Pignoli is a civilized, relaxed-yet-formal, slightly "arty" restaurant. Until recently, I though of it as one of Boston's finest and most interesting restaurants, a true dining experience. The menu has declined a bit, but the atmosphere remains.
The decor of the place is very warm and inviting, being a bit spare and modern while still being comforting. The restaurant colours are largely yellow and brown, with a free-flowing, slightly curvy seating plan that makes the place feel more intimate. The largest decorative feature in the bar are a few large (15') balloon shapes, paper lamps, meant to suggest the shape of a pine nut (pignole). The warm glow of the light through the paper makes the place seem cozy. There are no windows visible from inside the restaurant, but you don't miss them.
Atasca is a relaxed, small, old-world Portuguese restaurant in Cambridge. The food is very good, but relatively simple and honest. The staff are the same three or four old men who work there every day, very friendly, hard-working, and seem to enjoy what they do.
I like Atasca for its combination of good dining without pretension. It's a jeans and nice shirt kind of place, walk in without reservations, sit back and relax and have some nice olives and a bottle of good inexpensive wine. The restaurant is quite packed, you can barely walk between the tables, and you have to work to avoid feeling like you're rubbing elbows with your neighbours. The restaurant is close and cozy, with dim electric lighting. There is one small window up front, but the place as a whole feels a bit like a cave. An open wood stove in the front bar/kitchen makes you feel like you're sitting in someone's house, or a European restaurant.
CBC is the place you go for a quick beer and hamburger or pizza. Decent beer, high quality food, but otherwise generic experience. It's very comforting when you don't want to deal with anything complicated.
CBC always feels like a giant barn to me. It's a big cavernous building, old converted warehouse. Beer vats dominate the decor, as well as fresh wood and bright lighting. It's the cliché BrewPub. The back room is one giant space, maybe seating for 100, with very bright lights and no differentiation. I hate to sit back there and always sit up front, in the smoking section, because there the space is at least divided up some. The bar also provides a centerpiece for the front room with a friendly bartender, standing room, and relaxed people sitting on stools at the bar. The place is very loud and echo, suggesting rambunction within the confines of stodgy Cambridge.
Tacos del Mar is a decent little tacqueria, an import from a burrito chain in Seattle. It's strictly $5/meal fast food, nothing special about the experience except that the burritos are pretty good.
I hate everything about franchises - the genericness, the plastic decor, the sameness both within the franchise and between franchises (quick, what's the difference between the look of McDonald's and Burger King?) But Tacos del Mar is useful, and the food is pretty good, and franchise is an interesting study in anti-design. The whole place is designed for fast service and fast consumption. Place your order at the counter, pay and collect your burrito 90 seconds later, then sit down in an uncomfortable plastic chair at a plastic table for 8 minutes to inhale the burrito before leaving. It's very effective for what it is. Tacos del Mar is decorated in a cheesy turquoise motif, to suggest "Southwest" in the most naively iconic sense. But the use of turquoise is exactly equivalent to the use of red/yellow in McDonald's, or brown in Burger King.
I chose to look at newspapers instead of magazines, just because their design choices are more immediately visible on a single page.
The New York Times is the "newspaper of record", the serious US newspaper, the one that stands for the best of American journalism. The audience is a curious mix - snooty New Yorkers who believe the entire world revolves around them, and snooty intellectuals (like myself) who don't care about New York but feel that most other papers aren't worth reading. The material is mostly serious articles, earnest and thorough journalism.
The front page of the NYT conveys what it's about. The masthead is fully anachronistic - the famous "All the News That's Fit to Print" slogan from the late 19th century, the ridiculously ornate NYT logo, and the little corner of weather information (one of the few parts of the paper to acknowledge that the NYT is read outside of New York - different regional editions have different weather). Even the date line is anachronistic, combining a roman numeral volume with a hysterically serial number (this is #51,291).
The rest of the front-page layout is textbook newspaper layout (in the textbooks, because of its stature as The Newspaper). Above the fold are several articles, single columns, we small headlines to carry them. There's always a picture above the fold as well, usually of a person. In this case there's a graphic. It's not entirely flat text, there's a bit of human interest on the front, but the emphasis is on the News.
It's impossible to talk about the NYT now without talking about colour. They were famous for years for resisting colour in their weekday paper, earning the name "The Gray Lady", a name mostly of respect. The NYT went colour and the world didn't end, no one even calls it "The Painted Lady". In general the colour is quite subdued, always restricted to images and graphics, really just to bring some life to the images, not change the rest of the feel of the paper. The transition was remarkably smooth.
If the NYT is snooty, the WSJ is downright marginalized. It's the business paper, pure and simple, something proper men in expensive suits read on the subway on the way to work.
The WSJ journal is similar to the NYT in being no nonsense, but even more so. The logo font is very plain, no ornamentation. The same unreadable roman numeral numbering occurs for the volumes, although at least the number seems to start over every year. Still, much like the times, the WSJ masthead conveys "this is information".
The layout is even more dull and straightforward than the NYT. Individual columns flow down the page, sometimes so long as to be difficult to read. Column 4 always contains the "human interest" story, in this case a story about the bear market for Beanie Babies (hee hee.). The summary of news in columns 2 and 3 is a concession from "serious news" for their harried readers: individual paragraphs that the businessman can read without dallying on the details. (The NYT makes a similar concession on page 2, and also on the front page of the business section). This front page has a radical departure from stodge (at least, for the WSJ) - a cute little box on Weekend Activities, even with an image, a fall leaf! Usually the page is undecorated, except maybe for one pencil (never photograph) drawing of a columnist or newsmaker. This is your father's newspaper.
Naturally, the WSJ has no colour. It's really a shame, since they're presenting so much financial data - a bit of colour would really liven up their graphic presentation. But the data they present is still mostly mind-numbing tables, and colour is expensive, and they have a reputation to uphold.
I really like the NYT and the WSJ. I hate USA Today, for all it represents about horribly shallow journalism and the packaging of infotainment. But you have to hand it to them - their paper design is quite snappy and has led to changes in journalism layout all over the world.
The masthead alone is shocking. First, it's completely plain sans-serif fonts, modern and undecorated. This is a clean paper, no nonsense. Second, it's colour! And it has a graphic logo! Shocking. Nowadays this doesn't seem so radical, but when the paper was first introduced tongues wagged. I think it's curious that the masthead doesn't include a volume or serial number, just the date. I guess no one will ever bother to archive USA Today.
One of USA Today's big audiences, as I understand it, is airports - for people who are disconnected from the hometown paper and want some sort of update. They want a generic paper, nothing too taxing, just something entertaining and vaguely relevant. USA Today gives that quite cleanly. The front page has a news summary, much like the WSJ, but the summaries are one sentence and don't seem to compel the reader to read more. The layout on the rest of the page are deeper front page articles, this time in multiple columns, but somehow there are only two or three. And a big picture dominates the middle of the paper, along with a huge box graphic for sports. This isn't anything too serious, it's fun.
USA Today's use of colour was the main thing that distinguished it, until other local papers caught up. It's not just colour pictures (like the NYT), it's colour graphics, diagrams, even colour text. Lots of little boxes of design, all vibrant and fun and vaguely informative. It's quite punchy.
This is my visualization of 5 newsgroups. I mostly use the following design elements:
As I've described before, soc.motss is a very clubby
newsgroup, like a cocktail party. Most people are insiders, and
there's a lot of traffic. There's a few threads that are entirely
outsiders, and the occasional message that is ignored.
comp.ai.alife is supposed to be a discussion group for artificial life researchers. In reality it's a pretty much dead group, with seldom more than one discussion, and there aren't really any "insiders".
c.o.l.a. is an announcement group, moderated by one person. Very orderly. I cheat here - the posts actually all come from different people, but since they're approved by one moderator I chose to use one "insider" colour for him.
c.o.l.d.s. is a discussion group for Linux system issues. There's only a few regulars, the ones in blue, most people are "outsiders" who come in to post an occasional question. It's a busy group, someone diffuse and technical.
ne.food is for foodies in New England, mostly in Boston. Because discussion tends to be geographically located ("what's the best butcher in Cambridge? What restaurants are in the South End?") I tried a spatial metaphor, superimposing threads onto the region of the Boston area where the restaurants being discussed. The problem is that a map of Boston gets very crowded - scale issues are hard. And then there are posts from outsiders who don't know Boston at all and are asking generic questions, or totally off-topic. I put them out in the water. (Thanks to the Massachusetts Electronic Atlas for the image.)
I've run out of time to do this, I'm sorry. Feel free to look at my previous assignment for one idea (it'd be nice to fix up the colour issues some). Another idea I had was to take slashdot and use a newspaper metaphor. Each story was a column in the paper - pull the column out, flip over the piece of paper, and see the threaded discussion about the paper. Preferably in 3d, branches growing out of the paper. But the tools to draw that are time consuming.
| Nelson Minar | Created: September 29, 1998 |
| <nelson@media.mit.edu> | Updated: December 15, 1998 |