design | write/geek

Observing Design Observer’s design

Oh, goodness. I started writing this post in January, and have had it basically finished for weeks now. I’ve been putting off actually posting it for some time, thinking it needs more work. But now — in fact, just three hours ago — Design Observer unveiled a redesign and made me look like some kind of jerk. Now, if that isn’t an object lesson in shipping…

Design Observer looks dated.

The Past

DO’s header boasts proudly that it’s been operating since 2003, and you can tell. Look at it with 2014 eyes and you’ll observe a non-responsive fixed-width layout with tiny text. Is that really a blogroll? Where are the ubiquitous social sharing buttons?

It’s like a time capsule of early-2000s blog design.

And that’s why it’s so great.

Design Observer reminds me of a lot of websites from the ’00s, some of the first blog-ish things I ever read. (Like Pixelsurgeon! Or Design is Kinky! Or Pixelsurgeon!) Maybe I owe the fondness to my youth, and its design limitations to the bad old days of primitive web browsers. Or maybe it was just Web-1.9(beta) style. To my eyes, though, the look holds up well.

The Present

The information density on Design Observer is amazing and that probably has a lot to do with the typeface, which is tiny by today’s standards. I peeked into the HTML because I knew the typeface appealed to me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. IT’S 8 POINT VERDANA, you guys!¹ It’s so tiny, yet so crisp and readable. (Compare that to Arial, or its blatant rip-off Helvetica.²)

The site was definitely not designed with the current tablet craze in mind, and as a tablet owner who doesn’t love tablets, I like that. That said, I shudder to think of what Design Observer must look like at unscaled ‘retina’ resolutions.

The Future

Speaking of the future, I fear the day I’m going to visit Design Observer and find a Mediumification has happened — this has to be on their roadmap. It does seems a little strange for a design site like DO not to be following what are, for better or worse (Here’s my ballot! I vote ‘worse’!) modern design conventions, which favor clumsy UI for smudgy fingers over — you know — the stuff that helps people do stuff.³

And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Sadly, Design Observer’s robots.txt file tells most search engine crawlers to simply go away. DO specifically included a rule banning the Internet Archive, which means the page has never been captured by the Wayback Machine, the Internet’s somewhat-official time capsule… and never will. This makes it tough, if not impossible, to see what Design Observer looked like ten years ago, two years ago and even last week, to see how it changed with the times — or didn’t — to become what it is today.

And when this frankly wonderful design is replaced by something “better” and “modern,” it will also disappear forever. Hope this helps.

In college, I probably spent more time choosing a font for AOL Instant Messenger than I did studying for some classes, and this size Verdana was what I’d always come back to.[↩]
I kid… I own the DVD, honest! Now please put down those tasteful Dieter-Rams-designed pitchforks.[↩]
I’m not against designing while keeping mobile devices in mind, but these designs almost always come with designers choosing to reduce functionality across all devices in the name of consistency. Hey world, news flash — you can do responsive design in a way that doesn’t do away with sidebars, page chrome and just general functionality until websites look like WriteRoom. Just make it degrade nicely.[↩]

MOOCing for fun (and profit?)

Last year I read an interesting blog post that taught me the name for something I’d been hearing more and more about for a while: MOOCs (“Massive Open Online Courses”). You know, they’re those online classes that you can take, offered by universities like Stanford, Harvard and others — plus a host of private companies — typically for free and without credit. Oh, and across an absolute metric fuckton of topics.

Yesterday, setting aside any traces of an um-yeah-I-already-finished-college-thank-you attitude, I spent some time poking around MOOC List — an extensive aggregator of available classes — and found something that caught my eye: Intro to the Design of Everyday Things, taught by Don Norman, author of that book you may have seen on my dining room table, waiting patiently to be read, for a little while now. (Okay, Amazon says it’s been over two years.)

So I’m taking Don’s class now, and while I’m not sure if I’ve had my eyes opened to any truly new concepts yet, I’ve picked up a couple of terms: “affordance” and “signifier.” And to finish off Lesson 1, I’m currently on the lookout for a signifier to photograph, critique and improve.

So, why Intro to the Design of Everyday Things? I can actually share the answer I posted to the class forum:

I’m taking this class because, as a copywriter whose opinions on the finished product tend to extend a bit beyond my specific area of expertise, I’d like a more solid grounding in these other areas.

Basically, soon I’ll be telling you why I’m right about even more things, using all the right terms. Look out.

The Premium McWrap packaging is very nicely designed

I’m clearly no stranger to marketing, but my career hasn’t yet brought me in touch with product packaging. I like packaging, and I’ve actually bought things over the years because they were nicely packaged — stuff like candy,¹ Altoids Sours, some random bike part… and yes, I’ve even bought myself a few low-balance gift cards² to keep in my this is so awesome file.

I recently found myself impressed with the cardboard packaging around the McDonald’s Premium McWrap — I should probably go ask for a clean one while they’re still available. I guess I didn’t notice when they added this item to the menu, because I ordered my first one by mistake. My annoyance at paying about double what I expected turned to intrigue about as soon as I peeked into my drive-through bag.

Some of that price certainly went into the packaging design. What I found wasn’t a cheap paper-clad item like standard McDonald’s wraps, but something that actually looks like a “premium” product.

The box is rather thoughtfully designed, containing the food very nicely within — you know, what you want from a container.
It has a pull-and-tear strip for opening the package… and naturally, the strip runs right past the Xbox ad unit on the front.
There’s a little tab system on the side of the box that’s there primarily to indicate which wrap you ordered, but also to passively educate you on the rest of the lineup. (“Oh look, they also have sweet chili flavor!”)
It doesn’t look like this should work, but once you’ve opened the package, the box easily stands upright, even with the wrap inside.

Wait, was what tasty?

Still pissed that my parents wouldn’t buy me Bubble Tape.[↩]
Confuse your local cashier today — ask for a $1 gift card![↩]