New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum (and yes, spoilers in the quote and article for the entire Mad Men finale):
I don’t think the show was saying that real change is impossible. In fact, nearly everyone around Don changed quite a lot, and in ways that ring true for people living through decades—a real rarity in a TV show. Pete and Peggy and Joan, in particular, barely resemble the people they were at the beginning of the show. They’re stronger, clearer, and also more ethical. Their relationships are authentic. (Roger not so much, but that’s why we love Roger.) But if Don Draper is as much a symbol as a person, maybe that’s the point.
Among the many shows its compared against – from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad – Mad Men’s final world view ends up far more optimistic.
When designers and developers (and entire web teams) work closely together with flexibility and shared understanding, they can use their time and resources more efficiently and creatively. Whether your process is waterfall or agile, a solid team foundation applies to everyone: it allows you to shape a solution that benefits all teammates on a project.
To avoid the mistakes we made on our Pizza Site process, we balanced our responsibilities differently with the Bike Site. We became what I call 80/20 practitioners, focusing 80 percent of our time on our own respective strengths while distributing the remaining 20 percent across other disciplines to benefit the entire project.
Wonderful essay by Alexander Kriss at Kill Screen regarding Lucasarts’ golden age of adventure gaming and its impact on the burgeoning gaming market:
In the mid–1980s, the similar albeit slightly less profound question, “How do I know this is a videogame?” would be answered very differently than today. Such a query might have yielded answers like, “There are discrete levels that increase in difficulty, therefore it is a game,” or, “Progress is tracked by a score system, therefore it is a game,” or, certainly, “If the player fails, she reaches a ‘game over’ state, therefore it is a game.” The medium was young and existed in a kind of philosophical terrarium, bound by certain unwritten rules carried over from arcade era of the late ’70s.
Out of this experimental haze came Ron Gilbert, a young programmer and game designer at Lucasfilms Games (later to redubbed LucasArts). Beginning with 1987’s Maniac Mansion (co-designed with Gary Winnick), he embarked on the impressive project of dismantling the assumptions that had become so ingrained that most game designers had forgotten they were there. Like Descartes, Gilbert sought to find the latent truth of the (gaming) world through the power of the intellect.
From Medium, a one stop shop for everything about writing high quality text for the web. Everything from custom underlines to print styles, it’s all here. For web developers/designers, the best part is a technical supplement that outlines a lot of the CSS Medium uses to achieve its typography and layout.
Interesting piece from Alastair Coote on how to determine if a user is accessing your web property via either full browser or in-app web view. It effectively is a user agent string check, which by it’s nature means you’re not batting 100% accuracy, but it’s a cool idea nevertheless.
Wonderful, exhaustive look at David O. Russell’s career by Steven Hyden of Grantland. One smart observation:
Russell makes movies about families — some bound by birth (The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook), others by circumstance (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, and American Hustle). But they’re always loud, frayed, self-destructive, and yet somehow functional units.
Object-fit is a CSS attribute that should have had widespread support a long time ago; super useful. It’s a bummer that Microsoft still lists the object-fit parameter as merely “Under Consideration”, but falling back for IE is easy and safe.
The redesigned Bloomberg Business has been controversial ever since its launch. To many designers, Bloomberg’s maximalist layout is tacky and garish. I think critics are missing the larger picture. The home page’s dominance is waning. Bloomberg’s brash, over the top design is an effort to make it relevant again.
User flow on “content first” sites (e.g. blogs, media, Tumblr) has shifted in recent years. Social media, share services, and content aggregators have fragmented web site’s visitor flow. Articles and other permalinks have replaced the home page as a site’s main entry point.
Many companies, most notably Buzzfeed, have thrived off this shift towards social discovery. So most of their attention, optimization and A/B testing focuses on article pages. Meanwhile, other pages that link to these articles (home, section, feed) feel ignored. Most still rely on a busy, reverse chronological listing that feels like a relic of web design from years ago.
Bloomberg, at first glance, follows this “article first” design methodology well. Their articles have the same share friendly article template – big social media buttons, full bleed imagery, provocative headlines – as the competition. Yet Bloomberg dramatically shakes up the design of their home and section pages, which have:
Highly opinionated, brand driven aesthetics. A bold use of color, bordering on (or pushing past?) garishness. Text overlapping imagery. Web 1.0 era gradients. Blocky headlines with large white padding.
Varied story density. Content is in a responsive-friendly grid format. Yet every Bloomberg section mixes up how much is presented, and where.
No linear or chronological order. The layout rarely follows a clear pattern other than a “top story” or two placed at the top. Some pages have low density sections followed by high density sections. Others reverse this layout.
Bloomberg designers realize the battle for engagement has blown beyond the initial article. Now it’s the page after – usually a home page, section page, or feed – that requires creative focus. A unique, memorable second page experience can build a web brand and improve the odds of return traffic.
Bloomberg isn’t alone in heavily revamping and stylizing their home and section pages. The Vox Media properties and Medium have taken similar actions; they’ve carved out an aesthetic niche (Vox leans towards maximalism while Medium thrives on its simplicity) and a fresh articles listing format.
Overall, it’s a welcome trend. With web sites increasingly reliant on sharing and social media for visits, article design is starting to feel a bit stale. Now it’s the pages that bind the articles together that are getting a shakeup, with Bloomberg, Vox and others leading the charge.
David Bax, host of the consistently excellent Battleship Pretension podcast, writes on the dangers of the Netflix “all at once” TV model. For some shows, making an entire thirteen episode season available at once works. But some shows like Bloodline suffer from the format and treatment.
Wonderful to see the technology behind Slack’s Mac app get such a slick site and documentation from Github. Can’t wait to dive into this for side project work.
