The Sartorialist blog has been a big hit, with each post getting dozens of comments. Why? On the surface it’s the usual blogger story: an individual with insight on a particular topic publishes quickly and honestly sans organizational overhead.
To me, the Sartorialist does something else important. He delineates the difference between art and design. Many publications aimed at the fashion consumer, whether it be men’s magazines or even the New York Times, present clothes as art. I imagine the editors are fashionistas, and publish for (the taste and budgets of) other fashionistas. The Sartorialist on the other hand covers what people actually wear and so has something of agile in it, quickly revealing what people are and do. It’s field research with a point of view.
Cisco just posted a demo of the new Cisco.com site that will launch soon. It’s a good little overview of what customers will notice in the redesign.
I was lucky enough to spend time with some of the design team a few months ago. The site will be a fascinating study for several reasons, including semantic metadata-generated pages and navigation, navigation that allows access to any one of hundreds of thousands of pages within five clicks, and enterprise-wide GUI standards.
Cisco.com has been pounded in the past for its poor site. For such a large company that is the result of many merged companies, the redesign is a huge achievement. I look forward to seeing the final work.
Update: the site went live yesterday.
Pushing aside the cobwebs in the Razorfish archives I found a couple interesting specimens. They still hold up, all while reminding us of that period when frames helped us navigate and people took animated gifs seriously. Though they look old, you can simultaneously see how new they were when they were new.
Undressed – a Dutch catalog of underthings
typoGRAPHIC – self-explanatory
Peterme points to Philip Agre’s home page. Wow, there’s a ton of interesting material here on Internet culture, education, and design. Let the foraging begin.
girlwonder is looking fabulous with her new minimalist boxes-on-white design like, well, like me. Is white the new gray?
hey, I made Peter Morville’s A-list. Though I don’t know why, I haven’t written about information architecture in, like, nine years.
http://www.nycbloggers.com/
Nice presentation, I like seeing who’s blogging in my neighborhood (and so I wonder if navigating by zip code wouldn’t been better than subway line. The subway line joins us across neighborhoods in an egalitarian way, but no one talks to each other on the subway). That there are almost as many bloggers in Brooklyn as in Manhattan is an indication of who’s moving out to Brooklyn these days.
I’m off on vacation. I’ll leave you with this 9.11 Tribute site IA’d be a former co-worker of mine. I like that you don’t have to navigate upon arrival, you can simply sit back and absorb it. Sometimes the web can be like film.
Katie Raygun, a 15-year old with attitude, is one of those bloggers that make me feel like a voyeur. I’m 32 and pretending I still understand teenagers, and of course I don’t.
Some of it might be contrived, but who cares? She’s got voice, and that’s something I love in a weblog. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with me if you saw me on the street. So suck it.’
Link via Maggie.
A site originally IA’d by your’s truly – Tolerance.org – has been nominated for a Webby. I’m not expecting you to cast your People’s Vote or anything like that. But you would be supporting user-centered design and a heavily usability-tested site. And it’s currently in second place. That’s all.
As it re-launches I just discovered The Morning News, a ‘broadsheet’ of headlines and fiction. With writers like Paul Ford, Joshual Allen, and Michael Barrish it’s the Boxes and Arrows of writing on the web. Link courtesy of Maggie.
ooh, and they have a review of the new Death Cab for Cutie album, currently on the infinite repeat setting of my headphones.
