I have Gill Sans fatigue. Its increas­ing ubiq­uity might merely be the result of my increas­ing aware­ness of var­i­ous type­faces, con­fir­ma­tion bias, or some­thing else, but every­where I look, there it is. On all of the Col­liers Ostendorf-Morris for-lease signs (and there are a lot of those in down­town Cleve­land) on ban­ners adver­tis­ing lux­ury lofts, on signs in hall­ways, on busi­ness cards, on the side of com­mer­cial vans, on plaques and dis­plays at the Museum of Nat­ural His­tory. Everywhere.

What used to be my favorite font is now played out (or has been and I’m just now notic­ing). I still like Eric Gill’s work, though. And by work I don’t mean the fact that he slept with his sis­ters, daugh­ters and fam­ily dog. I mean his type­faces, wood­block prints and sculpture.

I took part in my first crowd-sourced viral video cam­paign [even though I think those words aren’t being used in the cor­rect way] for the U.S. National Design Pol­icy Coun­cil. The video is below, but you can fol­low the rabbit-hole of more infor­ma­tion by going here.

The ques­tions par­tic­i­pants were asked to answer were:

1. What role does design play in US eco­nomic competitiveness?
2. What role does design play in the US demo­c­ra­tic governance?
3. In what spe­cific ways, would a national design pol­icy fur­ther enable design to play those roles?
4. What would you pledge to do to help design play that role?

I was inter­viewed by CNN Money about the fed­eral stim­u­lus track­ing site Recovery.gov. I wrote a more detailed post about it over at The Design State.

I would also like to take this oppor­tu­nity to state offi­cially, and unequiv­o­cally, that I love squirrels.

I spent the bet­ter part of Sun­day, all of Mon­day and the bet­ter part of Tues­day in Chicago at An Event Apart. I had an amaz­ing time. The sched­ule was jam-packed with talks from 8:30 AM to early evening both days. Not only did I actu­ally get to see a bunch of web lumi­nar­ies in meat­space, I finally met Eric Meyer, and my per­sonal design role model, Dan Ceder­holm.

Overview

At times I thought the con­tent of some of the talks was a bit too con­cep­tual and utopian; I mean that the tips about only tak­ing jobs you feel pas­sion­ate about and spend­ing hours on the crafts­man­ship of a site sound good enough, but are only really applic­a­ble for folks who run their own, already estab­lished design busi­ness (Which were the folks giv­ing the talks). I work on an in-house team of thir­teen, my boss, 7 devel­op­ers, 3 design­ers and a web-maintenance per­son; we have around 100 sites that we are respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing. Since we’re in-house we can’t refuse cus­tomers and since we have so many sites to man­age we don’t often have time to give them the pol­ish they deserve. As a com­par­i­son, the team that Cameron Moll runs for the LDS Church has twice as much staff for the same num­ber of web­sites. Folks were con­sis­tently amazed that there were so few of us on our team and that we dealt with so many websites.

That’s my only com­plaint about the con­tent; in terms of logis­tics, I would have appre­ci­ated a map to the AEA Party the first night, but the pre­sen­ta­tions were avail­able online for con­fer­ence atten­dees and every­thing stayed on schedule.

Talk Thoughts

1. Jef­frey Veen’s (for­merly of Google) talk about infor­ma­tion design was excel­lent, and it made me think of a bunch of ideas for how we could dis­play Elec­tion Infor­ma­tion on the BOE site. He worked on the Google Ana­lyt­ics web­stats project so he’s an expert on how to dis­play large amounts of data in var­i­ous cus­tomiz­able ways. He talked about how instead of telling the story of the data, we can enable the user to tell their own story. We sort of already do this with our cus­tomiz­able elec­tion results, but after hear­ing Jef­frey speak, I think our imple­men­ta­tion could be a lot better.
2. Cameron Moll talked about deal­ing with in-house design groups. He man­ages a group of 30 design­ers for the Mor­mon Church and their 100 web­sites. Their process involves things like sketch­boards, which sounds like a great way to sell a design, if you have the time to put them together.
3. Zeld­man gave an excel­lent talk about how design­ers need to be empa­thetic to the needs and behav­iors of the users of the sites we design, instead of just design­ing for what a board or com­mit­tee expects to see. I under­stood his point, and even agree with it, but he didn’t really address the fact that it isn’t an option very often.
4. Jason Fried’s talk was sim­i­lar. He’s the main man behind 37signals, a very suc­cess­ful CMS and work­flow com­pany. He talked about crafts­man­ship and how doing the lit­tle things and tak­ing your time with a prod­uct will make it excel beyond the aver­age. He men­tioned how his com­pany spent 4 or 5 hours dis­cussing the best way to work the items in a radio list. It would cer­tainly be nice if we had that kind of time to invest in the crafts­man­ship of our sites, but I gath­ered from just about every­one else there, that you only have that kind of time if you’re self-employed or run your own business.
5. Dan Ceder­holm (my hero! and the author of Web Stan­dards Solu­tions and the Bul­let­proof series) showed us some neat new CSS tricks that can be imple­mented now for forward-compatibility, while at the same time look­ing just fine in cur­rent browsers. He kept stress­ing that it is okay if a site doesn’t look exactly the same in all browsers.
6. Rob Wey­chert com­pared design method­ol­ogy to how folks play chess. This was a great talk.
7. Rob Hoek­man did on the spot usabil­ity reviews. This is some­thing I think we need to do more of on our sites. There’s a site called Five Sec­ond Test [source of the idea] that can give a good rough esti­mate on how well a site’s design works with the usabil­ity. Another site that was men­tioned nearly con­stantly was UIE which has all kinds of help­ful infor­ma­tion about User Inter­face Design.
8. Cleveland’s own Eric Meyer talked about his use of reset stylesheets, which force most browsers to default to the same dis­play rubrics. I’ve used them on a cou­ple of sites and they are amaz­ing. No more hav­ing to fig­ure out why things break in IE! The Debug stylesheets are used to improve acces­si­bil­ity, by show­ing images that lack alt text, mal­formed table data and other stuff. They are only used as a diag­nos­tic tool, but are very helpful.
9. Andy Clarke talked about how he uses comic books as inspi­ra­tion for web­site designs.
10. There was a lot of talk about the using the Golden Ratio through­out the con­fer­ence. I actu­ally did a rigid Golden Ratio based design for the TWiFi project back in the day.
11. There was a demo of Adobe CS4 as well and there are some seri­ously awe­some new tricks to make work­ing in Pho­to­shop and other pro­grams much more user friendly. I’m excited about get­ting those pro­grams if we ever have the cash for it.

Inter­est­ing Links

• http://wave.webaim.org/ — Acces­si­bil­ity Checker
• Fire­bug (Fire­fox Plu­gin that allows instant CSS check­ing and modification)
• Xscope is a tool that allows you to deter­mine the widths and heights of ele­ments onscreen, with­out hav­ing to click around or open files.
• jQuery is a javascript library that is eas­ily inte­grated with CSS and is there­fore eas­ier for design­ers to imple­ment and use.
• Web Acces­si­bil­ity Check­list PDF

Other Cool Stuff

• Using the CSS outline attribute doesn’t affect page lay­out the way that using bor­der does.
• # is called an octothorpe
• Instead of using the CSS opacity attribute, which inher­its to all chil­dren ele­ments, you can use background-color: rgba(0,0,0, .7);

I flew in Sun­day night and wanted to go to The Field Museum, but the Chicago Marathon had traf­fic so snarled that I spent 45 min­utes on a bus, moved about half a mile, and was then told to get off the bus, cross the street, and wait for a shut­tle that would then turn around and take us to the muse­ums. This was at 3:30 and the last admis­sion to the museum was at 4, so I was forced to walk up and down Michi­gan Avenue shop­ping. I also went to Navy Pier on Sun­day Night. Mon­day Night I went to The Billy Goat, which is a famous bar where Chicago Tri­bune jour­nal­ists have been going for years and years. They serve cheezborg­ers (that’s how they spell it) and steak and egg sand­wiches. No Pepsi…Coke, No Fries…Chips. It’s cash only, and a really cool place. The Billy Goat Dark beer was really tasty, but I drank it all night with­out even get­ting so much as a buzz. I watched the Browns game a bit and hung out with some folks I know from MetaFilter.

The Blue Line Ele­vated Train ran from O’Hare just about to my hotel, so I saved some seri­ous cash by pur­chas­ing a CTA pass instead of spend­ing $60 for the round-trip shut­tle or $80 on a cab ride. In Chicago, just about every­body rides pub­lic transportation.

All in all, a great stay. Chicago is a town that is pretty much impos­si­ble to dislike.

Even though I was beaten to the punch.

While refor­mat­ting my work PC today, I browsed around the inter­net look­ing for thoughts on e-government and design. I came across an inter­est­ing research brief by Peter Muhlberger enti­tled Should E-Government Design for Cit­i­zen Par­tic­i­pa­tion? Stealth Democ­racy and Delib­er­a­tion [Abstract] [PDF]. He has a few other papers that look down the alley I’m inter­ested in read­ing as well.

This paper posits that Amer­i­can cit­i­zen apa­thy and dis­en­fran­chise­ment with gov­ern­ment are not due to cit­i­zens’ pref­er­ence for the appear­ance of oli­garchy as democ­racy or a belief in gen­eral con­sen­sus, [a view cov­ered in detail in a book called Stealth Democ­racy] but is the result of a psy­cho­log­i­cal effect; Amer­i­can cit­i­zens are gen­er­ally lin­ear thinkers, not sys­temic ones, which makes it dif­fi­cult [and there­fore less inter­est­ing] for them to engage in polit­i­cal and gov­ern­men­tal processes.

He has some data to sup­port this [nat­u­rally] and comes to the con­clu­sion that eGov­ern­ment has the abil­ity to enhance, and thereby improve the policy-making process, as well as other gov­ern­men­tal actions by allow­ing space for cit­i­zen dis­course in a non-intrusive man­ner, cou­ple with a few spe­cific require­ments. That’s all very good, but it doesn’t address the fact that pro­vid­ing space for cit­i­zen input is often the last thing that gov­ern­ment [as bureau­cracy] wants to do. Pos­si­ble avenues for crit­i­cism [such as open dis­course] are dis­cour­aged, or fun­neled into con­trolled, lim­ited set­tings [the media] where things like spin and talk­ing points can effec­tively neu­tral­ize them. So while the oppor­tu­nity exists for eGov assis­tance in cit­i­zen involve­ment, Muhlberger doesn’t offer any tips or tricks for con­vinc­ing gov­ern­ment to behave that way in the first place. An esti­mated increase in effi­ciency isn’t going to cut the mus­tard with the con­ser­v­a­tive nature of any gov­ern­ment entity.

The arti­cle was very good though, and I already see par­al­lels with the book I’m cur­rently read­ing: The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, which, in addi­tion to being an exhaus­tive ency­clo­pe­dia of typo­graphic ter­mi­nol­ogy, method and his­tory, also offers some fun­da­men­tal appli­ca­tions of typo­graphic usage and dis­play to assist and enhance user expe­ri­ence. It is also, appro­pri­ately, mar­velously designed.