming graphic novel has the look of a Depression-era, hard-bound schoolbook. It ships with no dust jacket, opting instead for retro-style, two-color artwork embossed right into the cover itself. Its format is exceedingly pleasing, too: at approximately eight-inches tall and six and a half-inches wide, it has the feel of something very personal, almost like a private notebook. Indeed, it’s billed as “a story from the sketchbook of Seth,” and it fully has the feel of something intimate and warm in its story as well as its execution. It’s the kind of printed product that makes me think for a minute that there’s a whole spectrum of “user experience” factors that digital design can never approximate: the texture of a paper, the weight of a hundred and twenty-eight bound pages in your hands, the fine-grained fidelity of ink. None of which is news, I know.
As it happens, “Wimbledon Green” is also a tremendously engrossing read. Its absurdist take on the fictional world of high-stakes comic book collecting, is by turns hilarious, endearing and gripping. Seth uses a combination of documentary-style ‘interviews’ and comic strip conventions to methodically unveil a bizarre world of insanely competitive collectors and the scandals that plague their pursuits… it’s an oddball approach that works almost flawlessly, and it’s helped immeasurably by Seth’s confident, casual draughtsman’s; line, which compacts as many as twenty unfussy squares of comic narrative into each page without ever feeling oppressive. I couldn’t put it down.
The Hobo Conspiracy
I’ve promised to allow myself the luxury of not writing long, extrapolated posts, so I’ll say just one more thing: there’s a lengthy chapter about three-quarters of the way into the book in which Wimbledon Green himself gives a lecture on “Fine and Dandy,” a faux legendary comic book lost to the ages that concerns two hoboes named, you guessed it, Fine and Dandy. It’s a bravura piece of narrative, in which Seth uses the Green character to convincingly evoke a nostalgia for an imaginary, lost era, while simultaneously putting forward a wonderfully articulated argument on what makes for the best comics storytelling. The weird thing is that it does so through the odd mechanism of a pair of hoboes. Along with Jonathan Hodgman’s debut book, the similarly satirical “The Areas of My Expertise,” this makes the second book I’ve read this year that has a strangely prominent preoccupation with hoboes, with an imaginary underground culture of hoboes spread out all over the country, a shadow hierarchy of hoboes living in parallel with the American past. It’s weird. Something’s up with hoboes.
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0422_state_of_sub.php | Date: 4/22/2006 7:21 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
The estimable John Gruber has taken the plunge into full-time, self-employed blogging, and I envy him. As I wrote in the link I posted to the Elsewhere section of Subtraction.com, this is a win all around: readers will get more of Gruber’s uniquely detailed and exquisitely reasoned Macintosh punditry, and Gruber will get to focus on Daring Fireball, the central passion of his professional talents.
He writes, “Thereâs nothing I want to do more than this.” I can empathize, because while I’m genuinely engaged by many things in life — including the daily and deeply satisfying challenges at my job — there are few things I enjoy more than working on this weblog. As a designer, authoring a weblog is more or less like landing a dream project with a client who’s always in agreement with your own creative judgment. It’s no accident that the design profession and the blog phenomenon have been intimately entwined since this whole thing started. It’s the first medium that has allowed unfettered access to publishing for a population of craftspeople who have almost always had publishing just beyond our reach.
Posting Pains
That said, I’m finding it harder and harder to post as often as I’d like to this blog. My days are simply too busy for me to take out the hour or so that I need (at a minimum) to draft and post a new article to Subtraction.com. With the best of intentions, I usually try and prepare a slate of stories during the weekend for the coming week, thinking that I’ll get them out over the course of the following days. Somehow that never happens, though, either out of laziness or a vague belief that such an editorial schedule takes a bit of the spontaneity out of the act.
Don’t worry. I’m not copping out and shuttering Subtraction.com. I enjoy it too much to do so. This is more of a ‘state of the blog’ post, an update on where my head is with this whole enterprise. In fact, I plan on making a few additions to the site soon, maybe as soon as early next month, that will hopefully inject a little excitement into things around here even if I can’t post as often as I like.
I also have no plans to discontinue my efforts to post as often as I can. One way to do that going forward is to write shorter posts and to do so more than once a day — I’ve always been proud of the way this site visually structures the presentation of multiple posts on a single day, and I’d like to see that happen more often. I’ll be honest though: brevity is not my strong suit. I often set out to write what I hope will be very short posts, like “Music for Blogging,” that quickly evolve from three sentences to three full paragraphs.
The War against Comment Spam
Anyway, in my ongoing efforts to incrementally improve the site as a whole, I spent a little bit of time today doing some housekeeping. First, I’ve decided to make a policy change on the remarks that readers leave on each post: rather than leaving each post open to remarks indefinitely, they’ll now be closed as soon as the post has been moved off the home page.
As you can guess, this is a result of the relentless and imbecilic onslaught of comment spam that continually plagues blogs everywhere. I’m a longtime user of MT Blacklist, a plug-in for Movable Type which allows me to automatically capture potential comment spam in a kind of quarantine until I can verify its authenticity, but even that process has become too much of a pain. So I’ve turned to MT-Close2, another plug-in that automatically closes comments for older posts entirely. (I know, I should upgrade to Movable Type 3.2, but I just haven’t got the brainpower to think about it.)
This is a great way to combat comment spam because the vast majority of such traffic occurs on older posts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow readers who happen across interesting posts in the archive to add their two cents. That’s the theory, anyway. I found that, in practice, the vast majority of remarks added long after a post has been moved off the home page haven’t been particularly valuable contributions to the conversation. For a post like “Desktop Clutter,” for instance, which is a brief commentary on the generally unattractive aesthetics of a brand new Windows computer that makes no pretense at providing support or help of any kind, the remarks that users tend to submit these days run along the lines of, “I LOST MY HP ORGANIZE HOW TO GET IT BACK??!??” All caps and everything, I kid you not. So I’m not going to miss those late-in-the-game additions, believe me.
What I Have to Say
Another change I’ve made to the remarks: Notice on that same post that there’s now a dash of orange to call out the remarks added by yours truly. I’ve always found that the comments that are the most interesting on any blog post are the ones added by the author himself, so, modesty aside, I came to the conclusion that others would find the same thing about the remarks that I write. It was a hard decision to use the orange, because it effectively breaks the black-only color scheme of the whole site, but I think it᾿s worth the exception to create a moderately more interesting user experience. Hopefully you’ll agree.
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0418_music_for_bl.php | Date: 4/18/2006 8:16 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
For moments of concentration, when I want to be particularly productive in hammering out a paragraph of overly articulated prose, I set iTunes to play “Quique,” an album of ambient, droning sound-spaces by the English quartet Seefeel. It betrays the fact that I came into adulthood in the mid-1990s to say that, because if there ever was a height of that obscure band’s popularity, it was the last decade, when dissonant and amorphous sound structures became all the rage. Good times.
I cherish this album a lot, mostly because it almost never fails to help me turn out the distractions around me. Looking at my playlist in iTunes, the tracks from “Quique” are far and away the most frequently played from my library, and as I do increasingly more writing, they are becoming entrenched in their positions at the top of my charts. Over the years, I’ve become more and more reliant on it, almost to the point when I can’t write without playing it. I can actually design to just about anything playing on the radio or television, but when I need to form sentences and string them into coherent paragraphs, I’m almost duty-bound to put this album on and turn up the volume.
There’s an entire study field about strategies for writing that I’m barely familiar with, I know. People have all kinds of sophisticated tricks to help them make that singular mental shift into a writing mindset, and I’m sure putting on a particular album, like I do, is just one of the more primitive methods of managing one’s writing environment. Still, I that bet the army of bloggers out there who have become writers almost by accident have developed their own, ad hoc strategies for doing the same thing. If you’re one of those new breed of blog writers, I’d be very keen to hear about the methods you use. Maybe it’s also as simple as putting on a particular album, in which case I’m sure everyone would be interested to know which one it is, or maybe it’s something else that I could be doing instead of listening to these same nine tracks (as much as I care for them) over and over and over again?
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0417_the_home_pag.php | Date: 4/17/2006 11:48 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
One of my favorite features on the new NYTimes.com is the row of feature articles that we have running across the middle of the home page. With questionable creativity, we refer to them by their acronym, “MOTHs,” though when they appear at the bottom of an article I guess they really ought to be referred to as “BOTAs.” I had almost nothing to do with designing them, so it’s not bias talking when I say that I think they’re a very attractive, eye-catching method of highlighting features using sometimes very different kinds of imagery (or no imagery, as with the headline-only ones) in a surprisingly cohesive presentation.
They’re also incredibly effective at signaling a different kind of content from what appears at the top of the home page, which is an important role in a layout that must juxtapose sometimes incredibly serious and upsetting content with sometimes esoteric or lighthearted content. The editorial team have used the MOTHs to great effect to publish a mix of opinion, arts, sports, technology and other articles less urgent than those at the top of the main columns. They make it all work together.
Behind the Scenes with a MOTH
We had MOTHs in our old design, too, but they were comparatively diminutive and required some inelegant typographic overlays for labeling. In this design, they’re a bit simpler to implement, though they did provide their own challenges. Because there’s a real, live, human editor applying editorial judgment to each photo, they must be manually cropped. To minimize labor for those already hard-working folks, we had to standardize on a single size for all the MOTHs produced. For those that appear on the home page and on article pages, that’s a no-brainer, because they’re represented in exactly the same manner in both cases: a full row of images spanning the entire width of the page.
But for the section fronts, like, say, Movies, the uniformly sized MOTHs present another challenge: they span only the first two major columns, which isn’t quite enough room for four MOTHs, but more room than we would have liked to have given to just three. In this case, as you can see, the pictures don’t look particularly comfortable, with far too much room left over on either side of the three we fit in there.
Grid Matters
This is the result of an inconsistent layout grid: the underlying column structure on the home page is slightly different from the one we use on the section fronts and article templates. There are some complicated reasons for why this is so, but it serves as a good illustration of two key points: first, putting together the visual framework for a site as complicated as NYTimes.com is an intricate puzzle, and second, grids matter a lot in information design. Now you know why I’m so crazy for them.
It’s true that the grid differential on the section fronts causes an aesthetic problem, but as it happens, it actually helps us with a usability problem: the MOTHs are designed to scroll forward and backward, one by one, in a slide-show like behavior (using JavaScript), and so they require an intuitive visual cue in order to suggest that functionality.
Our solution for this on the home page was to tuck a forward arrow and a back arrow in the title bar of the entire MOTH structure, just above the right-most MOTH. This is tidy and visually elegant, but in some informal user testing we ran in the office, I wasn’t very encouraged that as many people will spot them and understand them as I would like. Looking again at the Movies section front, with the arrows placed instead on either side of the three MOTHs and within the excess space left over from the grid differential, the arrows are clear, lucid and usable — they almost can’t be missed. I would bet money that almost nobody overlooks or misunderstands those arrows, especially in comparison with their counterparts on the home page. It’s just too bad they’re not as optimally elegant as I’d like to see.
The Human Hand in Evidence
I almost forgot one other thing that I really like about the MOTHs. In news design, there is a propensity to favor the photographic image to visually communicate events and ideas. The Times generates no shortage of beautiful photography, and I begrudge none of it, but lately I’ve become really preoccupied with the relative scarcity of illustration on the World Wide Web.
Basically, I’d like to see a lot more of it — it’s not particularly in keeping with my wannabe Modernist pretensions, but I started out my design school career thinking I was going to be an illustrator, so I carry a torch for the discipline. Anyway, there’s something about these MOTHs that’s particularly conducive to showcasing illustration, or at least in these first few weeks of usage, the editorial team has done a great job making use of hand-drawn images when they’re appropriate. It’s nice to see some evidence of human artistry amongst all that hard news and slick lifestyle photography. All of which is a segue into a new initiative I’m brewing up to use at least a bit more illustration online… but that’s a post for another day
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0413_hiring_the_r.php | Date: 4/13/2006 11:58 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
As hard as it is for designers to learn management skills, it’s even harder for companies to find truly qualified design managers to hire. It’s just a rare quality, because for truly creative types, the act of managing can often be a daily struggle between satisfying the sensibilities of the artist’s id, and orchestrating all the business factors that intersect with a design team. It’s an unnatural and often uneasy internal alliance of opposing agendas.
All of this occurs to me because an acquaintance is in the middle of a search for a new design director, someone to bring a keen design awareness and a sense of leadership to the Web design group inside of the Fortune 1000 company where she works. Aside from the usual qualities that one looks for in a candidate — portfolio, professionalism, work history, proficiencies — I thought it important to look for a few key characteristics when looking for a design manager. So I sat down and knocked out a short list of must-haves that I would recommend looking for when hiring someone to manage a group of designers, specifically in an in-house design group.
Experience, Large and Small
Given the choice between someone who’s led a smaller team to small but significant success and someone who’s led a larger team to large but not particularly notable success, I’d choose the former every time. It’s very difficult for design organizations to scale, in my opinion, and I distrust managers who have thrived at the big Web design agencies; so much of the job description at a large agency essentially amounts to justifying overhead and creating unnecessary process (I’m speaking from past experience). To be sure, there’s a lot of valuable things that can be learned in those environments, too, but it only becomes truly valuable when combined with lessons learned from making do within smaller organizations.
Words Make Better Pictures
Written skills are among the most important assets a design manager can possess; the ability to clearly and lucidly state a case for a design strategy or a subjective design decision is invaluable, and can mean the difference in pulling off a truly great design solution. What’s more, the written word is a reliable window into a design manager’s thought processes. The quality of their prose can tell you if they’re clear thinkers or not. If a candidate for a managerial position can’t clearly express himself or herself on paper, it’s a red flag.
Can’t We All Just Get Along
Gauge each candidate’s capacity for building strong relationships inside and outside the design group, for diplomatically resolving conflicts and misunderstandings. Design can never function as an island unto itself, both because of the many ways it is dependent upon the other pillars of any business in order to achieve meaningful success, and also because design is almost universally misunderstood. Having a keen understanding of whether a potential manager will be the sort to build bridges or burn them is critical; an intensive part of any interview process should concern itself with a candidate’s grace under fire and amongst peers.
D.I.Y. Positive
Given how rare design management skills are, it’s a win to find someone who possesses all of the qualities I’ve listed above. But all other things being equal, I’d vote for the candidate who can build a Web site from scratch over one who can only ‘direct’ the design and development of a Web site. I’m not talking about building an entire complex, transactional site with a custom Ruby on Rails back-end. Rather, I’m talking about a human-scale site, with a small number of templates, authored with modern technologies like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, perhaps a modicum of database programming, PHP and lightweight content management systems, too. Those who can pull such things off bring a richer level of experience to the table that can be very persuasive when dealing with the folks who are actually building sites.
Admittedly, it’s an incomplete list, but these are the critical factors that jumped to the forefront of my mind when I sat down to consider this issue in detail. I’m sure I’ve missed at least a few very important things… and I’m hoping if that’s the case, then you’ll fill me in.
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0411_the_last_day.php | Date: 4/11/2006 11:34 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
I likes me a little “Daily Show” four nights a week, usually followed up by some “Colbert Report,” too. I also like to check in on the fading days of the still excellent “West Wing,” and of course I tune in faithfully for “The Sopranos” on Sunday nights. This evening, I watched a TiVo’d episode of the FX Network’s “Thief” for the first time, and I was impressed enough to want to give it another try. And this fall, I fully expect to be a devotee of Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which is almost assuredly going to be excellent.
TV is good. I’ve said it before, but I really do believe that it has come light years since the programming of my youth, the general awfulness of which can usually be neatly summed up in just two nasty words: “Matt Houston.” In spite of the continued prevalence of reality television, I honestly do believe that there’s loads and loads of truly original, compelling and smart programming on the air today.
More and Better
And, as we as a society become ever more fixated on the shallow distractions of celebrity and fictional drama and comedy, I don’t see that changing. TV is just going to keep getting better. And I’m just going to watch more and more of it. And none of this is has even yet accounted for the one hundred and sixty-two Yankees games they’re beaming into my living room six nights a week until we close out the World Series in October (fingers crossed).
Still, given this glowing endorsement of the medium that I’ve just made, I’m pretty close to a decision that’s going to derail all of that: I’m pretty sure that sometime in the next few weeks, I’m going to cancel my cable television subscription.
Reasons Why
For something that I don’t really want to spend a lot of time using, cable television is really expensive. I don’t watch nearly enough of it to justify its exorbitant cost. Let’s say I spend about US$50 per month on it, which is a fair way of breaking down the connivingly packaged bundle price that my cable company charges me for basic cable, premium channels and ‘fast’ Internet access.
Even if I spent, say, US$30 per month on a single season’s worth of any given television show on DVD — and I have no shortage of such shows to choose from on the shelves of any DVD retailer — that would still be way more television that I could watch in a single month. In the end, I’d save twenty dollars a month and I’d own the programming! Forever! The economics of subscribing to cable TV just don’t make sense for me.
But there’s more, too. It’s nothing revelatory to say it, but TV is a huge drain on my free time. And I feel like there are so many, many more things I could be doing with my free time than watching television. I could be writing this book about design that I’ve been tinkering with for a few weeks now. I could be putting together this podcast idea I’ve been talking about with a friend. I could be creating that new Web site that will serve as an outlet for my writings on popular culture that’s been in the back of my mind for about a year… or any one of a half-dozen other viable, original design and Web ideas that I’m sure could be huge successes, if I could just find the time.
So I have two great reasons to cancel my television subscription. Now I just have to do it.
| http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0410_wrapper821.php | Date: 4/10/2006 10:34 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
There’s a new “Links” sub-section at the bottom of the Subtraction.com home page, which is more or less what you would expect: literally, a list of sites that I think are interesting. I haven’t had it before, in part because I think such lists are a little show-offy for my taste, and also because I always feared I’d snub someone by inadvertently leaving out a link to them. But, as time has gone by, I’ve come to feel that such lists are de rigeur for weblogs, and it’s a little impolite not to have one on mine. So here you go; I’m sure I’ve accidentally missed someone, but I’ll be trying to update this regularly — or soon, anyway.
The presentation style of these links is the manifestation of an idea that I had for showing lots of blog links by making use of the favicon, a concept that I had wanted to use for a project at work. As it turned out, we opted not to use it, so I thought I’d put into service for the links section. I’m fond of it because it’s a nice use of some very standardista-friendly elements — a simple, unordered list and favicons — expressed in a manner reminiscent of typographical tricks more commonly associated with print design (the drawback, of course, is that I can only list sites and feeds that feature unique favicons; not for technical reasons, but for editorial ones).
Three’s Company
It even works in Internet Explorer, though I had to replace all the regular spaces with non-breaking space entities in order to avoid some truly weird wrapping. Debugging that got me thinking about how poor is our control over line breaks and text wrapping in CSS 2: if you look down the left edge of the links display, you’ll see a vertical stack of favicons, a visual confluence that I really don’t much care for. That never would have happened in print; I would have used manually line-breaks, tracking and kerning to create a more varied distribution of the icons.
Luckily, the next major revision of the Cascading Style Sheets standard, CSS 3, will generally improve control over
For all its benefits, the typesetting limitations in CSS 2 have become so well ingrained that I think a lot of people have forgotten that we’re still in a primitive state of typesetting — if our tools don’t allow us to control line and word breaks or the rag of a block of text, then we’re still working beneath our capabilities as visual communicators. If you can’t tell, I’m kind of champing at the bit to get these new properties. Why a browser like Safari doesn’t yet support them while supporting far more superfluous text effects like CSS-generated
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0405_das_boot_cam.php | Date: 4/5/2006 11:14 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
Here was my first reaction to Apple’s announcement that they are now officially enabling, if not supporting, the ability to boot Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on their new, Intel-based hardware through a software utility they call Boot Camp: “Holy shit!”
This is a momentous move for Apple, something representing a real break from the nagging case of N.I.H. syndrome that’s dogged the company like a lingering cough for years and years. The world outside of Apple’s many legions of overboard devotees seems to think so, too: this afternoon, the Boot Camp story made it into the prized top-left slot on our home page at NYTimes.com (I swear that I have no influence over such decisions), and when the market closed today, AAPL was up by over six dollars.
My second reaction was to email a friend who actually works inside the Apple Computer ‘mothership’ in Cupertino, CA, and ask him how he could ever keep a secret like Boot Camp — indeed how he manages to keep all of Apple’s juicy, expletive-inspiring product secrets — to himself. His response was, “Every day is a trial, man. Every day.” He’s twice the man I would be in that situation, to say the least.
On Closer Inspection
On a third pass, a bit more sobriety nibbled away at my excitement. While I’m ecstatic about the idea of essentially getting two computers for the price of one with my next Macintosh purchase, I think dual booting is short of the ideal that I had in mind. Boot Camp does nothing to mitigate the fact that dual booting is incredibly inconvenient, that a user must first make a modal shift in hardware to move from one operating system to the other.
Through the lens of time and productivity, this is a costly decision-making process, and I can’t imagine swapping back and forth between Windows and Mac OS X more than once or twice a day. For the many users like myself who often need to work on two different platforms at once, it’s still not an ideal solution, nor does it truly mitigate the need to actually have two physical, separate computers on our desks.
When Apple moved to Intel processors, my original hope was for native support for Windows applications inside the Mac OS itself. This means launching programs written expressly for the Windows operating system alongside those written expressly for the Mac OS — getting the applications without the overhead of the frankly unwanted operating system, essentially.
This has been the focus of the open source WINE project, which seeks to give us the world of Windows software without Windows. There’s a Macintosh-specific version of WINE called Darwine, and it has been making steady progress. I still hold out a lot of hope for its eventual maturity, but it’s still a long way off.
Boot Camp, though it’s being released today only in public beta form, is here and now, and it presumably has the more or less full commercial (if not technical) support of Apple Computer itself, which makes it dramatically more viable than Darwine. Still, it strikes me as reaching for only low-hanging fruit: making Windows available from a dual-boot prompt on Intel hardware is only minimally impressive from a technology standpoint. Don’t we expect more from Apple, a company that is practically synonymous with systems innovation?
Booted Predecessor to Boot Camp
The Boot Camp announcement reminded me of the past ’daily trials’ that Apple engineers have endured while building spectacularly unexpected products. Digging back into Paul Kunkel’s gorgeous 1997 book, “Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group,” I re-read the passages on the “Jonathan” concept computers built at Apple in the mid-Eighties and designed by John Fitch:
“The idea came to [Fitch] in September 1984. ‘For weeks I had been thinking about a small computer that users could put in their living room and slowly build into a full-blown machine as their needs increased,’ said Fitch. ‘But rather than do a standard motherboard configuration, I designed a backplane that contained the power supply and a few ROM chips in the base… I/O connectors on the back, and a track on top that connected directly to the bus (the backbone of the computer, which functions as a high-speed data highway).’
“Fitch’s concept called for the backplane and track to support book-shaped modules, each containing circuit boards and chips for running the Mac OS, Apple II software, DOS, Windows or Unix operating systems, plus other modules for connecting disk drives, modems and networking hardware all plugged into the same track. Since the backplane was horizontal, and the modules were small and slender, Fitch imagined the system as a book on a shelf. ‘A basic system would have a short shelf with one or two books. A business setup would have three or four books. And a power system would have seven or eight books on a wider shelf.’”
The Jonathan concept would have made the Macintosh the centerpiece of a hardware system that would run virtually any operating system natively. And while nothing I read about it explicitly addressed the issue of easily swapping back and forth between multiple OS’s, it’s still a fundamentally more radical approach to increasing hardware value through software availability than is Boot Camp.
Please Do Not Feed the Operating Systems
Moreover, Jonathan was first presented to Apple executives in June 1985 — twenty-one years ago. Apple’s CEO at the time, the notoriously short-sighted John Sculley, nixed the project, “…voicing the fear that once the Mac and DOS were offered on the same platform, more Mac users might move to DOS than DOS users would move to the Mac. ‘That reasoning floored us,’ says Fitch. ‘Apparently, Sculley had less faith in the Mac than we did.’”
It’s true that Apple has been rescued from that narrow thinking since Steve Jobs’ return to the helm. And it does seem that, this time out, there’s a genuine belief that Windows is unlikely to sap users away from the Mac platform. As analysts have pointed out today, Boot Camp could be a “game changer,” creating the potential for a new influx of users leaving Windows for the Macintosh.
But in spite of all the innovation Apple brings to the table in so many arenas, the company seems to remain skittish about allowing its customers access to any other operating system than its own. Boot Camp is huge news from a business angle, and it’s going to be a delight to many customers — including me, probably. But that’s only because Apple has set the bar so low in terms of what we’ve come to expect from the company when allowing us to mingle freely outside of the Mac OS X garden. As it stands, Boot Camp is disappointingly short on innovation, especially in contrast to Jonathan; I hope it’s just the first step towards an OS strategy that completely upends the way we think about how multiple operating systems can work together.
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0403_the_awesome_.php | Date: 4/3/2006 1:25 AM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
Alert and not-so-alert readers of NYTimes.com will notice a little something different this morning: a major redesign of the site’s look and feel, from top to bottom (almost). In a Sorkin-esque, marathon session of exhausting and exhilarating proportions, our team spent all weekend implementing this new design, pushing it live in progressive stages starting Sunday afternoon. The home page, that hugely symbolic focal point of any site, went live at 11:33p Eastern Standard Time.
I think it’s a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it: the best reaction it could receive from readers (those not among that vanishingly small subset of the general populace who can be called ‘design savvy’) would be something along the lines of “The new design looks just like the old design.— That would suit me fine, because it would signal a continuity that I think is completely appropriate for such a closely watched site like The New York Times’, and besides, I know for a fact that it’s more elegant and more useful than it was before.
Who Did This
One little detail that I should clarify: I did not design this. Ever-changing marketplace and business pressures had made a redesign necessary long before I even began talking to management about the possibility of joining the company. By the time everything fell into place and I started work, the fundamental creative strategy had been set, a select few representative new templates had been designed, and all that remained was applying the new look and feel across the entirety of the site.
I’m being cheeky, of course, because it was still a major effort. For the past two months or so, I’ve been learning a lot in a very short amount of time about all the major sections of the site, their innumerable anomalies and special instances, and the complex method in which the whole production is turned out on an hourly basis. And that whole process of ramping up was compounded by the need to continually make low-level art direction decisions, interpreting the original, approved look and feel as it manifested itself throughout the hundreds of regularly-viewed pages on the site. It was an intensive but endlessly fascinating education — and it continues.
As you can hopefully tell from what I’ve written so far, this isn’t an attempt to disavow myself of responsibility for this major overhaul. I stand by it, largely because I genuinely think it’s an excellent piece of design, and I’m unflinchingly proud of the work that I did on it. Moreover, I want to give credit where credit is due: The Times went out-of-house to a design studio to help with the original creative strategy, but none of it would have been possible in practice without the extraordinary effort that the designers here put into it.
Most all of this extremely talented team were here before I arrived, and they really came through on this gargantuan task; it’s no exaggeration to say that they breathed life into the whole thing, and made its tremendous scope possible in the short amount of time we had to make it a reality. This redesign is really theirs, and along with the technology and editorial teams, they deserve the credit for every way in which it succeeds. In the coming days, I’ll try and write more about the intricacies of the redesign, but looking at the final result today, just a short while after we launched it, I can say honestly that I like it a lot. I’m proud to be here.
| http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0327_ias_in_iso.php | Date: 3/27/2006 11:52 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
For folks still recovering in whole or part from the exhaustion of the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, just think about those fellow attendees who went on to this year’s Dorkstock — I mean, this year’s Information Architecture Summit, wrapping up right now in Vancouver. I kid, I kid. Because if you follow the blog-borne reports coming out of the conference, you’ll see some really interesting stuff going on: tagging, tagging and more tagging, as one attendee told me, and lots of fascinating discussions on the organization, management and manipulation of information. Plus some flat out, wild and crazy fun. Look out.
Seriously, I’ve been following the events through excellent summary posts from Luke Wroblewski, among other bloggers, and feeling like I’m getting way more reporting value from the generally more analytical mindsets of the information architecture audience than I saw come out of South by Southwest. A lot of this ad hoc reporting is so good it’s almost like I’m there, but I’m not. It all sounds geekily absorbing, and it makes me think that maybe next year I’ll go.
You Don’t Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter
Then again, I got to wondering why the I.A. Summit and South by Southwest — which is the de facto summit for Web development in general — are separate events at all? There’s probably a tale to be told here about professional solidarity, camaraderie and/or jealousy that would explain why these two conferences, held just two weeks from apart this year, are unlikely to ever be consolidated into a single conference, but it would make a lot of sense.
Information architecture, for every way we’ve benefitted from its rise in the past decade, often seems to succumb to arcane tendencies — a sometimes impenetrable craft conversed among insiders in exclusionary language. I concede there’s a benefit to devoting an intensive series of days in a strange foreign country (okay, Canada) solely to discussion and idea exchange among members of this still young field. But I can’t help but think that the discipline as a whole would benefit more acutely — that we would all benefit more acutely — from a forum more inviting to all-comers.
Maybe not before this point in time, but certainly at this stage in the growth of online practice, we’re ready to have visual designers, programmers, marketers and business from all over the world mingling and butting heads together, in the same conference center. I’d be very happy to attend a conference that combines the eclecticism of South by Southwest — ideas and practice from all aspects of the online world, side by side — with the more focused track that we see on the slate at the I.A. summit. I know that I would benefit greatly from it, which is the origin of this mild rant, but I’d venture to say that a lot of information architects would benefit from it, as well. I’m pretty sure.
| http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0323_cmon_.php | Date: 3/23/2006 10:51 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
My first exposure to the “Getting Real” approach to Web application development came just about a year ago, in a session at the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Festival given by the method’s putative leader, Jason Fried of 37signals. It was called “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams,” and it was an hour-long primer on what then seemed like a completely counter-intuitive approach to creating hosted applications for businesses: do away with superfluous preparation and documentation, whittle your team of trusted collaborators down to no more than a very small handful, rush to build and rush to iterate — in short, just do it.
The Methodology with the Mostest
Since then, a lot has happened: using this organizing principle, 37signals has completely shifted away from its prior role as a trend-setting design consultancy, settling comfortably into an even more prominent role as an even more trend-setting ‘publisher’ of some of the highest profile Web applications anywhere. The company has released an unbroken series of critical hits: Backpack, Writeboard and Campfire — that have become nearly ubiquitous in industry discussion. In a dovetailing effect, the socialized Internet concept of Web 2.0 has become even more unavoidable: seemingly everyone is authoring new, hosted applications, and in a weird twist of deja vu that harkens back to another era that just passed us, like, twenty minutes ago, everyone is starting to get incredibly rich off of these Web applications. It’s the old Web, except that it’s a new Web.
For a methodology that, eighteen months ago, would get you laughed out of any whiteboarding session in town, it’s been a gangbuster ride to the forefront of the popular imagination — or at least the imaginations of would-be Web moguls everywhere, and of those of us who were hesitant to join the fray. Along the way, I myself went from being something of skeptic of the “Getting Real” method to something of a convert — and then, somehow, to being a provider of two supporting quotes in what can be fairly described as the de facto bible of this philosophy, a book released last month by 37signals entitled (what else?) “Getting Real.”
You’ve Surfed the Blog Posts, Now Buy the Book
So what, then, to make of the book version of this prevailing methodological trend? If ever the medium were the message, this is a prime example: the book is not a book in the traditional sense, but a downloadable PDF that can only be bought with the help of a Web browser. And clearly it reads that way, too. Its tone is casual and unforced, eschewing the formalities one might find in the kinds of books for which trees die: meticulously explained terms, qualified descriptions and an attention to the fineries of grammar and punctuation are all missing. The difference between “Getting Real” as an electronic document and a similar book that might have been printed, shipped and sold on shelves is the tonal difference between an editor that works in a tee-shirt out of a coffee shop and an editor in a full suit at his desk in a Manhattan skyscraper.
It’s not great literature, but then again literature is hardly the point. “Getting Real” makes little pretense at being anything more than a friendly explication of a particular working methodology. But its insistent modesty belies two characteristics that make it, if not literature, then something still more than what it seems: these hallmarks are the authors’s indelible sense of conviction, and the book’s particular place in history.
The Web 2.0ist Manifesto
Even without putting on airs, the language in this book is emphatic. With chapter titles like “Hire the Right Customers,” “Start with No,” and “Actions, Not Words,” there’s an uncompromising and unpretentious assuredness present that’s rare in design writing. The book is full of advice and guidance, true, but it’s also suffused with succinct and narrow declarations like this one, on finding the right market for your application:
“If you’re having this problem, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of others are in the same boat. There’s your market. Wasn’t that easy?”
Jarringly definitive statements like these abound, making it hard to read “Getting Real” as anything other than a manifesto, a rallying cry for the geekiest and best-typeset revolution ever.
You can hardly fault 37signals for this, because this is who they are. If you turn to them for lessons, you need to prepare yourself not for a series of helpful pointers, but for what practically amounts to a total belief system: a highly opinionated, take-no-prisoners attitude that informs nearly everything they do. It’s in full evidence on the company’s Signal vs. Noise weblog, which regularly dispenses and debates their evolving philosophy, and to great effect. In an industry crowded on the one end by faceless and overrated agencies of great scale, and on the other by individual stars basking in the glow of individual success stories, 37signals have staked ground as the player with the most complete and comprehensive world view. They’re playing on an entirely different level than most of us.
The History of Now
Though “Getting Real” makes no overt pretense at becoming a classic of developmental theory, its emphatic language suggests otherwise — as does its place in history. A year on, the common-sense tenets of the Getting Real method are becoming common wisdom: smaller is better, less interface is more, build for the now and not for the unknown. Even if you refute the overarching narrative of Getting Real, its components are being disseminated with great success, such that more and more designers and developers are employing its methods, oftentimes without the explicit awareness that they’re even doing so. This is the zeitgeist.
Given that, it’s hard to deny “Getting Real” as, at least, important documentation of this particular point in the evolution of design and development for the Web. You could say that historically, it’s not to be missed, and that would be true; if you want to have a first hand look at how this industry’s working methods are changing, this is the book to read. But if you’re resigned to being passively buoyed by shifting trends, then you can skip it: before too long, anything of consequence to be found between its digital covers will be fully dispersed in standard practices. It’s Jason Fried’s world, after all. We just develop in it.
| http://www.subtraction.com/arc...ves/2006/0322_wireless_gon.php | Date: 3/22/2006 9:47 PM |
| Author: Khoi Vinh |
Among the many things I wish I knew a lot more about is how my home network works. I mean, I have a pretty decent if admittedly fundamental handle on how TCP/IP and DHCP work together, but heaven help me if I ever try to get them to behave reliably for anything other than the most basic of configurations.
I use a heck