Chapter 42

I’m back from my perfect wedding weekend; thanks to any and all of our clients who waited patiently with their questions and needs while the last week or two of my life got hectic with preparation.  (And thanks too to the rest of WW, who did a great job running things in my absence.)  Although it was hard to leave Oz Farm, the site of our wedding, it’s nice to be back on the job.

One sad note during the weekend was the passing of Paul Newman; he died on September 26th, the day before our ceremony.  Although Oz Farm is off the grid and there’s no cell phone reception, the news spread slowly across the farm on Saturday.

Paul Newman was a great, admirable man in all sorts of ways, from his commitment to social justice to his lifelong and devoted marriage.  But he’s on White Whale’s radar because he was an alumni, frequent donor, and great friend to Kenyon College, whose site we redesigned earlier this year.  I was fortunate enough to be asked to design a homepage graphic to serve as a tribute, and it’s now live on the Kenyon homepage, along with a moving tribute page and a photo-by-photo description of the homepage graphic.   To create it, I paged through countless photos, which really gave me a sense of how long and how deeply Paul Newman has been a part of the American consciousness.  (The folks at Kenyon did the important work of securing all photo permissions, which I know was no picnic, given that since Paul’s passing copyrighted images have spread across the web without proper attribution.)

Tags: design, kenyon college, paul newman

Even though I assess, evaluate, critique, and praise Web sites for our clients every day, I don’t really use that lens in my normal, everyday browsing of the Web. I mean, don’t get me wrong, badly designed, poorly organized sites annoy me. I might even yell to no one (I work at home most of the time) when I’m frustrated with a site or see something that’s particularly garish. I also note good ideas and generally keep up with best practices. But I don’t waste my time overthinking or reacting to random sites I like or don’t like.

So I surprised myself this morning when I came across the Oregon State Fair’s Web site and was so impressed with its design, functionality, IA, and writing that I actually wrote a glowing, completely unsolicited email to their marketing director. (By the way, I found her email quite easily.)

I know the team that developed this site left no rock unturned. I can tell immediately. There are no weak links: They spent just as much time making sure the writing was spot-on as they did refining the design.

It’s a complete package:

• The design - great, catchy, beautiful, perfect for a state fair
• The IA - clear, easy to navigate, with a touch of unique flair (Big Tomato) that does the double duty of reinforcing brand
• The writing - smart, clever, knowing, funny, succinct
• The functionality - I love My Can’t-Miss List (such a great use of shopping cart technology) and that the big Purchase Tickets graphic on the top of every page

Even when our involvement on a client project is limited to design or strategy, we always emphasize the equal importance of these four elements. But of the four, writing is often overlooked until well into the project. As a result energy and resources are in short supply when the time comes to focus on content. I look forward to the day when all the RFPs we receive include a section on writing; when Web committees allocate a line item in the budget to content development before the project even starts.

I don’t mean to overemphasize writing, but as the lead IA strategist and content developer at White Whale, it’s something I fret about all the time. I let the other guys worry about functionality and design. In the end, sites succeed when it all comes together.

I haven’t been to a state fair since I was in high school but I’m going to this one. Amazing what a great Web site can do.

Tags: design, IA, inspiration, state fairs, writing

Site launches are a really big deal for us; we work with only a few clients at a time, so by rights we ought to stop the presses and pop champagne whenever one of our clients’s sites opens to the public. But inevitably new client work (and summer vacations) intervene, and our celebrations wind up being more private.

I wrote a blog post the day the Kenyon College site launched, and had intended to do something more splashy. I still might. We at White Whale are all very, very happy with how the Kenyon site came out, and are very proud of Kenyon’s able Public Affairs staff, who did a great job of implementing our CSS/XHTML designs into a sometimes unforgiving CMS; we’ve been there to help, but most of the finishing work was done on their end. So— Shawn, Patty, Rebecca: congratulations again.

But I’m really writing to talk about something specific that is happening to the design, which in my view is the most exciting thing about it.

Continue Reading »

Tags: design, kenyon, launch, photo gallery, web 2.0

Concurrently with my White Whale career, I am still finishing up my BFA in New Media at the Academy of Art University part-time. It has been a longish and convoluted path—which began with three quarters of a BFA in Graphic Design at the University of Louisville—but it has been enjoyable for the most part. One of the strengths/weaknesses of my current school is that we are trained to be jacks/jills-of-all-trades. This is very frustrating at times due to certain courses or activities feeling trite or deviating from my interest and purpose in pursuing this degree, but in many instances I find myself learning some incredibly cool skills that most designers and artists aren’t fortunate enough to ever find the time and motivation for. One such example is the topic of this blog post: my first foray into the realm of type design. Continue Reading »

Tags: design, Digital Art, Side-Projects, Typography

Here it is:

Tags: Current Clients, design, lewis and clark, process

You don’t use HTML tables for layout.  Every standards-based Web designer knows this.  

As of June 2008, this notion is so deeply buried in the conventional wisdom about Web page design that just about nobody ever thinks about it anymore; the idea of using a table for anything other than Tabular Data is met with scorn and derision from developers.  And so the lowly <table> tag sits alone in the lunchroom, friendless, with nobody to talk to except its perpetual hangers-on <td> and <tr>.

Now of course, we don’t use tables for layout at White Whale.  Ever.  How could we?  It’d be like driving an SUV, listening to a Zune, or voting Republican— it’s something cool people just don’t do.  We (as a company) couldn’t design a site with layout tables and look at ourselves in the morning.

But I don’t like conventional wisdom, and as a result I often find myself thinking about tables— in particular, how there are some things you can do with <table> that you can’t do with <div>, no matter how hard you try.  (At least across all browsers, and without using Javascript.)   Continue Reading »

Tags: bad habits, CSS, design, guilty pleasures, tables

And it’s open to the world, for all to see.

We work with a very small number of clients at any given time, and as a result we don’t get to enjoy the experience of a site launch very often; it sounds ridiculous, but our last site launch of major consequence was the Haverford site, which launched almost nine months ago.  We’ve certainly been hella busy since then, but this is our first flower to bloom in 2008.

I’ll have more to write about this later, most likely in an article for the main WW site.  I don’t think anyone reads this blog yet besides the other White Whalers, but just in case, to mark the occasion: here’s the first collection of Kenyon design ideas that we posted for internal discussion, on October 23, 2007.

My sincere thanks to everyone at Kenyon, everyone at WW, and everyone else reading this blog (which basically means you, Mom).

Tags: design, hi mom, kenyon, launch

During my times as a freelance designer—prior to being captured by White Whale—a majority of my clients were small businesses and entrepreneurial one-(wo)man-shows. These clients, and thus the functional beauty that I created for them, differed vastly in a myriad of ways and yet they all had nearly the same exact critiques of the comps that I would deliver to them. Those of you who have worked as designers are likely intimately familiar with these exact requests for revision:

• Even when it is a perfectly acceptable size and is not screaming “THIS IS THE NAME OF MY COMPANY!!!”, they ask “Can you make my logo BIGGER?”
• After painstakingly designing the whitespace of their design in the interest of facilitating a bit of visual respiration, the client notes that there “should be more content because the page feels empty in spots”.
• And then we have the infamous “The headlines need to be brighter and much larger”

In my Saturday morning internet perusing (it is at times sadly amusing that this is what has taken the place of cartoons in my adult life), I stumbled upon this; apparently our brethren have taken to satire as a vehicle for alleviating their work-related frustrations. While its easy to laugh about now, I am truly thankful that White Whale has largely pulled me from disputes over these issues; out of the several WW clients that I’ve been involved with, I don’t remember any of these issues being major points of dissent; here’s to having higher ed. clients!

Editor’s note: Yes, Douglas, but that’s because we usually make the logo really big anyway.

Tags: design, inspiration, logo, satire

I have never really taken much advantage of the cellphone camera, even though I’ve always felt like I needed a cell phone with a camera. But that’s changed this year. Continue Reading »

Tags: cellphone, design, lewis and clark

I consider myself a designer.  But my new ear, nose and throat doctor has business cards that make me weep with envy.

He is also a fantastic doctor, and broke the news of my deviated septum in a very caring manner.

Tags: design, otolaryngology