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Andy Rutledge : Design View

USA.gov ReduxSeptember 21

You may or may not know it, but the United States government has a website. USA.gov is dubbed the US government’s official web portal. There you can find information for citizens, businesses, government employees, and visitors to the US. Like many government websites, it is poorly designed and often confusing. It should be redesigned, especially if the Democrat candidate for president should win the 2008 election. In that case, the transition of our government from a capitalist, representative democracy to a Marxist state will require many changes, which should be reflected on the USA.gov website…

Contrast and MeaningSeptember 18

If you’re a designer, you work to communicate and convey meaning. So it’s important that you understand the mechanisms by which things and ideas acquire meaning; more than any other factor, your grasp of these fundamentals determines your ability to communicate effectively. Without fundamentals, you will flounder when faced with complex design challenges or constraints. That’s right: nothing has much meaning by itself, which is one reason why design is important.…

The Opposite of ProfessionalAugust 22

Much has been written, discussed, and debated lately about the ostensive necessity of academic education in whether or not one exhibits design professionalism. But for all of the exchange surrounding this issue I’ve not seen reference the overriding, vital fact: the two are wholly unrelated. Never the twain has met. They are non-relatives from different cultures. The one is to the other as dancing is to geology. In short, higher education does not produce design professionalism. Never has, never will. Yet the various aspects of academics, and other wholly irrelevant factors, are always the primary recurring themes debated in these discussions…

Times New OmenAugust 5

A short while back, the folks at Adaptive Path invited me and the gang at Unit to contribute to a cool project they had in the works for Mozilla Labs. Our part would be to design how The New York Times sports page would look a few years into the future. Now, the star of the show is not our page design; it’s the Aurora browser concept that Adaptive Path have crafted. But I thought it might be fun to examine the Times design all the same.

My PreciousJuly 21

…Designers, both humble and powerful, are as likely to fall prey to this sort of corruption as the characters in Tolkien’s story, and for the very same reasons. We have egos, we suffer periodic disappointments, and so in the effort to find or craft an unblemished or highly enjoyable project it is all too easy for a designer to cling too tightly to an idea, regarding it as precious, and equate it with holding tightly to integrity. Because of the forces that impact our work, designers can be especially prone to what one might call the corruption of the precious.