I am still working at Razorfish and have moved in with the girlfriend. We have a cat named dot. I spend way to much time on the road, but other than that, life is fucking awesome.

You can keep up with me on my flickr page, or on another weblog.

Perhaps I’ll have a design and user experience weblog again. But I make no promises.

I no longer have:

1. Free time
2. A visual designer job at Frog Design
3. 15 pounds
4. My shiney silver Canon SD20
5. My T Mobile Sidekick

I now have:

1. An information architecture job at Avenue A | Razorfish
2. A girlfriend
3. A shiney refurbished red Canon SD20
4. A Blackberry 8700g
5. An Intel MacBookPro (annoying noise free!)
6. A ton of frequent flyer miles

Liz Danzico and I have entered into a wager. $90 to the winner.

Liz states that by January 31, 2010:

1. Death to the address window (in the browser)
2. Death to the web page
3. Metadata is king

While I agree that metadata is uber important, I do not think we will see an end to the page based metaphor of the web any time soon, and I would be very surprised if the address field went away in the browser.

While I think there are problems from a user experience point of view with the page based metaphor of the web, and certain genres of websites—I feel that the user derives far more utility from it than she looses because of it. The page model allows us to define a location for a specific piece of information on the web. This allows all sorts of things to happen, like: creating bookmarks, sending URLs via email, finding information on the web via search engines.

To kill the page metaphor means breaking all these systems and having to creating new ones to replace their functionality. The value derived from abandoning the page metaphor is not great enough to warrant completely changing the way the web functions, and breaking a number of key systems in the process.

As sites start to make use of AJAX type functionality to breakdown the page metaphor, I predict that the web page will not be killed, but rather replaced by the ‘smart worksheet’. A url will still point to a discreet piece of data or functionality, but the page that this data lives on may be far more interactive and connected. I predict urls will become more useful, and more relevant because they will no longer be diluted by having a series of urls defining user transactions. Urls will start to point to specific pieces of data and nothing else.

I do think urls are user hostile. I do not think they are going away (and neither does LIz, but she feels that will become hidden to the user). I think urls will become more forgiving if the user mistypes them. I think the UX profession will continue to try to minimize the user’s exposure to them—but I think the address bar will be visible in a majority of browsers for a long time. Why? because it doesn’t actively hurt to have it visible. To take it away before a system is designed to replace it’s functionality is an act of ideology, and it will inconvenience a large segment of users.

So there you have it, my pragmatic view of the internet for the next 4 years. May I be $90 richer, 4 years from now.

Okay, if you walk out of Walk The LIne and don’t feel like going home and playing all your Johnny Cash CDs loud enough to annoy your neighbors, then there’s something mighty wrong with you. And if you don’t own any Johnny Cash CDs… well, ah, you best get yer ass to the movies ‘cause you might be itch’n to buy some afterwards.

I have a hard time coming to terms with the new aesthetic being peddled in the corporate identity market. There is trend away from the mono-chromatic, simple and witty icons of the 19th century and towards a more slick, conceptually vacant and multi-color mark of the 90’s internet boom.

Assigning a logo assignment in school has always been about a)clarity of message and b)designing within strict limitations. Yes, this is quickly becoming an old-fashion way of looking at a logo, but I truly feel something is being lost. And that, that is being lost is metaphoric of what is being lost in graphic design in general.

The 1980’s AT&T logo (designed by the amazing Saul Bass) is a classic example of wonderful design. You can imagine the design brief from the client stating that they wanted a mark that communicated that they are a “global communications company.” If you take away the text the mark still works. It references the global nature of the company by it’s circular shape and the lines in-force this (latitude lines) and at the same time makes the viewer think about satellites and data. The mechanical nature of the rendering connotes precision and competence.

Wonderful. A tremendous amount of clarity in a small package. And it works just as well in black and white—which means the client can save money on things like bills and invoices where printing in color would cost more money. Plus they’ll look great when they send out faxes and when their logo gets photocopied. Boo-ya!

Now, take our new logo. Take away the type and what do we have? Okay, now imagine this mark in 5, 10 years when the memory of the old logo is now longer with us. What do we have?

In my mind the reality in which this mark is rendered leaves little to the imagination. While I had no problem suspending my perception of scale with the old mark, with this one I am inclined to view it (and that also means interpret it) as a small mark. It looks to me like a rubber ball I’d by from a machine at the grocery store for 25 cents. The blue transparency has a lot to do with that perception as well. Rarely do I see perfectly translucent globes in scales larger than a couple inches.

So without the suspension of my perception of scale, this mark connotes playfulness, simple, classic and affordability and at the same time, once I’m thinking in these terms I also believe the mark means ‘easily losable’, childish, and cheap. The strips do not look mechanically precise anymore. They communicate a random, organic and in-precise manufacturing process. Does this mental frame communicate AT&T? I think not. Does this mark survive a trip through the fax machine or photocopier?

This new mark is all style and no thinking. It looses whatever thought went into it in a couple years. It’s what design has become. This way of thinking about design is not sustainable. If the internet has taught us anything it’s once we put the tools to create in the hands of everyone, everyone decides what is acceptable. And anyone can create style; you don’t need a fancy design degree for that.

Not everyone can create the old AT&T mark. That requires talent, and a fancy design degree can help bring out that talent. Design should be just as much about how something functions, or solves a client’s problem as it is about making something visually pleasing. The visually pleasing part is getting way too much attention, and other professions are taking away the ‘making things work’ part of design.

The every expanding and interesting visual complexity linked to my Website Traffic Map today. Sadly I haven’t had the time in the last 2 years to do further work on it. (But I have a notebook full of ideas on it). I no longer have access to the equipment I used to make them 2 years ago either. The maps were fairly quick to make (less than a minute), as long as the MySQL server didn’t hit swap space—then all bets were off.

I really want to pull out the code and start working on them again. Maybe sometime this winter, after the new year.

Work at frog is great, but working a full week plus teaching 2 classes at Pratt ussually causes me to work about 60 hours in a week (not counting weekends). I sleep on the weekends; for the past couple weeks I’ve been sick. I get better over the weekend only to be sick again on Friday. (I’m happy to say I’m fairly healthy today, which is a Friday).

My time constraints should get better, I’m dropping down to a single classs next semester. Most of my sophomore typography students were a bit upset when they found out. (Maybe it’s just because they were going to have to re-work thier schedules).

The last couple weeks in type I am focusing in on display typography. (Headlines and such). I gave them a dozen or so quotes to typeset, and one in particular that I found particularly profound:

“I never let my schooling interfere with my education”—Mark Twain

Apple’s new pro photo tool, Aperture looks really nice. It’s priced a bit higher than I, essentially a photography hobbyist, would be willing to pay, but the educational price is within my range. (Legally I don’t know if I can say what the educational price is).

I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to buy if my computer is 2 years old (1Ghz powerbook) and my camera does not shoot RAW files (a Leica Digilux 1). I think I’ll wait for some published reviews.

Here is a complete set of election data for every presidential election. Elections of note: 1984 and 1972. Both before my time of caring about such things, both landslide elections.

I have noted elsewhere that I have a new job. I’m really happy at Frog Design. Plenty of smart people, a nice mix of interesting work and an appreciation for good design within all levels of the organization.

My job search was getting a bit depressing. I was spending a couple hours a day looking, and after a couple months I was fairly listless and just wanted to sleep most of the time.

The current trend in the design industry is away from the model that prevailed in the eighties and nineties—the design firm. Most companies are bringing creative talent in house and/or hiring out creative work to lone practitioners. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but generally there is less large scale work that requires the resources of a firm being commissioned. Most of this work is being done in house, and contract workers are being used to fill short term staffing needs.

This means the bulk of the job interviews I was going on were not at design firms, but were at large corporations. Even after being called in for second and third interviews I was being told that they were not comfortable hiring someone who did not have work experience at a large company. The fact that I spent the last 9 years at a small design firm was a source of discomfort to those hiring.

During one interview I was let know that it was unusual (and not in a good way) that someone my age (31) would spend 9 years anywhere. During another I was told that they didn’t think someone could have the skill set I claimed to have (mild DBA skills, workable knowledge of PHP and server side scripting, HTML/CSS and fairly decent visual design pedigree). Why in the world would anyone with this skill set work at small firm when they could work for themselves and make a small fortune?

Ultimately it comes down to values and what I want from my life. I don’t like working alone. I learned my technical skills because I love making things, and had a desire to know hows things work. Ultimately I found that engineering goals and design goals are often at odds and it’s really hard to play both sides. I reached a point where all this technical knowledge was making my designs worse, and not better. Design is where my heart is and I’d rather leave the technical side of things to those who do it better than I.

I’m a whole lot happier now, more focused and rarely do I feel like sleeping more than 7 hours a day.

Any kind of squash product: squash soup, squash dumplings, fried squash—all of it. Mostly I find myself cooking these things because they aren’t common recipes one finds in prepared foods or at fast food joints.

That all changes in the most glorious of seasons: autumn. In the New York metropolitan area, autumn is the season that makes the other three bearable, and best of all: the grandaddy of squash takes center stage: The Pumpkin. Throughout cfes and bakeries I’m finding pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bread and right now I’m eating a pumpkin donut. Soon there will be pumpkin pie—my favorite desert. ever.

I’ve been having a fair number of problems with a client’s website. One of them was speed related, and the other was an issue of broken images.

The client wanted to host the site at their location, and their IT department would setup the server…

The speed was easy to address. The site would run just fine (speed wise) when I ran it locally, but would sputter and take forever on site (even when only one browser was accessing it). This turned out to be a problem with MySQL on the server. If I had the server use a different MySQL host (say, my powerbook) everything was very fast and stable.

Eventually was moved the website offsite (to Dreamhost) and the speed issue was resolved. The broken images however, were not. Broken images only happened in IE on windows. No other browser was effected.

They would also get progressively worse the longer the user would browse the site. I could not reproduce this on my PC at home (Windows NT 4 running IE 5.5). All of the client’s PCs exhibited this behavior. I falsely thought this was a virus problem on site. (Since while I was watching IE spiral down and crash and burn, Safari and Firefox wouldn’t have any issues at all).

It turns out that the copy of ImageMagik on the client’s server (that was used to produce all the images on the site) was producing slightly corrupted jpegs. I suppose this would cause IE on Windows (except my copy, for some reason) to slowly go down the drain until it just stopped showing any images at all.

The moral of the story, even if your sysadmin claims he can setup a server and compile stuff like MySQL and ImageMagik, well, um… maybe not. And bad jpegs can make IE/Win very cranky.

I’m still in disbelief, and still rather numb. This has to be the most significant devastation an American city has seen in my lifetime. I hope it will the most significant devastation any city will see in my lifetime.

I’m at a loss for words.