so i was talking to nick the other day about a site su and i are making. i was advocating SiFR for the headlines, which nick promptly shot down. we’ve done this in the past, and it got bitchy remarks from a handful of gamers on a public forum. not surprising to me—most technologists are almost reflexively anti-design.
sometimes nick seems this way, as he is both tinkerer and writer—both of which add up to a need for un-opinionated information and text. he is also deeply pragmatic. he starts with utility—i get that. but then style for him is an odd grab-bag of ideas. as with any long-standing client, working with nick is part telepathy and part understanding of his own media usage. ultimately, what he feels works best is what’s easiest to access for a reader. pure style is secondary to reading.
i feel like the typography we present on the gawker media sites is often inadequate for a publishing company with many different faces. focusing these faces for so many different sites is difficult to say the least, when we have only a handful platform-independent typefaces to choose from. it is so difficult to design without my tools.
with our SiFR typographic implementation, i was positive i’d found a way to please both me as a stylist and nick as an author. unfortunately, su and i had never anticipated one particular comedic banana peel flung in our way.
we got static from people using flash-stopping CSS. they protested that we weren’t catering to their particular weird software setup: CSS which allows flash to download but not play, thus ignoring the accessibility su and i build into gawker’s sites. if they would uninstall flash, they would see styled text headlines on our sites without knowing they were actually seeing a backup method… but no. they wanted to have flash content, but usable only on their terms. it pisses me off that because of macromedia’s flukey growth of their products, i am forced to work towards the lowest common denominator when i was so close to real style.
i suspect the problem lies in macromedia’s miseducation of designers, their disregard for accessible information, and the dot-com bubble’s endless stable of inexperienced design talents. there’s nothing that will fuck up a design worse than an overenthusiastic stylist who forgets to consider utility. if these things hadn’t happened, the anti-flash crowd would probably be a little less violent.
so anyway.
nick said, jokingly-but-not-really, “a blog is a writer’s revenge against the designers and marketers that messed it all up the last time.” that stung, after so many years of trying to design well for both technology usage and styled content. i responded, “and yet it leaves us designers who like to write completely in a lurch.”
i’m not really sure how i feel about this, other than being intensely weary of a handful of technologists childishly refusing to see that visual design is as useful as forms of engineering when well-applied. no wonder so many blogs are so goddamned ugly. and no wonder my own craft is so deeply maligned—sometimes even by a friend as trusted as nick.
…just to show that i love you, you sorry bunch of bitches. here’s some things i’ve been paying attention to lately, largely to do with web standards, design haters, and the seventies. not much relation between the three that i can tell.
taking on a stand on the semantic web. her point is that the semantic web probably won’t work.
the pile of pedants that is metafilter pointedly ignores usability statements (here’s another one) on SiFR because they just don’t like flash. nor do they like design. then they turn around and design. the web is funny.
robert hunter middleton is my god right now, simply because of the goofy dancing forms of his stilla, designed in 1973. i think i like the lowercase F from the ripoff better, though.
hao li has designed a fantastic addition to apple’s safari web browser which adds some deeply missed capabilities.
autumn whitehurst hits deco right where the seventies did. this work is gorgeous (via milan, who’s the tastiest).
before anyone gets their panties all up their butts, i totally love livejournal. shit goes on there that could happen nowhere else. about time someone lent that community some legitimacy.
update: jesse ewing asks if i drew the imagery. i only wish i did; someone gave it to me and i can’t remember who. jesse said that the portait looked to him like mena trott of six apart… and you know what? nothing could make that image funnier.
if anyone knows the artist, i’d love to credit them. contact me via the nav to the left.
william drenttel has written one of the cattiest, most snobbish threads i have ever seen a designer write. there’s a chance he is actually interested in exploring plagiarism in this article, but it feels to me like he’s simply taking satisfaction in calling another artist a thief. he fixates so thoroughly on the specific instance he’s talking about that any universal notions in the argument are pretty much demolished. the accused artist makes her own case towards the end. it’s an interesting fight, if nothing else.
via language log: the american dialect society’s word of the year (pdf), announced by category.
new apple hardware at gizmodo. this is such a smart stab at the mini-component market. all of the existing systems are fairly overpriced, and none offers the stability of the mac os. i think su may have just decided he wants this over a mini windows system he’d been ogling.
we’ll see if that actually happens; su vascillates between a thoughtful “huh” and outright hatred of the mac os when he’s working with it. kinda interesting though, to see some of the bizarre (to me) things he expects it to do, having come from a different platform. at one point he was trying to merge the contents of two folders with the same name by dragging one to the location of the other one. he apparently expected the system to combine the contents and attempt to not destroy data… which i found kinda odd. i mean, you’re moving a folder object to a place where there’s already a folder object with the same name. assuming you know a place can only contain folder objects with distinct names… doesn’t that mean you wanna replace the original? i thought so. then again, i’ve always been on a mac so i don’t know any other paradigm.
but whatever. a system is a system. i’m no mac zealot; i just use what i grew up on (as the windows platform was pathetically underpowered for print-level graphic creation when i was learning the ropes). but it’s interesting to see how someone from a different platform interprets or misinterprets what you take for granted.
i did find exactly one compelling reason to switch to a windows system at one point… the tablet pc. i’m rather disappointed apple hasn’t done something like this yet. the first time i picked one up, it felt so much more natural and real to directly touch my data onscreen than push it around from another location. if anyone has the means (they’re pricey right now), i highly recommend it.
a few years ago, i discovered a fantastic radio station called flaresound (now netmusique), and along with it a DJ named dyno. he spins some beautiful house… and he’s sill working. dyno contacted me yeterday to let me know about a new mix he’s published. good stuff. low, deep, and tinged with echoes from jamaica. lovely work.
so a bandaid was a bandaid was a bandaid to me until yesterday. the first thing i did was drop a cracked mirror tile on my foot, thus ripping a deep, ragged hole right over a giant vein. not fun—and how the hell do you keep a foot wound disinfected, anyway? you swig back a couple, prop it higher than your heart, pop in a couple of episodes of buffy, and send the boyfriend module out to grab a box of these suckers. they won’t come off, pull, or stick. i never thought i’d say it… but here’s to you, 3m.
i sure didn’t.
“weblogging is easy! your crippled mother could do it!”
sure it is, if you feel like launching her into a blogger account—and that’s the perception we giggle at when we work with gawker media. making a new gawker is work—and today, gawker launches lifehacker and gridskipper which took about six months for su and i to design and build. we finished tweaking design on the last iterations friday afternoon… and saturday, i didn’t even wake up until four PM.
six months..? oh my god, why!?
for that answer, you’ll have to wait a few hours. i’m writing something. for some introductory tidbits, here’s nick’s take on it for right now. oh, go ahead. you know you hang on every last word.
so let’s talk a bit about what makes gawker’s two new ones so damned special: it took forever for them to be right. they represent some big changes under the hood, both structurally and conceptually.
nick, su and i started making gridskipper in early june of last year when it was called rezoner, its editor was the fantastically funny dana rasso (whose work i love), gina trapani had long hair and only worked on kinja, and gawker media was an occasional client for me. the name changed, the editor changed, gina got a great haircut and got her own gawker title—and gawker became one of our daily concerns. on top of that, we were working hard to change the inherent structure of gawker’s weblogs—so suddenly, gawker became an all-consuming notion.
structure first: gridskipper was the first gawker title su coded from the ground up. previously, he’d contributed partial css to defamer (which is still my favorite visual design of the entire company). when su first started working on gridskipper, gawker’s entire template structure was hard-coded into its templating system, and its code was far from standard. it was, in short, a typical weblog. that’s fine for a personal site with a few hundred entries, but gawker media has around 30,000 articles entries spread across eleven titles with one to three editors apiece. all of the titles contain custom plugins for various categorization and link management functions and custom css tailored to the title’s writing style. it’s an amazing amount of content for a huge audience. a simple rebuild of gizmodo—just one of the titles—takes about three hours to finish. movable type is a good publishing platform for smaller titles, but gawker’s needs tax its ability on a daily basis.
su began the process by stripping all of the templates for changeable data out of movable type’s templating system entirely—most of what you see is a series of includes. he then re-wrote the page structure to be as close to standards-compliant css as he could (considering some of the rather bizarre ad structures we have to deal with from advertisers) and usually spends about half his days working under the hood to make sure links don’t break, categories work, blah blah blah.
su is probably the most able coder in the entire weblogging industry. he’ll never brag about it, but that’s my job. if anyone would like a list of items to back that claim up, i’ll be happy to provide it via email. and oh, look, i’m a shill: you can call us if you need a site designed, redesigned, or worked on (weblog or not).
coming soon: articles on the concepts driving both gridskipper and lifehacker, also: why nick and i have turned into the ozzie and harriet of the weblog set.
