Category: Design

After a highly entertaining half an hour with my work colleagues and fontifier, I now have a full operational font of my handwriting. It looks a little childish and insane, like the kind of thing you’d write threatening letters with, but it looks great as the default font on OSX’s Post-It equivalents. Should you be foolish enough to want my scribblings on your computer, feel free to download it from here: Coates.ttf.

I’ve been reading The Guts of a New Machine, the latest (and longest) article on the iPod perpetrated by the New York Times. It’s an interesting article that does the journalistic job of covering a variety of angles well while trying to find some unifying theme – but that makes commenting on it in general almost impossible. It itself has no thesis – no argument to make. So instead of addressing the piece as a whole I’m just going to jot down a few thoughts that occurred to me as I read specific chunks. I’m going to do this in multiple posts as it should make commenting more practical.

On rapid product development and coherent product vision

“The iPod came together in somewhere between six and nine months, from concept to market, and its coherence as a product given the time frame and the number of variables is astonishing. Jobs and company are still correct when they point to that coherence as key to the iPod’s appeal; and the reality of technical innovation today is that assembling the right specialists is critical to speed, and speed is critical to success.”

This chunk of the article (not a quote from anyone) interested me, because of the perceived dislocation between speed, the right staff and coherence. The process seems to me to have been successful in producing something coherent and clean almost because of its brevity. In my experience, three months is about as long as you can reliably expect any individual person to care about their part of the project more than they care about anything else – even if they’re given total free space not to have to think about anything else (multi-tasking is the evil enemy of creativity in my opinion). Only clear delineations between stages in a project (and strong management over those transitions) can really help maintain people’s levels of constructive engagement if you need a project to go any longer.

When I see the iPod and hear the time it took to think through it, I can almost smell the initial back-to-basics workshops, the brainstorming around what MP3 players could and should be at their core. You can feel the desire to understand something – grasp a vision – and the reason that sensation still sits at the heart of the thing is that there wasn’t enough time for that vision to erode before it got to market. The iPod’s design to me isn’t really about simplicity or coherence at all, it’s about getting to the essence of the thing and sparsely sketching it out without letting the cruft or baroque tendencies unfold. Where human beings are involved, design is a process in time, and the quality of that design can be affected directly by too-little time, too-much time, and not know what to do with the time you have.

I’ve just caught up on my Dreamspaces and been confronted with a conundrum. In a piece about brutalist architecture, they featured the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth. Here’s a picture of the building in question:

Now, this building hasn’t had the most illustrious of histories. It was built in 1966, given an award in 1967 and voted Britain’s fourth ugliest building in 1968. It is generally reviled by the public and will not be protected by government by being listed. But when the architect – Rodney Gordon – is asked about the general distaste towards his building, he replies:

“Well I’m very surprised. A lot of people liked the building. One thing I do find is that any piece of architecture worth being called architecture is usually both hated and loved. If people don’t notice it, it’s not architecture.”

That last phrase seems extraordinary to me – stunning in its arrogance and audacity and completely in opposition to most of the understandings of design and architecture that I’ve accumulated over the last ten years. That kind of ostentatious statement of impact above function was given up within the first ten years of web design. What Gordon is talking about is the construction of follies – buildings with little or no function but to inspire and awe. Unworkable spaces, unusable spaces. We have them on the web too – sometimes even intentionally – either as art or design showcases or as image-based impactful press prelease or advertising spaces. But this is different. This is a site – a space – designed for shopping and socialising that wants desperately to be innovative and impressive – the architect all the while dismissing the subtle and less overt arts of flows and usability, building things that are not scaled for humans or comprehensible to them. All the things that allow a place to be understood by people are dismissed as unworthy of the name of architecture. And why – because the building must be noticed… It’s stunning. It’s terrible. And I’m fairly sure it’s wrong.

If you’re interested in the Tricorn:

• The Portsmouth Society
• The Tricorn and Sacred Geometry

I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I’ve never had time just to push it out into the open. So, without further introduction, here’s a brief design history of plasticbag.org neé Barbelith.

Barbelith, it has to be said, had designs that predated this one. It had a number in fact. Unfortunately none of them have survived the test of time very well – files have been lost and archive.org hasn’t recorded their passing. The first vaguely well-constructed one (click on above for full screen-shot) was built by me hacking around with tables and adding things from the top down, feature at a time. It was considered quite good at the time, and remains the only single thing that I’ve designed in my life that has garnered universal good-feeling.

My weblog started as a piece of filler to sit on the front of my barbelith.com domain, which had within it a comic-book fan-site and what was later to become The Barbelith Underground. After a while it became clear that the people who were coming for the online community or the fan-site saw my weblog as incompatible with the rest of the community. So I decided to split my efforts over two domains – and plasticbag.org was born. I spent a considerable amount of time getting a design that I was exceptionally happy with assembled over several weeks. No one liked it. No one at all… It remains one of my favourites…

The main criticism of the pale-blue plasticbag.org design had been that it was too cold, so when I came to version two I made a conscious effort to make it more friendly. During the process I got terribly excited about ways of using black in tasteful and creative ways, the integration of random images into designs and the potential of right-aligning sites. I got particularly interested in ways of crafting a site that looked well-finished, which was why I put such a lot of effort into the bottom of the page – an area normally considered with distain or indifference by webloggers (with a few notable exceptions).Of my plasticbag.org designs, this is the one I look back on most fondly.

Version three of plasticbag.org came about because I was desperately pining for elements of the pale blue design which I’d always seen as representing the kind of modern disposable slightly artificial mood I’d always wanted to generate. This time, however, I was working with a classy designer of considerable repute (Denise Wilton) and she was patient enough to round robin designs with me until we came up with something I really liked and thought captured the mood of the site well enough. It had several ‘innovations’ for me – it was my first pure CSS site and the most difficult to build of anything I’ve ever made. It never worked perfectly in any browser. There was always something that made it feel wrong. It also used different style-sheets for the internal site and the front-page, so I could put content on half of the index and let it fill the page when you went into the archives. It was a nice trick, but fundamentally flawed. The text on the front-page was not a suitable width for long-reading, and I came to write smaller, more condensed pieces simply because it was all a reader could manage. Images had to be tiny to fit the width and then looked out of place internally. It was a glorious folly, but it was a folly nonetheless…

The design that replaced it is the one you’re looking at today – which brings us to the end of our little tour. I have nick-named this one “kottkesque”, it has some fairly obvious influences (kottke.org) and its creation came as a bit of a shock even to me. I spent an idle couple of hours thinking about what it meant to design a site for the weblog format – which was concentrated around putting long tracts of readable content on a page with almost no navigation at all, but instead quite a lot of ambient persistently useful peripheral information. And the more I thought about it, the more Jason’s work just seemed so practical – as if he’d uncovered a kind of ideal format that we should all now be looking at and working around. His was tables-based (and still is), so I pulled it over, rebuilt it in (slightly flawed) CSS and then started to try and push it in extreme directions – looking for ways to improve it in terms of branding, navigational areas and contextual information.

I’m not sure I succeeded in making that much of a contribution to what-comes-after his design scheme, except maybe in terms of abstracting navigational items in that top space. Quite possibly Jason’s design remains the clearest and most admirably platonic form of webloggery yet devised. However, I have my suspicions that his linklog/remaindered links format is pushing his format in directions it wasn’t really built to withstand, and that its showing the strain. This might be an indicator for where new investigations into weblog design should be concentrating their efforts. Perhaps erikbenson.com might have alternative lessons for us in this regard…

My wonderful cult are getting a bit of exposure at the moment and it’s all because of Jenny Everywhere. My involvement in the whole enterprise was fairly negligible – I started a thread to try and get people thinking about the possibility of Open Source Comic Book Characters. I didn’t notice that a quite a substantial group of rather more engaged and creative people – particularly Steven Wintle – were (unlike me) actually getting off their arses and doing something with it. The result is not only a completely Open Source Comic Book Character that anyone can use in any book owned by any company (or indeed by anyone who wants to self-publish a book with a soon-to-be recognisable character without worrying about rights) but also a series of highly entertaining completed stories:

• Name’s not down…
• The Late Shift
• Dame Fine Hostile Takeover (Part One)
• Mrs Zirma
• My Bloody Valentine

In the meantime, Jenny has appeared in Exclaim, “Canada’s Music Authority” as well as on Boing Boing yesterday. It’s all looking very positive. My next hope? That she’ll start turning up in cameos in DC and Marvel books – although presumably their legal departments might take a while to get around the concept…

The plans for Camden Town’s proposed tube redevelopment have been around since the end of last year, and I imagine debate has raged in the area. I’ve only just stumbled upon them though. My only real issue with them is that I wish they’d found a way to incorporate some of the current facade into the new building. Parts of London already feel characterless and inhuman – I can’t help feeling that those early twentieth century tube station designs are almost iconic now, and that their loss would be a terrible shame…

What do you guys think? Is it more important to preserve the identity of a city or to look to the future? Is Camden moving in the right direction?