simolinic

viafrank:

The opinions expressed below are solely my own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of my peers at Thinking for a Living. Also, cheers and hoorays for my fellow conspirers: Duane King, Shane Bzdok, Bob Borden, and Ian Coyle.

I’d be remiss not to mention the launch of Thinking for a Living v3.0, a site geared at creating and publishing thought-provoking design-related content. TFAL has been a passion project of ours for the past couple of years, and it’s really satisfying to see the site launch to such enthusiastic support. If you’ve gone and visited and read a little, thanks so much.

If you haven’t visited, I hope you can go take a look around. In redesigning the site, we tried to question a lot of the things that we found frustrating about the web: pagination, vertical scrolling (and its effect on the experience of reading), and the lack of a sense of completion as a reader. We wanted to make a place that was quiet and focused for sweet, dignified reading. If the site is called Thinking for a Living, we wanted a space suitable for thoughtfulness.

If you label your audience as “reader,” it changes a lot of your design process. You let the content do the majority of the heavy lifting to establish tone and personality. You obsess over contrast between background and foreground color for type. You think hard about grid structures and measurements. And, more than anything, you focus on the experience of reading the site. More often than not, laymen think interactive design means the interaction of the user manipulating the content at hand. In our case, the interaction wasn’t manipulation, it was consumption. The interaction was reading.

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I don’t remember how I got to Frank Chimero’s tumblr a few months ago, but I rejoiced in his designs and his essays. Since then, I’ve been refreshed and (dare I?) challenged by his continued articulations of life as a… well, as a human, trying to do good work, that happens in this case to be “design.” I just love him, and he recently summed up why.

Then, it turns out, he (co-?)designed and has written for an online magazine that, after opening it, poking at it for a few minutes with the mouse (the “next column” buttons chased me around in a fun way, making the clickable area larger without being intrusive), I realized I could move around it with the arrow keys.

I let out a little yelp of joy.

This is, so far, the best, most readable presentation of text on the internet that I have ever seen. It immediately reshaped several of my old opinions, and at once gelled with thoughts I’ve had about the web. Keyboard-accessible, yes yes yes. Touching one key to keep moving is great.

The only thing I wish I could do is move around the table of contents with the keyboard, also, and select articles from there… I’d also like keys to go directly to the next or previous article, without having to page all the way through the one I’m looking at. Though insisting on that sort of physical presence or progress — like in a paper magazine, getting glimpses of things you didn’t know you were interested in on the way to the one you are — isn’t bad at all.

And the articles look delicious, to boot. Long-form text, presented in a fresh and palatable way… Yes. Yes, please. Yes, forever.

The only problem now is that I want to know exactly how it works and I want to make sites that incorporate these ideas and mechanisms, and try to take them in other directions. And, frankly, I’m kind of busy right now.

… Yes.