He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices—startup, high-mileage, various blends—from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (“the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores. Although he recently divested, owing in part to a rise in the minimum wage, he gave me directions to the Team Dykstra Automotive Center in Simi Valley, so that I could see for myself. “It’s the Taj Mahal of car washes,” he said. “Ask for Carlos.”
The Sporting Scene: Nails Never Fails: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
I found myself riveted to this scathing writeup of the MTA’s Hudson Yards plans, announced today.
(For those outside of NYC, the Hudson Yards is a large piece of undeveloped property in Hell’s Kitchen (or “Midtown West”), basically the last large piece of undeveloped property in Manhattan. As you might guess, it’s valuable. The Metropolitan Transit Authority owns the property and has been shopping around the development rights for some time.)
From the article:
Equally unsettling is how the project fits into the surrounding urban fabric. The towers loom over the High Line, forming a colossal barrier against the Chelsea neighborhood to the south. (Allowing 11th Avenue to run through the site will lessen the effect slightly, but not much.) Arranging the towers along an east-west axis — a break from the traditional Manhattan grid — is only apt to reinforce the site’s image as an introverted corporate enclave.
This seems to suit the transportation authority’s agenda just fine: it always has been more interested in how much money it could make off the site than in the impact that the development would have on New York. The city could build at much lower density without spending a penny of taxpayer money.
I’m surprised at the indignation here. It can’t possibly come as a surprise to an architecture critic that a developer would sell to the highest bidder. I honestly have no idea whether the MTA–a quasi-governmental agency, I guess?–has any responsibility to be publicly beneficent with the land it owns.
Let’s assume for a moment, though, that the MTA is responsible for championing the public good as Ouroussoff suggests. Surely physical architecture is not the only criteria by which we judge an organization’s contribution to the public good. Many G train riders would happily trade several acres of “miserably depressing” architecture in the already miserably depressing midtown Manhattan if it meant the MTA provided more frequent service and full-time connections to working class neighborhoods in Queens.
I am over-simplifying, to be sure, but so is Ouroussoff. The breathless article about the conflict between private profit and public good has been written before. Only a fool would believe that New York City landowners have a cut-and-dried choice between the public good and “hustling for money.”
Inspired by a new article on A List Apart:
Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then check out the tags that are associated with the items returned. It’s like peering inside your users’ heads!
- Go to http://del.icio.us/url/
- Enter a URL and click the “check url” button
- Check out the “common tags” area in the right sidebar. I prefer to show a list of common tags to see how often a tag has been used, but cloud view will give you a sense of keyword weight, also.
- Do this for your competitors’ sites, too
These keywords are useful for lots of things: copy writing, designing AdWords campaigns, and basic SEO insights about <meta> tags. Be sure not to place too much stock in these keywords, though, especially if you have a small sample of tags generated from del.icio.us. Keep in mind that those keywords are generated by del.icio.us users, who may constitute only a small segment of your site’s total audience. Their needs and motivations – and how they think about and tag your site – may be very different from other segments of your audience.
This method is simply a cheap, fast way to find out how some of your users think about your site.
A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Here’s my problem: I have to remember the date I made a change on a website if I want to do a simple before and after comparison in Google Analytics.
Something happened on March 17, but you’d never know it by looking at Google Analytics.
What if Google Analytics let you place a simple marker on your timeline to help you remember events? It needn’t be any more complex than the dividend marker or news flags used to denote important events in Google Finance:
Two types of milestones in Google Finance.
A simple visual indication is all the work required of a Google Analytics milestone. I can manipulate the date ranges and data views as needed, on my own—no “milestone comparer” or “milestone manager” functionality necessary.
It seems the topic of failure is coming up a lot lately in the design blogs I read. Perhaps we’re all collectively dreading our Q1 reviews.
Lame joking aside, this passage resonates right now as Maggie and I are building up her bookbinding empire, which is arguably a design process within a business context. As we experiment with different ideas, layouts, or plans, we’re “recognizing accidents” all over the place as a result of our past experiences. I never thought of it in those terms until today.
Nancy Skolos remembers that one of her teachers used to say, “A good failure is worth a lot of mediocre successes.” To varying degrees, we carry this sensibility through into professional practice. For example, Jonathan Hoefler says, “Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly ‘experimental’ has to run the risk of failure.”
Design Observer: writings about design & culture
Fellow Fitster Noor is blogging her experience at SXSW Interactive. She has an insightful post up describing her first impressions as a conference “nobody.”
Today marked my third day at SXSW and it has been a really bizarre experience. There are times when I feel like I’ve been swallowed whole into the tubes of the interwebs. I keep seeing “famous” people walking around and all I can think, “OMG! IT’S [INSERT A-LIST BLOGGER/INTERNET FAMOUS PERSON] FROM [BLOG/URL]! OMG!” I keep imagining these people walking around with their URL and Technorati rank floating above their heads (sort of like the Sims). All the while, I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in high school again.
I hated high school.
on attending SXSW as a nobody :: Just Add Social
Should an art museum website exist to drive more people to the physical museum? Or should it focus on emulating some of the qualities of the museum experience like exploration, curiosity, research?
I strongly believe the latter, though I understand the reasons why museum sites tend toward the mundane. Of course, my ideal museum website does both: a unique, wonderful experience online that motivates further exploration in the museum itself.
If you’re interested in museum websites, this discussion on MetaFilter (linked below) is worth checking out.
Full disclosure: I often think about art museum websites.
“Websites were a wonderful way around the famous museum swamp.” | MetaFilter
This is the kind of design I wish more newspapers would embrace. The text-graphic combination is a useful format when you need to present complex information. Additionally, you can load this format up with a lot of information without it feeling overwhelming. Unfortunately most newspapers usually opt for the brain numbing USA Today-style “factoids” when they create infographics.
This infographic is notable from an information design perspective, too. It mixes text and graphics seamlessly (ha, seams, get it?) and uses time-shifting, focus, and abstraction to explain why Johan Santana’s changeup is so effective. Try making the same points with just text.
03santana_GFX.jpg (JPEG Image, 1125×1149 pixels)
Contrast, size, hierarchy, and space – excellent rules of thumb for novices and pros alike.
Let your type breathe. Don’t be afraid to leave blank spaces in your pages. This negative or white space will help focus attention on the text — and it’s the text that speaks loudest, so let it be heard. Next, remember the line-height CSS property; a good rule of thumb is line-spacing that’s at least 140% of your text size.
A Guide to Web Typography | i love typography, the typography blog
A great example of designing for the long now.
The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).
The Norwegian government put up more than $7 million for construction. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing money to help developing countries package and ship seed samples, as part of a broader $30-million project to protect the genetic diversity of the world’s main food crops.
Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic - Dot Earth - Climate Change and Sustainability - New York Times Blog
Sans Comic Sans is written by