Confusion seems to have surfaced around the Confessions piece I posted last week. Some think the article was wishy-washy and were hoping for a more definitive ending proclaiming loyalty to one OS or the other. Questions were asked like, “So… ~400 words
I’m in Washington D.C. this week, spending time with a few good friends. Since everyone is still working, today is my opportunity to tour around independently and see some sights. I haven’t been here since my eighth grade class trip,… ~300 words
Recounting the downward spiral and early recovery phase of a designer’s switch to the Windows operating system. ~1,600 words
New rules govern my play. My professional environment is suddenly different. No one expects me to be “in the office”. There are no looming deadlines. I have no voicemail waiting for response. No conference calls planned for the day. Just… ~300 words
After 6 years, 3 months, 3 days, my employment with Wired comes to an end today. What a ride it’s been. Jumping back in time, I remember picking up an interest in bulletin boards in ’92 while I was still… ~800 words
Anitra Pavka wrote an article for Digital Web a little over a week ago. Accountability of Accessibility and Usability digs into some of the reasons Southwest Airlines was brought to court over their alleged inaccessibility. Anitra explores some basic ways… ~61 words
Somehow, I recently stumbled across the controversial discipline and methodology of XP. Not another lame X-based abbreviation for the new OS from Redmond. I’m talking about eXtreme Programming, which has roots from 3 to 6 years ago, depending… ~500 words
At the very last minute, I gave in to an urge to head down to tonight’s monthly BayCHI program. Ironically enough, I ended up driving down to Palo Alto with Peterme of Adaptive Path and Erika Hall from Mule… ~200 words
How do we say more with less? When I write, I tend to be wordy. Four long convoluted paragraphs that could probably be summed up in one short sentence. As a designer, I was never trained to be a writer… ~200 words
An interview conducted by CSS guru and standards evangelist, Eric Meyer, covering the ins and outs of the conversion to a standards-based design for Wired News. (Translated into: Japanese) ~34 words
Sitting in the Miami airport, waiting for a flight to Chicago. Here’s a few more shots to highlight from this past weekend: … ~22 words
The AIGA I/O Conference wrapped up yesterday. Overall, it was an excellent 2-day conference with a nice range of topics covered. I stuck around in Miami for an extra day just to relax a little. Over the last couple days,… ~100 words
After listening to Hillman Curtis speak twice today, (once for the opening keynote, and another for a session on design process) I now have nothing but respect for him, and gratitude for the inspiration he provided through what he had to say and how he said it. ~300 words
I just arrived in Miami for the AIGA‘s Interaction Only Conference. A balmy 85 degrees with lots of humidity took my breath away as I stepped out of the airport. I’m excited be here, and am looking forward to… ~200 words
Last night, I received an email message from a gentleman named Mark. The subject was: appreciate your blog and designs. I’ve received quite a few messages like this recently. But there was something about Mark’s message that had a… ~600 words
I’ve been thinking a lot about type on the Web lately. Not type that a designer sets in Photoshop and turns into an image. But type which can be selected, searched, indexed, and resized by the browser. Type marked up… ~200 words
The issue can’t escape mention, even though it’s a few days late. Robert Gumson and Access Now recently launched a suit against Southwest Airlines, claiming that Southwest’s website was inaccessible to the blind, thus was in violation of the… ~500 words
I just returned home from Meet The Makers, a one-day gig here in San Francisco for (in the words of the organizers) creative people in a technical world. The small crowd included creative/design directors, web/interaction designers, IAs, founders,… ~400 words
Last week’s redesign of Wired News included significant visual changes to the interface. The push toward XHMTL and CSS is certainly a big deal. But as a designer, I also love delving into visual details, especially as they impact the… ~500 words
The high profile Wired News redesign has attracted a lot of attention, primarily because of the Web standards we’re using, and the effort we’re making at keeping our code compliant and error-free. However, daily editorial additions continue to allow XHTML … ~300 words
In reading some of the feedback pouring in since the Wired News redesign, some of my confidence that we did the right thing initially began to erode away. The launch was somewhat anti-climactic. The press release looked like a… ~400 words
Late last night, I got a call from a very good old high school friend from Ohio, Jon Hamilton. Jon started out soon after high school as an EMT, went back to school to become a paramedic, and is now… ~400 words
I’ve also been in touch about the redesign and working closely with Eric Meyer for the past few months. He’s been a tremendous source of encouragement and inspiration along the way. He powerfully adds: “… the really important stuff… ~100 words
Just after wrapping up my last post, I started looking around to see if any buzz about the WN launch had hit the Web yet. Ahem… I don’t think this one will sneak under too many radars. Jeffrey Zeldman just… ~300 words
At long last, the Wired News redesign is visible to the world. We launched the site around 10pm PDT time last night. And what a relief it is. Despite numerous setbacks, delays, bugs, and technical difficulties, we pushed through to… ~300 words
Since our failed attempt at pushing the Wired redesign live last night, our engineers and developers have been working like crazy to figure out what went wrong. The errors never showed up in our development environment, but only manifested themselves… ~100 words
The Wired News redesign was scheduled to go live in the wee hours of the morning today. Technical difficulties started popping up as we were pushing everything to the live servers around 2am. Fragments were disappearing, images weren’t working, Unfortunately… ~200 words
Wired News has used Vignette as a content management system for a few years now. Today, we discovered an odd bug that shows up whenever the cache (memory) was flushed (reset). Vignette is automatically inserting one html comment tag right… ~200 words
Progress on the stopdesign.com redesign continues. I now have the entire portfolio entered into a sortable, reusable database. I’ve created a bunch of server-side scripts (ASP) to create each portfolio page dynamically based on two templates. One template drives the… ~200 words
A lot of ideas exist in my head which I wouldn’t be able to do justice with a 2 or 3 paragraph entry. In the process of a site redesign of October 2002, I’m setting aside some space to dedicate… ~94 words
I was looking up flights to Miami on Orbitz.com today for an AIGA design conference I’ll be attending in November. I came across this awkward rendering [.gif, 48 KB] of their much-touted “matrix display”. All missing images pointed to http://www.orbitz.com/d.gif,… ~200 words
I’ve been debating how to build out my portfolio pages for the last few days. The current pages are all flat files that required a ton of work to create, and have been a nightmare to update. I’d like to… ~100 words
I’ve been planning out the structure for a CSS workshop we’ll be offering to Lycos designers and developers sometime later this month. I’ll be collaborating with Steve Mulder, a colleague of mine in Boston, who wrote a book on style … ~300 words
Tom, a colleague and IA in our User Experience group in Boston, took the time today to run some Wired News pages through the Bobby accessibility evaluator. For comparison, he tested both the old and new WN designs, along with… ~300 words
I started batting around ideas for a redesign of stopdesign.com a few weeks ago. Today, I actually made progress by sketching out some rough ideas and planning a simple architecture. The site has basically remained untouched in the four years… ~200 words
When Eric Meyer visited last week, we pressed him for a quote or two about the Wired News redesign. I was blown away with what he sent back. While his comments were intended for the press release and the story… ~300 words
Finally had a chance over the last two days to begin thinking about the Wired magazine site design. The current site is riddled with usability problems, poor architecture, and a very awkward design. I can be brutally honest about it,… ~200 words
We implemented a secondary version control technique for Wired News images and CSS files this week. Images and CSS files have been moved one level deeper than they were, into a folder named according to the current release date (ie:… ~200 words
We moved some of our CSS and image files to a different central server today which we can all reference for design and development versions of the site. I almost immediately noticed that Mozilla and Netscape browsers weren’t rendering our… ~100 words
Eric Meyer came to the Bay Area this week to take care of business at Netscape’s headquarters in Mountain View. So while Eric was in town, he and I set up a time to meet each other and talk about… ~300 words
My colleagues in Boston ran some users through the Wired News design prototypes this week. While we were fairly confident that many of the usability problems of the old design had been addressed, we wanted to make sure there weren’t… ~300 words
We made an important discovery today which will help us simplify the maintenance and version control of the style sheets for Wired News. It has to do with importing additional CSS files and referencing images from within any CSS file.… ~400 words
I’m in San Diego for the extended weekend, spending time with good friends, trying not to labor too much. We spent some time last night enjoying phenomenal Italian food at one of our favorite Point Loma restaurants, Old Venice.… ~200 words
Since I haven’t jumped onto the wireless platform bandwagon yet, designing pages for the AvantGo channel has been an interesting challenge. Not too difficult, because there aren’t many choices. But that’s the challenge of it. It’s like trying to say… ~100 words
I took a look at some pages today that Wired News generates for our AvantGo channel. The AvantGo reader only supports a limited subset of html 3.2 tags, according to their style guide for developers. After reading though their guidelines,… ~200 words
It’s worthwhile mentioning that a lot of the initial research on multi-column CSS layout for the Wired News redesign was done while studying examples from Eric Costello’s CSS Layout Techniques at glish.com, as well as Rob Chandanais’ Layout Reservoir… ~300 words
I sent a note yesterday to Eric Meyer (considered the expert on CSS, and author of many of the books I’ve been referencing about the subject) and to Jeffrey Zeldman (co-founder of The Web Standards Project and creative director of… ~200 words
I should mention here one of the major reasons I’ve become obsessed with Web standards and CSS. My current project (as Design Director of Wired) is a complete redesign of Wired News. See a screenshot of the before state [.gif,… ~300 words
Duly noted that the second broadcast for Leno has already begun on NBC means I didn’t even beat Carson and his Last Call to bed tonight. Eric Meyer’s latest book, Eric Meyer on CSS, Mastering the Language of Web Design… ~200 words
