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May 26, 2012
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In Praise of Arial
Can we talk about how Arial gets no love? In the hierarchy of typefaces, it’s not quite Papyrus/Comic Sans-grade, but I doubt anyone is going to be making a documentary about it anytime soon.
Arial is easy to ignore. I only started actually looking at it recently, when I threw it in as a filler type for something I was working on. The image above is a fictional concert poster I made for a friend, done entirely in Arial and Archer (yes, I know. hush).
Is anyone using Arial in an interesting way? I genuinely believe that there’s an opportunity to do something really cool here. I would love to see some examples.
Mar 17, 2012
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Thoughts on the Pinterest redesign
Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I’m not a fan of Pinterest’s new profile page.
BEFORE: Old Pinterest profile page, from Mashable article.
AFTER: New Pinterest profile page, from Mashable article. Note that this shows a pin-view, not the board-view, as in the BEFORE image.
Ego Before Content
The beauty of the old version was that the content - the pinboards - had pride of place. The redesign puts a big fat profile at the very top, which completely distracts from the most important thing on the page - the pins.
Layout
The pinboards used to be better organized. The tight grid (and it’s vertical emphasis) made it a possible to quickly understand what was being presented. The new layout is a mess. It requires you to scroll down before you can really see anything, and the horizontal orientation makes the page feel flabby. Add that the images are cropped in a weird way, and the whole thing seems like disjointed images floating in white void.
Also, what’s up with the serif used for the pinboard title? On a page with everything else in sans-serif, the serif looks very out of place.
If it ain’t broke…
I would love to learn what motivated the redesign. I imagine that there were strategic considerations that made it desirable (maybe to make room for new features?) but I can’t help but feel that it was unnecessary. The new page is messy, overly complicated, and unattractive.
Mar 14, 2012
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Digital Storytelling Lessons from The Onion
The Yale Record invited The Onion to speak on campus a few weeks ago, where I got to hear Baratunde Thurston (Director of Digital) and Brian Janosch (Editorial Coordinator) discuss exactly how they make pure comedic gold on a daily basis.
I was excited for the talk because I often find myself doing content marketing for student groups and administrative offices. This is what I learned. (Tip: if you’re easily offended by fictive accounts of hostage-taking Congressmen and mentions of abortion, you should stop reading here).
Aug 31, 2011
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Aug 7, 2011
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Local currencies are used to keep community wealth circulating within the community instead of heading out into the wild blue yonder of internet shopping or national chains. There are a few communities—Ithaca, New York for example—that are actually implementing it. We were challenged by Jason Santa Maria to create our own forms for local New York neighborhoods. I chose Little Italy which has shrunk over the past 50 years from a culturally rich, wide area of Italian-American heritage and family life to a three block row of tourist-trap restaurants. My goal was to establish a link between using the currency and reversing the deterioration of the neighborhood.
To create that link I not only designed bills that reflect periods in Italian design and typography, but also turned the back of the bills into a vintage map of Little Italy, which grows in size as the denomination grow with it. The lowest denomination shows Little Italy as it stands today; the highest denomination shows it at its largest. When visitors spend the higher denominations within the community, it’s directly suggested that they’re acting to tangibly re-grow the boundaries of the neighborhood to its heyday. It’s an economic and cultural battle cry of sorts.
(via Strange Native)
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Curious about cities, patterns, design, and marginalia. I use the word 'narrative' a lot. Emmanuel is Ghanaian, and a long way from home. Nice to meet you. (@equartey, Pinterest, email, ask)
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