paper & pencil

decline of magazine covers

Michael Beirut mourns The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover

now that magazine covers only consist of celebrity photos, the author wonders what happened to the magainze covers designed by people like George Lois for Esquire in the 60s.

George Lois’s covers for Esquire provided my first glimpses into the world of graphic design thinking. In the suburban Cleveland of my childhood and early adolescence, Lois’s images — Mohammed Ali pierced with arrows a la St. Sebastian, Richard Nixon in the makeup chair, Andy Warhol drowning in his own soup – didn’t look like anything else in our house. I realize now they were like messages from another world, a world of irreverence and daring. Each was so brutally concise, so free of fat and sentiment. They weren’t just pictures, they were ideas. Even before I knew he existed, I wanted to do what George Lois did. I wanted to come up with those ideas. I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

he does go on to say that these types of covers just wouldn't work in today's marketplace, where covers need to seduce, not shock.

Rick Poyner summed this up nicely in the comments:

The shift from visual idea to visual formula reflects a shift of power since the 1960s from editorial priorities to marketing priorities. Consumer magazines exist to attract advertising, not because their publishers want to express a critical point of view about the world. The editorial is there to deliver readers to the advertisers and most of it is utterly saturated with the concerns and values of the advertising that surrounds it. But we knew all this.

The reason there are so many coverlines is simply that publishers are convinced that the more they offer upfront, the more chance something will appeal to readers. This leads to bad design, but unfortunately it appears to work.

web standards awards

WebStandardsAwards.com - "form and function combined".

Every week each of the three regular WSA judges is allowed to award a Silver Star to a new web site that they think is the most deserving. At the end of each month all the Silver Star winners are voted upon by a pool of special judges and a monthly Gold Star award is given out to the top site in that month.

Mandatory criteria:

* Main pages should validate as HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 compliant using the W3C validator. Some exceptions may be given for obvious typographical errors and the inclusion of rich media, such as Flash.
* Pages must maintain — in spirit — a separation between data and presentation, such as that enabled by the coupled usage of XHTML and CSS.
* Appropriate tags must be used to mark up data i.e. tables are for tabular data.

While assessing a site, the judges will consider the following points:

* Visual appeal
* Degree of separation between data and presentation
* Quality of code
* Usability
* Accessibility
* Uniqueness

the design of the awards site itself is quite nice. love the use of css to create the tabbed navigation.

blog maps

infovis has posted visualizations of the blogging world.

there are city maps with locations of bloggers at major stations:

London

New York

Washington

(via infodesign)

personalization features

IBM research paper Personalizing the user experience on ibm.com(pdf) - provides a listing of personalization features and descriptions of each type (p.5).

some examples:

Personal Book An area on the Web site that is available from any page on the site. This area provides one place where a registered, logged-in user can access and modify all personal data about himself or herself and access all personalized functions on the site.

Subscription-based services All services in which the user must indicate an interest before they are active for that user. For example, a user may subscribe to a security alert system to receive alerts either in his or her Personal Book or through e-mail whenever a security patch becomes available.

Adaptive presentation tailored to user characteristics Features that adapt the contents of the Web page based on either the user’s known characteristics (e.g. adapt information content to the user’s job type) or context (e.g. because the current line speed is low, do not send unnecessary graphics).

Personal preferences in page layout or format (customization) This includes features that allow users to specify aspects of the Web page that they would like.

Adaptive navigation Features that adapt the Web page presentation and/or content based on user profile, other pages visited during this session, current emotional state, or current task or context.

Future purchase considerations Features that make it easier for Web site visitors to make purchases in the future. Examples of these features include the creation of an individualized catalog of items a customer often buys, recommendations based on past purchases, or wish lists in which a customer can indicate an interest in items should they go on sale.

they also identified different identity types (p.7):

Invisible An individual who not only has not registered with the site, but has cookies turned off so that the Web site cannot detect whether he or she has ever visited before. Lowest level of trust in the site.

Anonymous
An individual who has cookies enabled but has not registered on the site. Shows slightly more trust
of the site.

Identified
An individual who has registered with the site, providing personal information in exchange for the
use of personalization features. Shows a high degree of trust in the site.

Associated
An individual who has both registered with the site and indicated that he or she is associated with a
particular team or organization. Shows a very high degree of trust that the site will provide value to
him or her and the team.

Differentiated
An individual who has created multiple profiles on the Web site for different purposes (e.g. home
and business, different business roles). Shows a very high degree of trust in the site.

inherent value testing

new uie article: Inherent Value Testing :

. . . a simple usability testing technique that can help you measure how your site communicates your product's inherent value.

2 phases:

Phase 1: Work with a set of existing loyal customers and have them give you a tour of the site and point out what they like and why.

Phase 2: Have a set of potential customers and give them the tasks outlined by the loyal customers and have them role-play different scenarios.

What Spool and his team discovered when conducting one of these tests is that while the loyal customers raved about certain features and services, the potential customers could not find information on any of the same services.

As the potential customers used the site, we focused on what they thought the service was good for. We asked them to tell us what they liked and didn't like about the service. We watched where they went on the site and how it convinced them to take advantage of the service.

Everybody was surprised at just how ineffective our client's site was at communicating those core values that the experienced customers had raved about. Rarely did a prospective customer encounter anything that communicated the service's low prices. In fact, each customer stated outright that they thought the service was more expensive than familiar competitors, when in fact the service was actually cheaper.

Nor did the prospects see anything that communicated the service's high quality or exceptional customer support. The prospects even mentioned, without prompting, they believed the overall service quality would likely be poor. They said this was because of how difficult they found the site to use.

update 2/25/2004:

uie just posted part 2: Conducting Your Own Inherent Value Testing

design advice

some great thoughts on interaction design from Jonas Löwgren in his B&A article Just How Far Beyond HCI is Interaction Design? - a reaction to reading Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction

“First, recognize that the ‘right’ requirements are in principle unknowable by users, customers and designers at the start. Devise the design process, and the formal agreement between designers and customers and users, to be sensitive to what is learnt by any of the parties as the design evolves.”

- J.C. Jones, design theorist

But design is innovative; it is about exploring possible futures, where the users as well as the technology are different from today. In some situations, it even makes more sense to think in terms of designing the users. As Terry Winograd points out in his interview (p. 71): “one of the biggest challenges is what Pelle Ehn calls the dialectic between tradition and transcendence. That is, people work and live in certain ways already, and they understand how to adapt that within a small range, but they don't have an understanding or a feel for what it would mean to make a radical change, for example, to change their way of doing business on the Internet before it was around, or to change their way of writing from pen and paper when word processors weren't around. I think what the designer is trying to do is to envision things for users that the users can't yet envision. The hard part is not fixing little problems, but designing things that are both innovative and that work.”

ethnography

From dan saffer's what i'm studying blog is his notes on a talk by Rick E. Robinson (former CXO at Sapient, founder eLabs) on "ethnography and things to think with."

There are three core parts to ethnography:

* You go to them. It always happens in context.
* You talk to them. Talk to the subjects, not read about them.
* You write things down. Develop a disciplined set of data so that your findings can be passed along and used by others.

The research itself is comprised of four things:

* A description. Of something: a thing, an activity, a belief, a setting, etc.
* Interpretation. Not summary, not "insight," not wholly "emergent" either. It is grounded in the subject.
* Towards an end. Research has to be both instrumental (useful to the people you do the research for) and salient (it has to be to the point).
* Within constraints. Of site, setting, time, tools, material, solution spaces.

you need to go in with a hypothesis to test against - a "hunt statement"

We are going after X so we can do Y.

For Rick, the real purpose of research is to create models of thought, which then become "things to think with." These models live between the setting of the research and what needs to be created. They describe something that is fundamentally "other" in a way that people who weren't there but have an interest in it can understand and apply it. Good models are like good art: subversive. Any representation or re-representation always offers the idea that things can be different.

4096 color wheel

this color wheel contains a palette of 4096 colors - web-safe and web-smart. both use 3 pairs of hex digits. also shows you the unsafe equivalent.

you can type in the hex code for an unsafe color and get the closest web-safe and web-smart equivalents.

found type

itchyrobot.com's collection of found typography

bless these people who collect and post this stuff up for me to enjoy!

(via memepool)

paul rand's legacy

With the recent publication of a new book on Rand (Paul Rand: Modernist Design, edited by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo), Michael Bierut lodges a few complaints about Rand that spurs a very lengthy discussion in the comments.

The discussion seems to revolve around the issue of how realistic should biographies on Rand be? Many feel that putting Rand up on such a hugh pedastal is misinforming young designers on the realities of being a designer.

William Drenttel:

But, those perpetuating his legacy do not want to acknowledge that he might, on occasion, have been a hack too. This is especially important in evaluating Rand because he created a myth about his own integrity: the history, as he told it, is that he never let clients tell him what to do. I believe this is a falsehood, and it wrongly suggests to young designers that they too should aspire to an uncompromising relationship with clients, rather than acknowledging the struggle and challenges of a complex practice.

Paul Rand also created a myth around clients: namely, that great work is only possible when one finds, courts, and educates that rare breed — the enlightened, trusting, powerful CEO who makes it possible to do great work. Rand certainly had such clients. (I've had three in my own time.) Yes, such clients are an occasion for celebration. But it is not true that great work cannot be done through other means, and through teams, and through new decentralized organizations. It is wrong to suggest that the only way to do great design is to find and tap into the singular vision of an individual client. Ironically, such a view underestimates the power of designers to persuade, and to participate in, increasingly fluid and complex organizations.

some, feel that even if Rand's body of work is over-hyped, he had a bigger contribution to the visibility of the profession.

Gunnar Swanson:

I think some of the seemingly-unique status of Rand as a designer is political. No, he didn't advance communication or systematic thinking (two hallmarks of great graphic design in my opinion, also) as much as others did but he did more to advance the social status of the designer (and particularly the designer's relationship with clients) than anyone since Frank Lloyd Wright and Raymond Lowey.

I agree with Chris Conley:

we need heros and heroines as much as we need rigorous research that results in credible claims on the value and impact of design and designers on society.

I'd add that we also need more intelligent discussions like this that closely examine long-standing traditions and heros to see what still holds true today.

(via xblog)