The artist, Nancy Januzzi, is one of the senior illustrators at The Wall Street Journal, where Laura works. Like all of the hedcut artists, Nancy delivers a certain amount of gravitas to these manually-intensive, trademark portraits of her subjects, which is why I find this picture so hilarious.
It’s not just that I have an over-the-top preoccupation with my dog. It’s that the portrait manages to capture Mister President’s absurd, deadpan seriousness with uncanny accuracy. If you’re going to render a pet in this definitive, white glove style, his is pretty much the most appropriate expression. At the same time though, he’s a dog, and a pretty goofy one at that, too. The effect is just wonderfully ridiculous. I couldn’t stop laughing.
FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.
Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words. Frequency change measures the difference in frequency as a percentage: greener words are unusually popular; redder words are the opposite.
Here's something else you already know. Try to please everybody and you'll please nobody. What does this have to do with business? Everything, just like in life. Too many features on a product equals something unusable. Too many chefs in a kitchen causes chaos. Too many validated opinions can lead to a compromised product or watered down vision of something that was once great. You already know this because you've been there, you are there, you're going there.
But the little voice kicks in. "I want to be liked".
It's subtle—you might think you're beyond it, but not as much as you'd care to admit. Pleasing yourself isn't the solution either, especially if you consider what you do to be in the service industry. We're all in the service industry now. So who do you please?
Digital type wizard Erik van Blokland just posted a facsimile of LettError Magazine, published on MetaDesign’s color copier in 1989. It’s packed with dawn-of-digital nostalgia and the Dutch twins’ playful humor. There's even a nice quick critique of the Bezier curve. The cover of FontShop’s recently published Font 007 has an uncanny, but unintentional similarity.
In other LettError news, Erik has revived a FontFont classic, FF Trixie, with enhanced detail, new features, and a dramatic trailer accompanied by Just’s guitar.
Starting today, visitors to NYTimes.com have the option of seeing an enhanced version of our home page that we call Times Extra. This alternate view of the same editorial slate adds links to related coverage from third-party news sources and blogs — right there beneath our main news stories.
False modesty aside, I’m making an exception for Times Extra because, well first I think it’s a quiet breakthrough that’s pretty neat, and second, because it’s a concept that I personally hatched on the side with my Times colleague Philippe Lourier, the brains behind our Blogrunner aggregation engine. It was originally something of a lark so we’re pretty happy that it’s finally seeing the light of day (as a beta experiment). Of course, it would still be nothing more than an intriguing idea without the many, many hours of additional dedication from the designers, editors, technologists, the ace project manager and the hard-driving product manager that joined our campaign to make this happen. For their long hours, patience and dedication, I’m incredibly grateful.
In Action
Here᾿s how it works: at the top of our home page, just click on the toggle that says “Try our Extra home page” that now appears just below the New York Times logo.
What you get is the exact same home page with an additional, scrollable box of links beneath each of the major news stories. We’ve color-coded these outside sources in green, so that’s your cue that they lead to external content.
Actually, I should say you’ll see these additional modules beneath most of our major news stories. This process is entirely automated, relying on Blogrunner intelligence to match the stories our editors pick with relevant headlines from the thousands of blogs and other news sources that the service is constantly crawling. So sometimes, because of the delicate combination of human curation and automated formatting that drives our home page, no matches come up. We’re working on improving that over time, though.
Fear of Design
Finally, one more point: as far as graphic design goes, this is pretty unremarkable stuff. We went through a few iterations to decide what these links would look like, but in truth there’s nothing here that will win points for visual innovation. Or even good looks: the automated manner in which the scrolling boxes are added can create some unintended and undesirable gaps in the page’s layout.
And there’s a legitimate argument to be made for the sheer density of what we’ve created here with all of these additional links; our already crowded page only gets more crowded with Times Extra.
Sometimes though, design is a matter of trying to effect material changes to the experience at the expense of aesthetic purity — and opportunities for graphical showmanship. Times Extra is an experiment in modestly redesigning the user experience; whether it’s a success or not is up to you and all of our users. Hopefully enough people will find it useful for us to evolve it further; I don’t think any of us suppose that this is really the last word in how third-party links can be expressed on the site. My point is that, as designers, an aversion to flouting the rules of visual decorum often doesn’t serve us well. Nor for that matter does a fear of failure.
Starting today, visitors to 
