Last weekend I attended a typography walking tour around the Lower East Side of Manhattan led by Tobias Frere-Jones (of Hoefler & Frere-Jones fame). The tour focused mainly on engraved and painted signage from bygone years. Some examples were presented because they were so damn beautiful, and others were presented for the exact opposite reason, but all were very intriguing, representing a place, time, and cultural inheritance in the history of the city and its people. Tobias told us that the tour was inspired by his research leading up to the design of Gotham—a gorgeous typeface, though fast approaching ubiquity—in which he crisscrossed all the blocks below 14th street taking photos of every bit of preserved type he could find. At multiple points over the course of the walk we were treated to some of Gotham's ancestors and original inspiration. Tobias has only done a few of these tours, and they sell out within a couple of hours, but if you are in the NYC area, I highly recommend signing up (check out the AIGA NY events page for updates). There are few chances to be lead around such a historic city to look at interesting typography by someone so knowledgeable of craft and heritage. I managed to take photos of all the type we stopped to study, as well as a couple other examples along the way, and dropped them on to Flickr for continued viewing pleasure.

I first worked with Matt Mullenweg about three years ago when I had the pleasure of redesigning the WordPress logo, so I was very excited when he approached Happy Cog to help redesign the WordPress admin. Though many talented people have had a hand is this project, Happy Cog's was just one piece of the whole. We were tasked with re-architecting the admin (expertly done by Liz Danzico), creating a revamped design (done by me), all overseen by Jeffrey. We worked on a good handful of pages which the Automattic team coded and extrapolated to create all of the other pages. WordPress has grown so organically over the years, that certain areas of the old admin became like little serfdoms, complete with their own unique styles and functionality. One of the biggest goals we sought to achieve in the redesign was to bring a system of consistency to the different admin pages, forms, and content types.

I won't go into all of the new features and advancements, Matt has already thoroughly covered those, but I do just want to mention that this is an iterative process. A lot of things have been reorganized, streamlined, or altered. Little odds and ends of the design work we executed haven't made their way into the system yet (or will be included in the .com rollout of the admin). So, some things may take some getting used to. It's important to understand that this project is setting the groundwork for the new WordPress, and that this is just the beginning of development. And of course, if something is missing or broken in this release, you can always file a support ticket.

We are very excited by the results, and hope you will be too. My hat goes off to Matt and the Automattic team, and to all of the passionate members of the WordPress developer community. If you are interested in checking out the new WordPress, take 2.5 for a spin or watch a screencast of the admin in action.

Instead of braving the long lines and frustration of losing my voice while trying to shout above the the music—assuming I even managed to get in the door—I opted to get swept away with smaller groups at bars that weren't hosting a parties. This resulted in a much more relaxed time full of really great conversation with new and old friends.

I presented twice this year, first as part of a panel on Day 1 called "Respect!" accompanying Jeffrey Zeldman, Liz Danzico, Erin Kissane (all Happy Cogs), and Doug Bowman from StopDesign and Google. I was nervous about presenting with so many co-workers fearing it would end up very one-sided, but it turned out to work really well, giving everyone a good glimpse into our group and how we work together, while Doug provided a good in-house balance to our points.

The second talk on Day 3 saw my longtime friend Rob Weychert and I team up again to tackle critiquing in "Everyone's a Design Critic". Battling both a time change for daylight saving, the first slot of the day, and less sleep than I'd like, we and the crowd managed to drag our butts in and pull off a really engaging conversation. There was a lot of audience participation, which helped everyone perk up. Below is the podcast for "Respect" and the slides for "Everyone is a Design Critic" (podcast coming soon).

• Respect!: Podcast | Video Clip (I love that they label me "Santa Monica" and renamed our panel. Great job, guys.)
• Everyone's a Design Critic: Podcast | Slides (8.1MB PDF)

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener of the conference was the nature of how people interacted with one another and the content being presented. I saw very few people taking pictures, blogging, or even using laptops during the talks, and I collected far fewer business cards than ever. What I did see was an incredible amount of was Twitter action. In the past year Twitter has certainly exploded, but its presence at SXSW was palpable. People were not only using it to converse during talks as a sort of back channel, the Mark Zuckerberg interview being a good example, but also to organize flash meetups and impromptu parties instead going of the official events. Lots of people were using Twitter last year too, but it didn't have the kind of saturation of followers to create the network it did this year.

Even stranger still are the implications of a possible drop off in Flickring and blogging. In previous years, blog posts and photos were the way people archived SXSW, you could skim through both to piece together a good semblance of the story for what occurred during the conference. I'm going to venture a guess and say that this year everything was archived by tweet, not solely, but most accurately. Twitter really became the story and storyteller of the conference. (I can't take credit for this observation, it sprang out of a conversation with Liz). There are some pleasant exceptions to this, notably Mike Rhode's sketchnotes, but wow.

This year's SXSW has left me optimistic about the conference. Last year I felt like grew too big for its own good. This year it grew bigger still, but everyone seemed to find ways to make it work to their advantage. One of these years the conference will probably just turn into a large Katamari ball, but until then I think I'll keep showing up. Actually, that might be even more incentive to show up.

As I stood on the subway platform the other day, zoning out at the posters that line the walls, I snapped to attention as a most peculiar thing caught my eye: a poster for a movie called The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie. I can honestly say I don't know much about VeggieTales (the TV show or the films), but damned if this poster, and more specifically, the character on it, aren't clever.

Do you see it? Right there on the hat. At first glance you might see a skull and crossbones (or in this case, flatware), but that same shape is also a flourished letter "P" for "Pirates" and a sliced mushroom viewed from head-on. So simple and smart. Small details that carry multiple meanings like these are design gold, and this one hit me that much harder because it wasn't very obvious at first glance. This isn't going to get me into the theater for the film, but it sure made me stop and stare like a idiot for a few minutes. High fives to whoever the designer might be.

The kind folks at Webstock (Tash, Mike, and Siggy, to name a few) put on a wonderful conference, sparing no detail in showing the attendees and speakers a splendid and informative time. As Dan Cederholm said, New Zealand is a sort of "Earth Concentrate"; travel about five minutes in any direction and you will likely be confronted by a different and gorgeous landscape. Thank you to everyone at Webstock and all the attendees for showing us around and being so damn nice. I definitely want to go back and visit someday.

Some stats: I managed to take 298 (and post some on Flickr), saw about 835 sheep and 3 movie stars, ate the largest mussels I've ever seen, and rode 27 times in 16 different vehicles over the course of 10 days:

1. Volkswagen Jetta (2)
2. AirTrain (3)
3. B757 3-cabin (2)
4. BART (2)
5. 747-400 (2)
6. Airport bus (4)
7. 737-300 (2)
8. Volkswagen Golf (1)
9. Double-decker bus (1, top floor)
10. Taxi (1)
11. Ferry (1)
12. Rental Car (1)
13. Water taxi (2)
14. Kayak (1)
15. Shuttle bus (1)
16. Cessna Caravan (1)

Photoshop is a lumbering dinosaur of an app (and the cause of many a marble of doom), snatching the attention of available resources until it's finished whatever it needs to do. Unfortunately, Adobe's efforts to make Photoshop such an all-in-one tool has clouded what its real use should be, and the loss of a competitor in Macromedia has stifled most forward progress. Hell, once you start needing to issue multiple editions of the same program, you should probably just split up the functionality into different apps. Let's not even get started on the farce that is Creative Suite, where only the most popular of the bundled apps get more than a glance with each "new" edition. I’d guess Adobe has all but lost the respect of the community responsible for their success, because it seems as though Adobe has given up on respecting us.

In a moment of frustration the other day, I remembered an old friend: Fireworks.

While in college and shortly after, I actually designed many of my first websites in Fireworks. At the time it was still under Macromedia's guidance, and on a natural path to become a strong UI design application. Fireworks blended some of the vector power of applications like Freehand and Illustrator, with some light bitmap handling and great image optimization. But then Flash got really popular and Fireworks became neglected. Now, approaching three years since Adobe bought Macromedia, Fireworks still languishes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Fireworks hasn't received any love, but the features being added are paltry at best, most being touted by how they integrate with other Adobe programs, leaving little for Fireworks to actually get done. The plain facts are it doesn’t do bitmaps better than Photoshop and it doesn’t do vectors better than Illustrator. It does do a scant handful of things better than those programs concerning the web (specifically image optimization), but do I really need a piece of middleware to bridge that gap? No. So, just who is Fireworks for? The casual web designer? Hardly. It sits firmly on the fence between power users and weekend web designers.

It's high time we had a grown up User Interface design program, one that understands the nature of the web and the parameters we work under. Each time I revise a bunch of related text in a Photoshop comp, I wonder why the hell there aren't Styles palettes like InDesign. But let's not stop there: how about per-document grids, rather than system level settings. Or functionality to treat images and text as flowing and wrapping elements, rather than islands of content that need to be moved individually. Perhaps a rendering engine that understands CSS, the intricacies of type styling, and relative sizing units (px, em, %). Knowledge of current browser UIs, chrome, scroll bars, and libraries of those elements to use in comps (Fireworks does currently touch on libraries of form elements). Also, we don't really think of pages as flat and static entities anymore; we now have pages that adapt to user interactions, reflowing, recreating, and altering content without a page refresh. The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications to design those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore.

All of this is just scratching the surface. What we need is simply a dedicated and professional level UI design application, and Fireworks could still be it. And if Adobe can't get it done, surely the independent development community could answer the call. In the past year, a rash of image editors running on Apple's Core Image have been released. Pixelmator for example, is basically all the functionality I currently use in Photoshop, without the stuff I don't (as soon as they get decent color and type palettes, I would seriously consider switching).

I really do hope the answer might be my old friend Fireworks. Photoshop seems like a lost cause at this point; soon enough it will be too bloated to run on modern computers anyway. For now, the ways in which we author and design websites have grown up, and our programs need to as well.

Every day I see aggravated blog posts, twitters, and IMs all pleading for the same damn thing: someone to bring sanity to color calibration.

For those who may not know, monitors and operating systems come with default color settings. You are able to change and calibrate these settings to tweak things like brightness, contrast, and temperature (of color). That all sounds great, but any number of factors can shift color values away from what you've specified, and some applications have their own separate color settings that may override your calibrations. Take some time to bone up a bit on Color Calibration.

I have two computers. The guts are identical, same model, same make, same settings for color—both at a system level and in programs like Photoshop. On one computer, when I export an image from Photoshop it looks different in browsers and in other applications than it did in Photoshop. What's more, it looks different still in Photoshop, browsers, and other applications on the other computer with the same settings.

Do I really need to re-calibrate my setup every other month? I know that a monitor's colors settings shift ever so slightly as time goes on. I know that environment, lighting, and phase of the moon can all have an effect on the display of color on-screen. I can accept that. What seems odd to me is that seemingly no one has figured out how to compensate or correct this at the OS level. It also doesn't help that the language and acronyms used to define color settings are confusing enough to make the average person weep.

I imagine there are still expensive calibration programs that will keep my computer in check, but should we have to expand our systems to address something that it should take care of already? And for the love of god, why are Adobe, OS and monitor makers on different wavelengths when it comes to color display? Is there any standardization in this field? Is standardization even possible? Maybe Pantone should've listened to Tim Bray and nipped this in the bud long ago.

And even if I did employ software on my setup to fix the inconsistencies, it wouldn't really fix anything—the people viewing my graphics will still be in the same sinking ship. It's maddening, I tell you! I realize there is no one solution to this problem, but is anything being done about it?

A few months back a friend was lured into a few harmless flap 'n' snaps. But, lo! The next day he found himself in the hospital. It turns out he's a hemophiliac, a fact unknown to all but him. The doctor told our friend that he was bleeding between his brain and skull and that flap 'n' snaps weren't good for anyone, most of all a hemophiliac. Those intrepid among you may connect these dots to form the conclusion that we all bleed between our brains and skulls while performing a flap 'n' snap, but we're able to clot that bleeding. Luckily, our friend is fine.

I love flap 'n' snaps as much as the next person, possibly quite a bit more, but I would be remiss in not telling you this cautionary tale. Like drinking, drugs, and politics, you take your life into your own hands when you flap 'n' snap.

Will this stop me? Nah. After all, my body can magically clot blood! But, for the rest of you, especially hemophiliacs, please be careful. I've updated the Flickr group with an appropriate warning. Flap carefully.

A couple of years and a couple of jobs ago, Kevin starting making avatars for everyone in our circle of friends. He has always taken to drawing us from the full spectrum of flattery to insulting, but these were presentable caricatures we could even show our parents. All of us used them mostly for IM an the various sites that allow a profile picture. Flash forward a couple years and we started using them in our Basecamp account for Happy Cog. Everyone likes them so much, that we've gotten Kevin to keep outfitting our roster with avatars whenever new people come onboard.

In the past year or so I've been noticing a funny thing during our kickoffs with new clients. We briefly show them Basecamp and talk about how we would like both companies to use it during the project. When we get to the People page their demeanor completely shifts, they see a slew of our avatars staring back at them. We just used them because we thought they were funny, but for new clients unfamiliar with Basecamp, it has the added effect of breaking the ice for them. Rather than "oh great, new software to learn," it becomes "hey, we can have fun with this."

It's a simple thing, and certainly an unplanned one, but it shows some of our personality to the people we work with and helps them get acclimated to our process. Below are the current Happy Cog avatars. Some were created years apart, so I've listed them in chronological order. As you can see, the style has gradually gotten more detailed. Some fun details: mine was made when I didn't wear a beard or need my glasses so much, Erin's is setup so she can change its hair color to match her own ever-changing hair, and Rob's forehead (fivehead?) extends about 40px higher than the cropping.

This past weekend I was using the previous Apple keyboard on a friend's computer and it was like rediscovering my old Commodore 64 after years of it being hidden away—clickity-clack, clickity-clack—and as silly as it sounds, I became acutely aware of the finger effort needed to depress each key. The new Apple keyboard laughs at all of that, combining the ease of typing on a laptop with the scope of a full size keyboard. Plus there's barely any room for dirt and fuzz to settle inside... there really isn't an inside!

Consistently Inconsistent

As beautiful as it is, I have but one small beef: Apple moved the volume keys from the top right of the keyboard. It seems like such an insignificant thing, but it screws with the use patterns I'm accustomed to. On the previous keyboard the volume controls and disc eject keys resided at the top right. Now they double up in the middle of the keyboard (joined by three iTunes play control keys) occupying the F7-F12 keys. For whatever reason, I can't seen to get this through my head. I've been using this keyboard for weeks and I still find myself hitting the top right keys.

Perhaps weirdest of all is the eject key. In both the current and previous keyboards it didn't share space with a function key; it was only the eject key. Previously, it was in the extreme top right spot; F19, then to the right, eject. Clean and simple. On the new keyboard, eject is slapped in between F12 an F13, creating an odd break in the continuity of the function row. It gets even more confusing when I use my MacBook which places all dual purpose F keys to the left while leaving the eject key by itself on the far right (the MacBook Pro can't decide either).

Why did Apple move them? Did they change them for the sake of the new truncated wireless keyboard that more closely resembles a laptop keyboard? That way the wouldn't have to manufacture different F keys for the two keyboards, one set with those seven keys on F7-F12 and one set with them on F14-F19. With the groupings they have now—three iTunes control keys, three volume keys and one eject key—they could've easily map these sets to the sections of three and four function keys on the right side of the keyboard. It seems so much more natural and intuitive, much the same way that in the middle is avoided in the OS menu bar; important functions are pushed to the far left and far right sides. Isn't that where they should be?

I have a bunch of fun stuff coming up in the near future, not the least of which is a little side project I've been trying to launch for a very long time. For the Jason Santa Maria completist (hi Mom!), my letterpress business cards landed in a HOW magazine feature this month (more on the HOW website), and I'm interviewed in Steven Heller's latest book, Becoming a Digital Designer, along with great people like Jim Coudal, Mike Essl, Marian Bantjes, and many more. Lastly, I'm stealing some time away from work next week to attend the Future of Web Design conference in NY, if you happen to be going be sure to say hello.

I'll be playing against Brian Taylor, a throughly capable opponent whose work I've admired for years. Commentating on the match is Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti fame (and responsible for one of my favorite posts). I definitely have my work cut out for me. Check out the match preview for more info on the three of us and the game.

The match is a special Halloween edition and I'm told is not meant for the faint of heart. The blood shall indeed flow! Hopefully there will be a medic on the court, just in case. A few vampire hunters and crucifixes probably wouldn't hurt either. In these final moments leading up to game time I've gotten my racket restrung and have been doing some calisthenics to ensure I can chase down any errant returns. I won the coin flip, so I'll be starting us off. No matter who wins, this promises to be a fun time. Tune in tomorrow at 2pm Chicago time or GMT-6, and jump into the forums for discourse on the match. Hope to see you there!

Update

Boy, am I glad that's over. I won! It was an intense match, and now my office is knee-deep with blood. Brian had some great volleys (I really want a big print of the illustration from #6), and the commentary from Matthew was just perfect. Luckily, my volleys were fueled by Dawn of the Dead playing in the background and the Misfits boxed set on rotation in the foreground. If you missed it, you can always head over and watch the replays from the match. And 15 minute rounds is a cruel, cruel joke. Those folks at Coudal know how to pull the strings. Now, to get the hell away from my computer, for tomorrow I will be in Philly for a 24-hour horror film festival.

As a young lad, I used to love staying up late to watch monster movies on TV. In the end, even bad was still good; it was the genre and the setup that lured me in every time. Most times it would play out the same way:

Monster(s) is summoned/created/crash lands in a populated/underpopulated area and kills/terrorizes the populace. Survivors are left to band together and fight/unsummon monster(s).

Most were cheesy at best: Critters, House, and C.H.U.D., but there were always some winners mixed in: The Fly (original and remake), Night of the Living Dead, and The Thing. Those years were time well spent and have given me a life-long love of monster movies.

Some of those monsters were so good, that they've become icons of the genre; horror films wouldn't be nearly as much fun without staples like vampires and zombies. But, what is the best monster? And what criteria do we use to determine what makes a monster the best? Do we base the decision on breadth of exposure/sequels (Dracula), body count (Jason), or just plain scare-quotient (Exorcist)?

I have my favorites, but I would love to hear from you. Who or what is the best movie monster?

I wish I had many more months to labor over the design of this document, but I spent as long as we were able. I haven't worked with this many graphs and tables in a very long time, but it felt good to do some print work again. The last time I did a print file of this size I was still using Quark, and I gotta say, InDesign is a vast and welcome improvement in that department. All of the charts and tables were prepared in Numbers, and placed into InDesign as PDFs (keeping the text live and selectable in the final PDF). We tried to ensure it reads well on screen (so that people wouldn't need to print it out just to read it) and in printed form. Getting the colors to work well enough in both mediums was just a pain. As exhausted as we all are of working on this, I'm actually already looking forward to tackling next year's document, at least from a design perspective.

So, please head on over and check out the findings. We've also offered the raw anonymized data, if you would like to crunch the numbers differently, or would just like to print out 33,000 responses to all the questions and wallpaper your house.

Great job Eric, Jeffrey, Erin and the rest of the gang. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey, you've done a service to our community.

(Not candy of course, that's still a necessary evil. We're not animals after all.)

Where are the things that go bump in the night? I don't want to buy the same holiday as everyone else. Halloween is brimming over with opportunities to create things yourself, and this month practically demands that you get your hands dirty. Lest I become an old Halloween grump, like a music snob pining for the good old days, I offer a handful of alternatives, commercial and otherwise, to help you and me get in the spirit of the season:

• Spooky Sock Monkeys: Kim at Sock Monkey Drawer is at it again with eight ghastly Halloween sock monkeys. Last year's monkeys sold out in about a day, so this year she decided to stretch the fun out a bit and put them up on eBay. Guillaume and Morlak are just damn cool.
• Blood Puddle Pillows: Take the most comfortable dirt nap of your afterlife.
• Skull-A-Day: A Skull-A-Day keeps, well, it probably keeps friends away. Some favorites include the doily skull (a.k.a. skoily) and the floppy skull.
• Gross-Out Cakes: Celebrate the holiday in gruesome culinary style with a Kitty Litter Cake. Or maybe you prefer a Toenail Torte?
• Carve Something: Halloween would not be complete without some wholesome pumpkin related fun. If you're new to pumpkin carving, start out with some basics before moving on to some more serious fare. Make sure you dress appropriately.
• Old time Horror Radio: Ghosts, Monsters, Mad Scientists and more! Something to drown out the howling winds and creaking window shutters.
• Idle Hands: MAKE Magazine has a great Halloween issue this year chock full of tips for making your own haunted house, and really nice makeup how-tos. Check back on Instructables and the MAKE Blog all month long for loads of DIY fun.
• HotBloodStix: Blood sticks that work with your average hot glue gun. You can also make it the old fashioned way.
• Spooky Stickers: The latest Halloween icon set from the Iconfactory. Some other favorites include Vintage Halloween, Halloween 2004, and Eat Me, as well as two awesome desktops, Haunted Mansion and There Castle! (both include iPhone sizes).
• 50 Dark Movies Hidden in a Painting: From last year, but still a great game to waste your afternoon with.