The other day I ran across this lovely series of articles in the New York Times called "Why I love…". Here’s a great one breaking down a bit by Robin Williams.

The articles are fascinating and super fun to read, but the "editorial UI" design here is brilliant (and subtle) as well. The way video clips, stills, and references are mixed with the text make it feel almost like cross-cutting B-roll in a documentary: you read a paragraph or two of the author’s comments, then see what they’re talking about. This sounds maybe simple or even obvious but getting it right on a webpage (that has to work on many devices, in many browsers, at many sizes) is an awful lot harder than it looks. The Gray Lady’s designers have struck a perfect balance in their layouts between text and illustration that allows each to enrich the other instead of distracting.

This is genius too: when they quote a line from the bit, they make the text into a button for an actual audio clip:

The way the text background becomes a progress bar for playback is just… oof. I wish I’d thought of that.

I ran across this short film this morning. I saw this for the first time a couple years ago and it was really nice to watch it again.

I’ve been kind of obsessed with Carl Sagan for most of my life; Pale Blue Dot (the book the voiceover comes from) is an all-time favorite, one I reread more or less like it was scripture. Hearing his voice reading from it over these images honestly gets me a little choked up every time I watch it.

Also! There’s a website with stills! I’ve found my new desktop wallpaper.

Schnyder is a really nice new display serif family from Commercial Type, one of my favorite foundries.¹ Originally designed for the logotype of the New York Times’ “T” magazine, they’ve expanded it into a full-blown typeface with several weights and widths.

You can definitely see that this was designed for a fashion magazine; the fashion world loves their high-contrast serifs to the point that it’s all but cliche, but the quirky, playful character of Schnyder makes it feel a bit more unique.

I love the angled cuts on the tops of the lower case stems. And look at the way the lowercase “a” and “u” talk to each other in “Paul” at the bottom. Very nice.

I ran across this article earlier about the friendship between two skeleton racers in the Olympics, one from Ghana, the other, Jamaica. It’s a great read, but I especially love this bit:

Akwasi Frimpong, 32… remembers thinking on [his] first run [on the sled]: "Oh, man, I’m going to die. You want to brake, but there are no brakes. If there was a button to press stop, I would have."

But then he got to the bottom nearly a minute later, alive, and recovered his athletic instincts.

"The competitiveness in you says why not go back up and make less mistakes and go even faster," he said.

I wonder how many great inventions and accomplishments have happened after moments like that in human history? "Well, that was dangerous and terrifying… but I bet I can go faster if I try again."

Designer Tobias van Schneider posted a really interesting post-mortem reflection on his ".Mail" email client project.

I remember seeing his concepts for the app back in 2010 or so, and they were really brilliant. You can see a lot of ideas in there that have become standard in modern email clients: swiping for actions, simplified account sidebar, avatars/social integration, and lovely minimalist type treatments. His case study/pitch was the first place I’d seen them; I can’t say for sure he invented those UI patterns, but they certainly weren’t common before. As a product it may have failed to launch, but as a piece of UI design it was really influential.

This was also shortly before Sparrow got acquired by Google and then killed, and I remember desperately hoping .Mail would take off so the world ¹ would once more have a usable email client. I signed up for the email list and checked the case study occasionally, hoping to see an Available now! callout appear there.

But, sadly, email protocols and APIs are a horrible quagmire of sadness and despair and knashing of teeth, and it was not to be. But many of van Schneider’s ideas were picked up/stolen/borrowed by Dropbox, Spark, Polymail, etc., and we now have at least a few pretty damn good email clients, perhaps with .Mail to thank for it.

Also, Tobias van Schneider has perhaps the most amazing beard in the design industry.