03 14 2005: we relaunched a redesigned gawker and defamer for mr. d this morning.

defamer’s outward design doesn’t change much; everyone’s thought that one was right on the money from day one. under the hood, it’s a complete rebuild from the ground up.

gawker is a different story: both code and design needed to be gutted and rethought, so we cheerfully burned it to the ground and rebuilt it. the only thing left from the original is jason’s logotype, which i took care to preserve (it needed to be rebuilt to fit other media). everything else is brand new: typography, css, the works. much more pleasant to read now. the last version of gawker was, as was said as i was growing up in tennessee, “‘bout damned ugliest thang since homemade sin.” sounds less than delicious, right?

oh, and both sites now have shiny new guides… just like gizmodo’s. enjoy.

-pk

03 13 2005: i’ve heard from joel, in his most peeved tones, that he’s been told several times that some folks don’t like the new gizmodo android.

that’s fine. we knew it was going to happen, and it didn’t bother us much—we’ve been designing long enough to know what comes along with a redesign: you assess what was wrong with the old design, make the appropriate corrections, change the visual voice to match the property’s current state, then launch. then you run like hell, because nobody likes change and everyone suddenly has time to give the designer a piece of their mind regarding something they really didn’t care about mere days prior.

so here’s where that android came from.

sometime in 2003, i started slapping faces on gawker media sites. actually, defamer was the first site to get one as a conscious thought, and it worked really well—defamer’s one of those sites that fits its archetype well. i still love that design.

shortly after that, i mentioned to nick via IM that maybe it would be appropriate to consider each gawker site to be just like a person—a name and a face. unfortunately for me, nick loves loves loves, like, dirty filthy loves the notion of programmatic solutions for everything, so it became his directive that i ensure every gawker site fit that mold.

there are exceptions to this rule. for those exceptions we’ve rationalized that the archetype behind the site is supported by too broad to be visually “pegged” by a portrait. the identity is therefore expressed strictly via its typography. gawker is one of those sites. if we were to apply the solution to gawker—and we tried—we’d have to find the ultimate picture of a new yorker. that’s a terrifying prospect to me.

anyway.

nick decided gizmodo was to get a face. specifically, nick decided gizmodo was going to get the female android from metropolis. we thought this was the weirdest idea we’d heard in a long time, but were intrigued as to how it would actually look. usually, nick’s notions are much more vague, but in this case, he wouldn’t be budged in any other direction (coughtechcough), except by our strongest argument: he couldn’t have her. metropolis is protected under a copyright that’s only a few years old. that meant i had to make a new android, and one who carried metropolis’ drama. she needed to be retro and cinematic, she had to be beautiful, she had to be seductive.

i made a few false starts myself before goiong to other artists to get our android. so false, in fact, that i’ve gotten rid of them. really embarrassing stuff. but i thought it would be interesting to filter this character through multiple artists, since she was to be both new and old, seductive and classic.

i approached dirk tiede, a local anime artist, to design the girl. dirk publishes his own comic, a manga set here in chicago. he’s also designed for several kids’ properties, including lego. he’s pure geek material, through and through—the perfect candidate for such a job. nick was highly skeptical at first, but dirk came through:

after dirk had finished her, we sent her off to jesse ewing, who’s a close friend and freakishly talented artist. jesse’s work consistently floors me. no matter what he does, he infuses it with a spirit that is purely middle-american to me: it is solemn, a little sad, earnest, a bit romantic, and cinematic. i love his work.

jesse had never done anything like this before. his work is almost always much more intimate, capturing small, personal moments. he wasn’t really sure why i’d asked him to do this. it was the intimacy of his work that i wanted for this girl—she needed a humanity to her to soften her robotic nature, and it would take a lot to make the piece even remotely believable.

so when he delivered his final image to me, i was floored:

the detail in this piece was simply amazing. he’d captured dirk’s character and taken her to a place that i’d never considered.

here are some details.

impressive, no?

so. enjoy her while she’s around. i wish i’d gotten to use more of her in the final design, but it probably would’ve been too much of a system shock. maybe people will get used to her and we can show her off more on the next go ‘round.

-pk

03 12 2005: last week, amid much hate mail and more drama than i’ve ever witnessed for a simple redesign, su and i launched a redesigned gizmodo for gawker media. this is gizmodo’s third design, the second one i’ve created, and i believe the most useful and beautiful. this redesign is the cumination of several performance upgrades su and i have been making to all of the gawker media sites over the past few months.

here’s a list of changes and improvements.

1) there’s a robot head. love it or hate it, my artists’ work came out magnificently. the image is a mixture of a character design from chicago’s dirk tiede and mixed media illustration (watercolor and pencil) from ohio’s jesse ewing. dirk is an amazing cartoonist, and jesse is one of my favorite illustrators anywhere in the country. he has an unbelievable range and a solemn sadness to his work that is subtle, but unmistakable. i was thrilled to finally start mixing illustators in a way that made their work more surprising.

2) su basically nuked all of the existing CSS and rewrote gizmodo from the ground up. there should be a fairly significant increase in the quality and consistency of page rendering across multiple browsers. the css should also come as close as su could muster to a reasonable validation (given the crazy shit he has to put up with for ad servers).

3) post typography is now larger, more clearly organized, and much easier to perceive quickly.

4) headlines are now set in typography native to systems. su and i are beginning to move away from web-standard typography as a primary typesetting strategy. there’s no real reason anymore since operating systems are now shipping with a wider range of typefaces installed. if you’re on windows xp, you should be seeing arial black, and if you’re on a mac, you should see futura. all the rest of you bitches get arial, verdana, or sans-serif. sorry. all i can do.

5) date headers are now easy-to-spot visual separators between days.

6) posts are easier to spot by themselves, and easier to mail along to friends.

7) the sidebar has a huge list of improvements which i won’t really go into since they affect every gawker site, but the most notable new feature is that gizmodo (and all other sites from here out) integrates a guide to the web powered by kinja.

next up: we’re launching a new defamer and gawker in the next few days. keep your eyes peeled. if you’re in the new york gossip market, i would guess this might be HUGE! NEWS! but probably nobody else will care. hope you like.

-pk

03 11 2005: longtime client gawker relaunches gizmodo today—the first of our designs we’ve redesigned. principal pk talks about dirk and jesse’s work at his site.

-pk