greenpoint design

About

Greenpoint Design is a Brooklyn-based web design and consulting firm. Greenpoint Design provides information design services and makes accessible, standards-based web sites.

Information design means organizing data and presenting it in a way it is quickly and easily understood. It’s a catchall term that has come to encompass web design, knowledge management, information architecture, graphic design and usability engineering. In print, for example, an editor acts as an information designer when she restructures an article for clarity. In graphic design, the artist performs this function when he pares down an image to its essentials. On the web, the information designer has the additional dimensions of interactivity and a fluid viewing environment to consider. Good information design uses the web’s dynamic to help users find the information they seek.

About Us:

My name is Rob Cummings and I’m the director of Greenpoint Design. I’ve been working in the web space since 1998, first as a developer and later planning and organizing websites. I’ve built a series of sites for small and medium-sized businesses as well as working in-house at larger corporations as an information architect. Some of my larger IA projects include websites for Ford, Boston Scientific, Harris Direct, Morgan Stanley, M&M Mars, Proctor & Gamble, The Clinton Foundation, Prudential, Netjets, Mount Sinai Hospital, Conde Nast, Telstra, The Hewlett Foundation and the Kennedy Center.

Through Greenpoint Design, I contract directly with companies for information architecture and design work and collaborate on other web development projects.

Aesthetics

As a general principle of aesthetics I prefer simple solutions. In a sentence, a paragraph, an essay or a website, the best line to meaning is usually a straight one.

William of Occam, the 14th century English logician, put it this way: Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred. This dictum is worth remembering especially on the web, where a proliferation of tools, ideas, and possibilities can muddle any meaning. Given a choice between plain or fancy, I will always choose plain. Or, as Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

In this section of the site there have been several mentions of standards-based design. Standards-based design is an effort to impose order on what has been the free-for-all of web design. The leading proponent and arbiter of standards is the World Wide Web Consortium, an all volunteer group of computer scientists and others bent on making the web a better place.

The chief effect of coding to standards is to separate design from content. In this website, for instance, all the content is held in the database and the design is controlled by a few templates and a stylesheet. This separation of design from content means that the look of a web site can be easily changed, or the content can be moved to another system. What this means for commercial web sites is that they can avoid the costly coding and recoding that has been the bane of the early web and port their data to new tools as they become available.

As the Internet evolves, the tools it uses and means of presentation will change. The net will be accessed through a multiplicity of devices — cell phones, hand-held computers, televisions and gadgets as yet uninvented — which will require new methods of presentation. The best way to future-proof a web site is to separate its content from the method used to present the content, i.e., to adhere to standards-based design.

Wherever possible I look for open source solutions. Not only is open source code cheaper (usually free) and secure, but it embodies the spirit of the web. That is the creative collaboration that makes the internet such an interesting place to work. Or as Tim Berners-Lee wrote in Weaving The Web, “The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.”

About This Site

This site is built on Wordpress, an open-source content management system. After considerable research, I chose Wordpress because it is strictly standards compliant and outputs the cleanest code. It is also relatively simple to use and configure.

The theme for this site is based upon Borja Fernandez’s Pool. I have made a few additions and subtractions to his elegant design, mostly in the CSS.

Greenpoint Design also uses several plug-ins from the growing library of WordPress extensions. They include: a contact form, Akismet and Search Everything. GD is designed for Firefox and Safari, but it will even work on dodgy browsers like IE5.