Author: Christopher Fahey
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Class and Web Design, Part 3: As Seen on TV!
(This is Part 3. Please check out Part 1 and Part 2) Does the “AS SEEN ON TV” badge tell you that a product is good? Or does it have the opposite effect on you? My guess is that, if you’re anything like me, the little red badge indicates “cheap crap” to you. But to…
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My Aeron Chair
This is not an Aeron chair. I’m quoted in the September 25 issue of New York Magazine about my thoughts on the Aeron chair. Because, you know, I’m an expert and all. It may not be clear from the article, but I’m really not among those who find the Aeron to be the world champion…
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Clinton in the Fox Hole
Clinton on Fox. Notice the footnote: If Clinton hadn’t done this interview, Richard Clarke’s role in fighting terror (and Bush’s role in ending Clarke’s role) would drift further away from the Fox viewer’s consciousness. I read a post today at Sean Coon’s connecting*the*dots blog entitlted “and keep your enemies closer“, and I thought at first…
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Class and Web Design, Part 2: What Class are You?
As I discussed in my previous post, class is one of the few things Americans simply don’t like to talk about. Paul Fussell discusses this reluctance in the introduction to his excellent Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (a classic book I read many years ago and just picked up again to help…
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Class and Web Design, Part 1: The Class Struggle
Three ugly ducklings by zefrank. In the last year or so, hundreds of articles, blog posts, and conversations in the web design world have revolved around the question of “Why does bad design succeed?” MySpace, eBay, Google, and craigslist are usually cited as examples of “bad design” (or even “ugly design”) that works. And everyone…
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The Empathy Test
“Let me tell you about my mother…” In the movie Blade Runner, the “Voight-Kampff Empathy Test” detects whether or not a test subject is a real human being or an android “replicant”. A machine reads the body’s physical reactions to various psychologically- provocative scenarios (“Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil.…
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Elegance through Nomenclature
New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but…
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There’s a Ring at Lincoln Center, and it ain’t Wagner
Johannes Brahms, clearly pissed off at Avery Fisher Hall. How is it possible that New York’s most dedicated Brahms lovers can excuse Lincoln Center? A couple of nights ago I went to see a concert of chamber music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, on one of the final nights…
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Action Jackson
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in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Design, Images, Personal, Reviews, Science, Technology, TV & Movies, Web