My friends were split right down the middle on Colts vs. Saints, but I think we can all agree that the NFL’s plans to keep the new Superbowl logo the same year after year will deny generations to come the ability to say, “Shiny VAG Rounded and a Reflection? What were they thinking?”

Some of my favorites of yesteryear, complete with accompanying snark, below.

1966. The first Superbowl wasn’t a Superbowl at all. Very sporting of us to hold a “world championship” for a game only played in one country. Still, I can’t imagine how such a logo was approved during Don Draper’s 1960s.

1970. This one looks like The Future, or what The Future must have looked like in 1970 back when flying cars seemed right around the corner. The curved multiple lines are very IBM.

1974. A typographically interesting specimen; the curvy “X” is most unexpected and vaguely feminine for the manliest manfest in sports. It reminds me of a yearbook or a Carpenters album cover. I bet the designer got canned that year.

1975. But the very next year, something just as fonty. That’s the legendary Friz Quadrata, by the way, none to the masses as “the Law & Order font”. Also, back in 1975 the letter “X” must not have been as incredibly badaXX as it is nowadays or it would appear bolder. Or maybe the standards for what qualifies as “bold” have changed.

1981. This one just screams Wrath of Khan to me. No?

It’s worth noting that the slab-serif-plus-bezel style of the Roman numerals would be hard to shake for the next few decades.

1995. Peculiarly southwestern. Yes, it was in Arizona but I have to assume that—tame as the Mid-Nineties were—it was a deliberate decision not to play up the XXX theme. I could imagine a logo adorned with neon mudflap girls going over with the Nascar crowd.

2008. What are the chances this just so happens to so closely resemble the Obama logo of that same year? Why didn’t I notice that the first time?

You can see all of the old Superbowl logos here. What’s your favorite?

Although inspired by Vigilante Design years ago, I had doubts. Could design really succeed without knowing how the client measures success? It felt too much like spec work. If I hadn’t stumbled into trying and failing to aid someone in incorporating Fair Trade into their buying habits, I probably would’ve left well enough alone.

To be clear: Transfair USA has not asked me to do a redesign of their logo, nor has my fianceé—who works for them—expressed any displeasure in the logo.

By the age of 6, my mother had trained me to look for the upside-down Spidey in the corner of comic books. If he wasn’t there, I couldn’t buy the comic. Decades later, I discovered that Spidey did not represent any actual certification scheme, just a way to keep me away from Punisher, G.I. Joe, or anything with guns. In the big picture of changing buyer behavior, the logo is less important than value propositions, availability, or even habit, but that doesn’t excuse us as designers for not doing what we can to help consumers recall, recognize, and recommend the Fair Trade Certified label.

The problem to be solved

A good logo needs distinct shape and character. It doesn’t have to tell the whole story of your brand, just serve as a conceptual container for what the brand may ultimately deliver. The Nike logo doesn’t mention shoes (smart since they’ve moved far beyond shoes) but the checkmark does evoke accomplishment. Similarly, the Apple logo doesn’t mention computers but a bite from the forbidden fruit well conveys their iconoclasm.

As for shape, the current Fair Trade Certified label may not hold up to the Nikes or Apples of the world but still has a lot going for it. When we consider imagery associated with fairness, justice, or equality the first that springs to mind is the scales, closely followed by an “equals” sign. Both are embedded, although understated.

Accentuated instead is the laborer’s half-white, half-black aspect, a juxtaposition I assume is meant to represent race? A single-color silhouette (either black or white) would represent humanity in its totality, but a two-color makes the contrast undeniable. Before I understood Fair Trade as a concept, I thought this meant that trade between different nations should be without deficits. Ignoring the symbolic confusion, it also confuses the overall shape.

The globe underlines the global nature of cocoa from Ghana ending up in Switzerland or sugar from Paraguay ending up in the United States. It may offer a typical consumer some insight into supply chains (“my food comes from somewhere?”) but it seems redundant for consumers already looking to buy Fair Trade. Regardless, it confuses the overall shape just like the bi-racial protagonist.

As for character, the lines are thin, mostly straight, and the grid of the globe has a technical feel to it. While the main figure has a noble posture, his or her lanky build doesn’t impart happy or healthy.

Constraints & considerations

Let’s not do this in a vacuum, eh? We’ll first download the label usage guidelinesand learn the flexibility the label requires. Next, let’s take a look at the existing landscape of certification logos.

Transfair USA certifies a lot of different products, but coffee remains what they’re best known for. The ooviest of grooviest coffee-makers will “triple certify” their beans. “Triple” means Fair Trade, Organic, and Shade Grown (typically certified through Rainforest Alliance). Unfortunately, not every coffee-maker falls into this oovy-groovy (OG) category and many certify with only one scheme. A consumer in a hurry, despite wanting to do right by both his or her own family and the family growing their food, might be content with coffee certified by somebody, even if it’s not Fair Trade. This (quite tragically!) introduces competition among schemes.

The Rainforest Alliance logo is fun, interesting, and easy to recommend (I could’ve just told my mom to look for the frog). The USDA Organic logo, while a little boring, is easy to recognize. Unfortunately, when we’re actually shopping, the labels of certification schemes that a product carries—not to mention nutritional information, ingredients, or even weight or volume—are tiny and hard-to-read.

Here are those same logos at half the size and blurred to simulate our quickly scanning a shelf of products. The frog, like his real-life counterparts, disappears into a mass of green. We’re left with two colored circles and a black & white rectangle. Fair Trade Certified wins this round; in fact, a “black & white rectangle” is what I actually scan for when shopping for Fair Trade…

Unless I’m in Europe. Fairtrade has a different logo everywhere else in the world. The United States decided to be different (surprised?). The minimalist in me really, really wants to just recommend the U.S. adopt the global brand.

Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly great logo. Nice colors, but in terms of shape it’s meant to convey either a laborer with fist in the air, a dead bird skull (ONCE YOU SEE IT YOU CAN’T UNSEE IT), or… uh… I dunno, maybe a coastal highway during a solar eclipse? Anyway, I’m unimpressed.

Chiseling away inessentials

Bruce Lee, in describing logo design:

The extraordinary aspect of [logo design] lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way; the closer to the true way of [logo design], the less wastage of expression there is.

In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions.

Okay, so he’s talking about martial arts and not logo design but the same principles hold.

The parts of the current Fair Trade Certified label that work are the colors (black and white stands out) and the vague association with the scales of justice. The parts that don’t are the bi-racial aspect of the main figure and the confusing background. Let’s keep the good and drop the bad.

We immediately increase legibility in the small and fuzzy version versus the original. It still retains its shape as both a human figure and a set of scales. The character is round and friendly, the buckets break the border—suggesting abundance and generosity.

Without a client to require additional constraints and considerations, I have to admit this process feels empty. Excellence comes from the dance of wild intuition and callous evaluation. What do you think? A successful redesign or no forward motion? Does it accidentally resemble anything?

On a technical level, it’s easy. The words of this blog post are stored in a database and then formatted into markup (HTML) when your browser hits this webpage. Then a stylesheet (CSS) comes along and handles its appearance: which typefaces it uses, what colors it’s rendered in, any non-content graphics like icons or backgrounds, and even layout like whether the sidebar goes on the left or right.

On a semantic level, it’s more complex. Where does style end and content begin? Most of us would say that typefaces and colors are clearly style and not content, but what about capitalization and punctuation? Although it’s mostly obsessive designers ranting about small-capped subheads and em dashes, they are characters embedded in sentences. From a technical standpoint, they fall on the markup side of the markup/stylesheet divide.

Except when they don’t.

The blurry line

For lists, we consider it sufficient to specify whether items are ordered (<ol>) or unordered (<ul>) in the markup. The stylesheet then decides whether to provide bullets, numbers, Roman numerals, or even tiny hearts. Punctuation, in this case, is style. Typing “1.” in an HTML document is semantic heresy!

Those small-capped subheads are the same way. We specify a line of text as a subheader (<h2>) and the stylesheet can decide if it should be all caps, small caps, or left as is. Typing “THIS IS A SUBHEAD” limits these options, so we don’t do it.

Like lists and caps, we could leave it to the stylesheet to wrap any quotes (<q>) with the right quotation marks. It’s not hard to empower the stylesheet for this task and it would provide genuine value to cultures that don’t use double-quotes. Perhaps because quotation marks are readily available on our keyboard, our semantics-inspired idealism fades. We type ” and move on.

The line gets even blurrier with treatments like italics, boldface, or underlining. Traditionally, designers have used these visual alternatives not merely to illuminate or embellish, but to convey meaning. There is more than style at work in the difference between little women and Little Women.

Separation anxiety

Why does finding this line matter?

In your browser, it doesn’t. Content and style are reunited in a practically invisible process, leaving the fact that there even is a line irrelevant to the reader (although it makes the designer’s life better).

The divide is more pronounced with feed-reading. A feed-reader like Google Reader or NetNewsWire (my choice), accesses the content but leaves behind the style. Users of feed-readers value this “pure” approach as a (if not the) advantage over visiting each and every blog or news service to which they subscribe. It allows for quick and efficient reading… but at what cost?

There have been plenty of studies on how typography and other elements of style affect the perception of tone. Color and imagery are used to provide context. Consider the Wall Street Journal’s stipple portraits instead of photographs or A List Apart’s muted palette and watercolor illustrations that elevate it from just another tech blog to the Wall Street Journal of the web design world.

More than superficial enhancements are lost. This is an aside. In a feed, it’s just another paragraph and seems out of place.

Stylistic elements are used to decipher the personality of the speaker, which in turn allows you to parse the content more efficiently. Without these cues, it’s too easy to hit “next unread” and be halfway into a new paragraph before you remember that this author uses a lot of hyperbole and her claiming that everyone needs to be on Facebook is completely different than if the design director for NYTimes.com had said it.

Two solutions

The most basic solution is for authors to exert control over the context of their content. This might take the form of limiting feeds to article summaries, forcing a visit the website of origin in order to finish reading. Or it might be a branded footer including links back to the original source… a reminder that the feed is not congruent to the content, but a variant in an alternative format. This is a popular solution, because it’s something that an author can do by him- or herself.

A more complex—but potentially more satisfying—solution would be to allow for greater blurriness (the blurriness that already exists) in feed-reading. This would involve authors agreeing to abide by stricter semantic rules such as those provided by the hAtom microformat or new HTML 5 elements like <article>, <aside>, and <section>. In turn, developers of feed-reading software would allow styling for those elements alone. We could still provide transportability while avoiding the headers, footers, sidebars, and distracting advertising that have driven people to feed-readers in the first place.

This second solution begins to sound a little like the standards-free hell of email clients right now. Does GMail support this CSS declaration or that one? How about Outlook? No one wants to take that paradigm and apply it to the 90% working world of RSS feeds. Instead, we’re likely to see this situation resolve itself in one of two ways: the concept of authorship and context becomes significantly more important and require more attention than it has been in the past, or a generation that’s grown up with this new paradigm as the only one they’ve ever known says, “yeah, so what?”

It’s Kindle season on the Internet and for the last several weeks I’ve enjoyed following along as the almond-shaped Venn Diagram intersection of technophiles and bibliophiles have pre-ordered (i.e. ordered), tracked, and ultimately received their shiny new contraptions. Results have been varied.

I hope that the answer is not so simple as “it’s not made by Apple”.

Unfortunately, I belong to the guitar pick-shaped Venn Diagram intersection of technophile, bibliophile, and design snob. Despite my deep desire to carry around thousands of books wherever I go, an embarrassingly big part of me just can’t get past the fact that I already own a piece of gear with which I can send and receive email, check the weather, make phone calls, watch videos, listen to music, and syncs with my preferred third-party to-do list and feed reader. And it manages to do all that with only one button! Why on earth does a Kindle need almost 50 just to read a book (which are, by tradition, buttonless).

Perhaps there are real things called “designer parties”, but this was just a birthday party that happened to have a number of interaction designers in attendance.

Nor am I alone in this assessment. At a recent “designer party”, I raised the question of being uncomfortable with my lack of enthusiasm for the Kindle and found myself in good company. Some thought that its core defect was leaving all typesetting to an algorithm instead of the careful—and human—eye of a trained professional. Others agreed with what I name now and forever the Giles Argument:

Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell… musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um… smelly.

If we’re left to decipher who the Kindle is actually “for” by its page on Amazon, it quickly becomes clear that I am disqualified not by my indifference toward Caecilia, but by my Y-chromosome! At “press time”, the pictures of people using the product are: 1) a woman on a couch, 2) a woman on a beach, 3) a women on a pure white background. As a man, specifically a man that’s not on something, obviously this product is not for me.

Ultimately, it was a phone conversation with my mother that cleared up the target audience mystery. If I tell you that she is an elementary school librarian, you’re sure to get a misrepresentative mental image. She also totes a hot pink iPod in her polka-dotted backpack as she rides mass-transit around the Midwestern suburbs. Well-acquainted with the Giles Argument (see above), she explains that—despite a deliberate effort to dislike the gadget—the Kindle is all-the-rage among her librarian friends.

Ironically, it won their hearts for one of the very reasons designers bite their thumbs. The robotic typesetting allows fonts to be resized on the fly—a feature that she assures me I will find increasingly more valuable as I get older.

Okay, technically it’s been one-hundred eleven days and I’m deliberating leaving client work out—rest assured that I am indeed getting business, not performing at my local Gentlemen’s Club or something—at any rate, it’s not an exhaustive list but here it is.

October

I was very pleased to find out, amidst all of the banks falling apart and the economy cratering, that I was selected as a speaker at South by Southwest. I get to run the discussion that I’ve always wanted from SXSW, namely “Non-profits: Be the web you want to see!” We’ll cover topics like: putting together an online strategy that addresses your mission and not just your fundraising goals, how to get things accomplished when no one at your job cares about the Internet as much as you do, and how many activism quotes I can purposefully mangle in 60 minutes. Should be a blast.

Hanging with Internet luminaries Timoni and Geoff back in ‘06.

If you’ve never attended SXSW, you should really try to attend. I consider it to be the most vital web-related gathering there is. As a webworker, I can remember how in the dark I felt before attending yearly. It sets the tone for the year to come and provides an outstanding opportunity to get beyond the hype of this technology or that platform and meet the people “who make the Internet”.

November

I discover, to my surprise, that becoming a “real” business in San Francisco requires applying for a “Fictitious Business Name”. I was assured that this the fictitious name of a business, and not the name of a fictitious business. You can search for me here.

Yeah, like that, only with real people who love each other.

Getting this form completed put me in line at SF City Hall on Election Day, where couples were being shuffled through marital rites as quickly as possible for fear that the next day their right to marry would be revoked. Indeed it was.

December

I break even for 2008. To be fair, it’s not like I had to pay off a shiny new office building or a deluxe server room that could scale to the gazillions of hits my website was getting. But still, in the middle of an economic meltdownturn, I managed to turn a profit. I can be happy about that.

January

We’re only halfway, but I have managed to submit an entry for the Design 21 “Wood, Paper, Checkmark” competition featuring FSC. I’ve been familiar with the Forest Stewardship Council for a long time now and was thrilled to potentially work with them. I even brought in a friend of mine to do some really excellent voice-over work.

You can indeed help me win by voting for my submission, but voting requires a profile on Design 21 and the entries are shown in random order without designer names, so you’d potentially have to sit through 123 entries before getting to mine. If you’re a designer that concerns yourself with social responsibility issues, you really should join Design 21 anyway and—once you have—I certainly won’t stop you from voting for me in the competition (hint: toilet paper).

So far, 2009 is looking great and… despite the financial turmoil going on around me, including costing several friends their jobs… Diligent Creative is managing to hold on and even thrive.

It’s an easy mistake to make. When you’re asked to think about the brand of McDonald’s, you probably picture the golden arches. When you’re asked to think about the brand of Ford, I’m sure the blue oval springs to mind. It may be a little bit zen (or at least Heisenbergian), but the very act of consciously thinking about branding prevents you from experiencing it.

I’ve talked about some of these issues, independent of cigarettes, before.

To illustrate the difference consider, “And after the funeral, we’re all going to get brunch at McDonald’s”. Chances are you didn’t stop to think about their logo before deciding the Mickey D’s is a less than respectful destination for a wake. The brand of a thing is slippery; sensory cues like logos and jingles become twisted up with prior experience with the product or service to create a subconscious soup of how something feels to you.

Design considerations of the branding of cigarettes is well-tread ground. The film “Thank You for Smoking” and its fabulous opening credits does a respectful job. There’s also the series premiere of designer favorite “Mad Men”, containing this gem:

This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.

So, in many respects, the UK government finally deciding to pay attention to cigarette branding and “considering outlawing the use of logos, colours and graphics on packets and requiring them to be sold in plain packaging” is showing up un-fashionably late to the party.

The folks over at We Made This have a concept sketch of what that might look like. It’s kinda sexy and dangerous. It’s not, of course, sexy or dangerous. That’s just the transparency of Helvetica set in black on a white background allowing whatever else you already think about cigarettes to shine through. The prevalence of the International Typographical Style in modern society has repackaged “plain packaging”.

Let’s really think about logos for a moment. Do my health-conscious, eco-friendly activist friends really choose Brand “A” because of their unwavering commitment to Indigenous rights? Or even their hatred of cloven-hoofed mammals? No, it’s the subconscious soup!

Don’t get me wrong. Stripping logos off the packaging will no doubt have some effect. Analysts suggest that, “plain packaging would prompt many smokers to abandon the premium brands such as Marlboro and Benson and Hedges, and instead switch to much cheaper makes”. This is bad news for the tobacco companies and worse news for the public health folks, who were hoping to curb smoking—not drive an exodus.

The real problem here is not any cigarette’s individual brand, but the brand of smoking.

As long as guys like Don Draper include “drink and smoke constantly” in their guide to picking up women, it’s unlikely that striking the individual tobacco companies will lead to a decrease in rates of smoking.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that as a persecuted pastime, smoking could gain an even stronger brand as cool, rebellious, revolutionary, and of course sexy and dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other products try to associate themselves with smoking in hopes that the brand would rub off on them.

The artist is hunched over a table top of sketches stained with coffee rings, deadline looming, until an “A-ha” moment—where the dark clouds part and a solitary ray of inspiration shines through—and everything falls into place. It’s great drama, just like the witness breaking down on the stand and tearfully crying, “Yes! I did it!” or the bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam to win the big game. All of these things actually happen from time to time, but seldom mark the end of the journey. Tomorrow, the lawyer will file paperwork, the baseball team will practice for the next big game, and the artist will endeavor to turn that perfect sketch into valid XHTML.

It’s one thing to remind ourselves that great works take great work. After all, Thomas Edison was famously quoted, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” almost 100 years ago. Or you could look to Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, and passage 94 from Art of Peace.

Progress comes
To those who
Train and train;
Reliance on secret techniques
Will get you nowhere.

These are lessons that, despite those among us always looking for a short-cut, reside deep in our hearts.

It’s another thing to fully embrace what many creative professionals consider the ultimate enemy: the revision. Yes, the dilution of pristine output into stuff barely recognizable as art, fit only for lowest common denominator mass consumption. That’s certainly one way to look at it, but if that’s what is happening to your work, I have to say “Ur doin it wrong“.

The guys behind LOLcats inspired a lot of these concepts, actually.

For the last four years, I’ve served as a webmaster for a non-profit organization. A good definition of webmaster is a web designer that has to live with the consequences. My organization had big intentions online and my first few years were spent sewing a patchwork of beautiful but disparate designs we’d commissioned from multiple agencies into a quilt that provided some sort of comfort to the people actually visiting our site. Before long, I took the reigns myself, started saying “no” to a lot of otherwise enticing ideas, and focused on traffic stats and user behavior while re-crafting our online presence. In a year, the Web Team had decreased our bounce rate by almost 20% and dramatically increased conversion to both our email list and online donations.

I don’t fault the agencies. They each danced the dance that all designers do, partnering stated client needs with personal choices both informed and intuitive. That is the ultimate role of an expert, listening carefully and then leaping forward with confidence and experience.

But they only did it once.

Briefing, brainstorming, delivery, invoice, goodbye. What made the in-house designs more successful (if the goals were objective visitor conversion and not subjective aesthetics) was each day’s attention to the previous day’s decisions. “Living with the consequences” was ultimately the fast path to good design.

Creative work is at a crossroads, struggling with what it means to be an expert in the face of the wisdom of crowds. I believe a path has presented itself and, by not taking it, we are missing a chance to fully engage the interactive nature of today’s culture.

The first books were oral traditions written down; it would be centuries before the chapter was invented. The first films were plays with a camera aimed in their direction; the innovation of the close-up caused hysteria. The web, even as it manages to wriggle out from under the book’s metaphors of pages and authors to achieve its destiny as a mode of communication, still labors under an obsolete model for its design process.

Am I just talking about Agile web design? Yes, but also how it must effect our relationships.

What would a better model look like? Consider regular check-ups with your doctor, “Looks like we’ve made some progress on your cholesterol, let’s keep working on that. How’s your back feeling, any better?” Good designers do this already. They form plans with their patients, earnestly listening to their ailments before writing any prescriptions, and providing supplemental education when important… but why stop there? Why not have the same conversation with the data?

I love the duck-billed platypus. Besides being a web-footed, duck-billed, egg-laying mammal, they also have poisonous claws and can sense electromagnetic fields. No designer, no matter how inspired, would have presented the duck-billed platypus and no client, however savvy, would have approved it. Yet, after generations upon generations of adapting to fit its environment, here it is.

It’s not hard to imagine a design process that places evolution at its center. Instead of projects guided by hunches and filled with pre-determined deliverables, we would have extended engagements guided by research with more milestones after a launch than before it. Client and designer both would sit down with statistics and decide which numbers should go up and which down, leading to either subtle or radical redesigns on a weekly basis. All of this would result in a final product quite different than anyone had expected at the onset, but evolved to fit its environment.

True not only for visual & interaction design but copy-writing, viral videos, or anything else you could measure the success of.

This kind of process requires a certain kind of designer and a certain kind of client. Both have to be willing to try new things but temper their own enthusiasm with the cold hard facts. It would require a creativity that can maintain its vitality when mixed with reality, a confidence that expertise still has a place in a world filled with data. It would require a faith that putting process over product ultimately yields a better product.

And it would require diligence.

For what better a word than diligence to describe the act of enthusiastically doing your best each day and soberly evaluating the fruits of that effort the next day, knowing that this behavior—and not any “secret technique”—is the character of great work?

It is my experience that designers and clients such as these are bountiful. My last five years in the non-profit and responsible business communities have introduced me to a great number of people and organizations that pick big fights, take on insurmountable odds, and somehow get up each morning with the same devotion. They are guided by a trust that victory, while in some circumstances a long way off, is inevitable in the face of diligence.

Maybe you are one of these people. To work with me, please visit DiligentCreative.com.

It’s hard being a complete douchebag these days. Movies have trailers that specifically tell you to turn off your ringer. With the sullying of hands-free headsets, the “you think I’m talking to you, but I’m actually talking to someone more important” trick that used to be great fun is now played out. Next to go was the “even though I’m actually talking to you, you’ll notice I’m wearing my Bluetooth earpiece at all times in case someone more important than you wants to talk”. Sheesh, it’s almost as if people are deliberately making it rough for you to show how unimportant they are.

Hey bro, thanks for calling me back. Synergy!

Yes, it’s time to bring your douchbaggery into 2008 with this amazing Bluetooth handset.

The idea is simple. Bluetooth microphones and speakers are now getting so miraculously tiny, they can be placed into a ring. But, as a fucking douchebag, you might ask, “why not two rings?” You could put the microphone into a pinky ring and the speaker into a thumb ring and I think you know where this is headed…

For additional douchebaggery, make them talk to the finger (not included).

You’re once again the envy of all your douchebag friends as you use the universal symbol for “hold on, I really need to take this one” to, in fact, “take this one”. Confuse those Luddite Midwesterners by talking to “imaginary friends”. A quick “call me” gesture after a lovely date could actually be arranging a booty call once you’ve dropped off the Nice Girl. The possibilities are endless!

What are you waiting for? Buy one today! Operators are standing by… no wait, they… they’re actually talking to people… that’s really confusing.

The Grid

Having seen Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh talk about grids at SXSWs and then reading the classic Grid Systems in Graphic Design I couldn’t not redesign my site using a grid.

In fact, I’m even maintaining a vertical rhythm as well (busting out some Bringhurst for that). This particular aspect isn’t 100% yet, as I’m having a time with borders throwing off my vertical grid, but I’m working on it.

Also worth noting is that I, while these strict grid types often make excessive use of Helvetica, after I did a bit of research I found that Gil Sans is included on every Mac and anyone with Word installed on Windows, so I’m going to use it here. Not everyone will have it, but it’s more exciting than Helvetica (and not enough people have Futura).

Colors

I’ve been thinking about how to embrace wabi-sabi on the web since I began the Stanifesto. How can you create something that weathers and gathers character with age in a digital medium? If you follow that last link, you’ll notice that the post is in black & white. That’s because all of my posts gradually desaturate with time now, and anything over a year old is grayscale.

Additionally, this site now slowly cycles through color schemes throughout the year. I wrote a particularly clever algorithm that grabs the day of the year and then calculates the color palette from it. That means that if you visit often, you may never notice that the colors are changing but if you only come by once-in-a-while, the site will have entirely different hues. You can blame my switching to locally grown, organic produce for this feature (just like certain fruit, the purple color scheme is only in season for so long so enjoy it while you can). Oh, and transparent PNGs play a large role here.

Goodies

Most popular posts! Recent comments! Contextual footers! Creative Commons license! All sorts of fun for those looking for it. Still to come is a full overworking using microformats and stylesheets that re-arrange content based on the size of your browser window. There are sure to be some bugs, too but I couldn’t wait until everything was ready or I’d never come back from vacation.

Speaking of vacation, I’m headed to Black Rock City next week, where I’m going to try to do the unthinkable and somehow continue to blog. We shall see.

I’ve been working all weekend trying to get a brand new design ready for Sunshocked.com to go live with its 100th post (this one). As the midnight hour slowly approaches and the 100th blog post (this one) needs to be posted, I realize that I’m going to have to take a little more time with it than I had anticipated. It’s got some fancy stuff going on under the hood and it would be a shame to rush it. The next post will cover all the changes and why I made them.

As for this post, I had considered a “99 problems but my bitch ain’t one” theme, singing the praises of my girlfriend—with whom I’ve had a lovely time plotting and planning for our rapidly approaching moving-in-together. But, unless you’re a Jay-Z fan, the clever title could be misconstrued.

So ends the two weeks of constant blogging, not with a bang but with a whiiiiimper.