Liveblogging a presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco by Jeffrey Zeldman

This is like super-big D, because it’s all design. That’s what we’re gonna talk about, and selling it.

For me, it was awesome when the Web came along in 1995 because the clients didn’t understand it. Using the arcane science of html with B and I tags, I could (essentially snow my clients). Eventually I had a client asking for an entrance tunnel. Who’s heard of those? Of David Siegel? He’s the first one who tried to add design to the Web before it was possible. He proposed an entrance tunnel before the Flash intro was even invented. First site I worked on had a perl entrance tunnel that swapped images. You just had to sit there and wait until we considered it done. Nobody minded in 1995, but by 1996 clients were buying Davie Siegel’s design. They though they know what leading Web thinkers were doing, and it was time to start doing client services again. [continue with: ‘Selling Design’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco by Jina Bolton

(Zeldman tells us we cannot mention or blog the fact that Jina was the one behind the increased standards compliance and accessibility of Apple sites, including the store.)

(Livéblogging may be slower on this one due to fatigue. I have realized I am only thoroughly livéblogging the stars I already know. And that I do that at all conferences. Most of them are boys, BTW.)

(Shows her incredibly hot “head shot.”) It makes me look awesome! (Later mentions she’s from Memphis, pronounces “Moleskine” as “Mohlaskeena.” And “Hoefler” as “Hohfler,” but he gave up long ago on getting his name pronounced correctly [“Heffler”].)

Interface cosmetology: Art school crammed into 45 minutes. Grid, typography, colour, finding inspiration. Really just adding flair or æsthetics or sexy style. I’m really, really into Web sites that are not just beautiful but sexy. Foundationally, you have to know the rules before you can break them. To do a dynamic layout that’s not really grid-based, you need to understand the fundamentals of the grid before you can break it. [continue with: ‘Interface Cosmetology’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco by Doug Bowman

(His entry slide reads d3zign2 sca13. I’ll look later for the inverted z he’s using. [From Azeri? No, I was thinking of ƨ from Zhuang. Inverted z isn’t in Unicode.])

If it weren’t for Jeffrey and Eric, I wouldn’t be in the exact position I am today. Thank you for your support and encouragement several years ago for the Wired redesign.

Rather than give you a formal presentation, I’d rather just assume the 200 of you are my close friends. (Runs through his “career so far.”) Started at a small design agency, Mentus, in San Diego. 20 people. I moved to Hotwired in San Francisco in 1996, I think. Around 150 people, publishing around eight or nine different channels – a site about cocktails, politics, pop culture, search engine Hotbot. Transformed back into the Wired brand a year after I was there. Renamed Wired Digital, acquired by Lycos. Acquired by a Spanish company, Terra. I was the only one on the team who spoke Spanish, so I travelled around the world speaking Spanish, telling jokes about the team in Boston. I decided to kind of give that up. I started a little company of one, Stopdesign, but I got to work with some great people along the line – Happy Cog, Adaptive Path, Eric – through subcontracting. About two years ago, I got contacted by a little company for a contract opportunity, which later became an offer for full-time employment.

I never thought I’d work inside a large company again, but the idea of working for Google really appealed to me – to have a grand impact on a global scale, design problems the likes of which I’d never seen before. I’d have taken it had the salary only been a dollar a year. I had to think about it for a while, but this opportunity to lead the visual design for Google was phenomenal and I’d be stupid t pass it up. Been there a year and a half.

I can’t give you all the inside story of Google, but IC can give you some of the design decisions we have made there and the ones I’ve pushed into the company and tried to change Google a bit. Compared to companies like Apple, which has their design 75%, 80% figured out, Google doesn’t. [continue with: ‘Design to Scale’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco by Jeffrey Zeldman

ERIC MEYER: In the back channels, we call him King Z. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeffrey Zeldman.

ZELDMAN: “Writing the user interface” may seem paradoxical. I remember learning the elements of hypertext – the font tag, the i tag, how to excite user interest by using animated GIFs. But something seemed to be left out: Text (shows slide with “hypertext” in hairline font except for “text”). We don’t spend very much time writing.

What we know about the Web: Content drives traffic. Freshness counts more than looks; constant change is an important part of what we know. (Shows Technorati.) (Takes lots of swipes at Boing Boing.) There was a guy with a drill on top of that, and a lot of Suicide Girls ads. Still the number-one-rated Web site. Why? Because they had very good content, and they constantly refreshed it – faster than you could read it, and faster than Robert Scoble could write. [continue with: ‘Writing the User Interface’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco by Jason Santa Maria

When I was in college, I learned a lot about typography and colour and layout, and by the time I graduated I was pretty cocky. I knew how to throw stuff on a page; this stuff was easy. I got a job in Philadelphia, and one of the first projects I worked on was this (Captain Noah, a children’s show). I didn’t even get the order of the colours right in the rainbow. Best of all, this was a six-foot-tall poster inside the store.

This made me realize there is an art-direction component. It’s all of the pieces that add up to make a design. And not only that, it’s the concept. Captain Noah’s dead now anyway, so it’s not that big of a deal to see this.

This is about taking good design and making it something better – not necessarily perfect. These are the things that I go through in my process when I’m designing. [continue with: ‘Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag’ →]

Again, for An Event Apart (i.e., for Zeldman): “Why I Hate Online Captioning.” (Because I do.)

Approved persons may met me.

Parc Woodbiné Park, Leslieville Heights.

I’ve been trying to kill off graphic-design criticism as it presently stands since I started writing such criticism way back in ’89. I didn’t know that was what I was doing then, but by the time I wrote “TypoBlog” for Print, boy, did I ever. The whole point of the story was to alert the dinosaurs (print, Print) about their successors in the evolutionary line, the mammals (blogs). And lo is it coming to pass. [continue with: Design criticism: Do not want →]

While methodically reading every plausible book on typography and graphic design in the library, I also request dozens of books via interlibrary loan. Only a few of them actually come through. Here’s what I’ve been looking at lately. (See my full reading list, continuously updated.)

Living by Design: The Partners of Pentagram, edited by Peter Gorb (1979)

I had no idea that Pentagram did so very much in the ’70s. The range is shocking, it was mostly for blue-chip clients, and it was all over the map.

A custom typeface (by Matthew Carter!) for Lucas. (The book does not quite define which Lucas it is. The one that supplied faulty electricals for every British car for decades? In other words, “Lucas, the prince of darkness”?) Livery for 50 models of motor vehicle in the Lucas fleet.

An entire logo study for British Petroleum. Reuters, Clark(’)s shoes (no relation), Cunard. The Conference for Islamic Solidarity, as tough a job then as it would be today (the work showed seriously mismatched colour of Latin and Arabic scripts). Redesigning 10,000 forms for Kodak. The book A Sign Systems Manual, now a $300 collector’s item. Helvetica everywhere.

And, incredibly, office interiors. (Ad agency: “Though the double-volume entrance is nearly 6m high, the design arrangement makes the climb not unpalatable, and there is a fat red handrail to cling to” – for dear life, presumably.) Everything here is chrome, it’s leather, it’s carpeting, it’s steel.

And even more incredibly, product design, like a space-age digital clock (the Clark Alto [no relation]) and a huge line of Kenwood countertop appliances, complete with bean-slicer attachment. A design investigation into a 110-format camera stated “[I]t was found that smallness is not the optimum criterion. The great need… is for a camera that can be sturdily held, and this implies that a larger, rather than a minimal, size is what people want.” The lessons of the iPhone three decades before its birth.

The book was, however, a bit of a slog due to physical discomfort. It weighs a ton; the body copy, set in Rockwell Light in a size just small enough to be too small, bordered on illegible. Nor was there really any correspondence between illustrations and cutlines, some of which were on different spreads.

Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties by Rick Poynor

Yeah, him. Anyway, I got this one out again to reread of the genesis of one of my leitmotifs, XTRMNTR. Julian House was the designer.

The two things on XTRMNTR were an obsession with the military-industrial[-entertainment] complex and, for the time, [Primal Scream’s] quite political statements…. I’m sure it is an unconscious thing that led me to make it so angular and aggressive. It was done in Quark Xpress rather than Photoshop, and it is quite a limited, clumsy tool to cut things out with…. Sometimes it is the fact that you cannot do something very well with a program that gives the design its feel.

Note the complete absence of apology for using strictly digital tools, and the realization that such is all they are.