Design & Code

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

—Eliel Saarinen,
quoted by his son Eero,
in Time magazine, June 2, 1977

…she’s quotable:

“Writing about design is like dancing about architecture.”

–Jennifer Ziegler, author of Alpha Dog
and How Not to Be Popular.

Ever wonder where we get the ampersand character from?

Via Daring Fireball, a link to a lovely article from the typographical masters at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Such info appeals to my type-nerd sensibilities, and reminds me of the sterling advice from Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, notably quoted in Ellen Lupton’s outstanding Thinking with Type, and parsed in detail in a session with Mark Boulton at the 2007 SXSW conference. That is, “In heads and titles always use the best ampersand available.”

Seriously, open up a word processor and type some ampersands in different fonts. Check out the bold and italic versions. It isn’t all that tricky to create a CSS class that will ensure that the most attractive symbol on your visitor’s system gets used.

Why be so finicky about a character that essentially arose out of shorthand? Because that is what design is all about, sweating the details and caring about things like ampersands. The statement itself could become a shorthand for a broader philosophy about taking pains to do the best work we can.

Q: Do you need an author website?
A: You betcha.

Awesome Author Site Tip #1: Yes, you should have a website. You probably don’t need convincing on this point, but I’m going to state three reasons why you need an author website.

They may not be the reasons you think: [click to read more...]

Over the next few weeks I will be listing and elaborating on my best hints about whether and how to design and maintain an effective author site. These are some of the same topics I illustrate at length in my “AuthorSites” talks to writers’ groups, beginning with the talk I did last May for the Illinois chapter of SCBWI.

Author Sites: Hybrids

But before we begin I first have to say: Author sites — and I’ve designed and produced over two dozen of them to date — are tricky. Why? Because they are hybrids; they are part personal and part professional.

Your site is personal because as a writer, there is always a part of you in your work. In fact, your site needs to be personal because discovering something of the author-person is one of the main reasons some of your visitors googled you and found the site in the first place. If you are going to place yourself on the web, you need to be prepared to share.

Your site is also a powerful promotional tool for your work. Teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents, editors — people responsible for getting books into the hands of book-lovers — all are potential visitors to your site. These visitors will be looking for signs that you are a professional, someone who can be trusted with a child’s sensibility or an avid reader’s attention.

Straddling Conventions

There are conventions regarding personal sites (it’s probably okay and maybe even expected to post pictures of your dog) and conventions about professional sites (it’s probably not okay and maybe even a downright bad idea to post pictures of your dog).

There’s no one-size fits all rule for where you, the author seeking to put up a site about yourself and your work, should place yourself on the continuum of personal-to-professional. We can probably, in the comments and in future articles, come up with some guidelines, but all I am asking of you here is to begin thinking about the balance you want to achieve. I’ll touch more on this as we go along.