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Andy Rutledge : Design View

Web 0.2November 10

I suspect the next year or two will be the best time ever for freelance designers and developers, and even for small agencies in the US. But only the most savvy and professional freelancers will be able to survive the economy we’re entering. Small businesses have had certain advantages ever since the advent of the Web, but I believe we’re entering primetime for agile and opportunistic squirrels, as the larger beasts lumber and sputter along. I think the coming years will in many ways be a return to the early days and wide-open frontier of Web design and development business. Web 0.2. This situation favors free agents, and here’s why.…

The Design of (the wrong sort of) DissentOctober 20

I often read about and hear about how designers must have the courage to speak truth to power and how political dissent is one pillar of patriotism. These are tenets I firmly believe in, by the way. But I also find laughable the way many designers think they’re speaking truth to power by creating or showcasing design examples of Leftist political dissent, in books, in magazines, and on personal websites and blogs. I’m struck by how anyone in the design community can believe it takes courage to do these things when there is zero chance of suffering any negative consequences for doing so…

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 19

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. Contrast is important because the meaningful essence of any thing is defined by its value, properties, or quality relative to something else. That’s right: nothing has much meaning by itself, which is one reason why design is important…

Times New OmenAugust 6

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.