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. My first look at the internet came in 1986 when a classmate showed me how he sent electronic messages (e-mail) to a professor at a campus half a continent away. It seemed like a cool idea, but since you had to know a dozen UNIX commands just to edit and send the mail, I didn’t find it very compelling.

Then in 1994 a guy named Josh Quittner made a pitch to my graduate journalism seminar for a class called “Cyberspace Reporting”. It all sounded a bit woolly. Josh, however, looked like an interesting character and seemed to know what he was talking about, so I signed on. At the time Josh was New York Newsday’s technology columnist. He would later go on to found Time Inc.’s Pathfinder.com and edit Business 2.0. At about that time a new tool called Mosaic was released. With this magic tool the Internet became much more than piles of data accessed by command-line interface — it was a window on a whole new world of stories, pictures and sounds.

By the time I graduated from Columbia’s Journalism School in 1996, I had lost interest in the traditional aspects of the trade and began building websites. The first major site I worked on was the prototype for McKinsey & Co.’s intranet. That naturally led to building McKinsey’s first external website. From there I moved to the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to help build their intranet.

At the giddy peak of the bubble, in 1999 when my peers in the internet biz were dreaming of fat IPOs, I decided it was time to go surfing. I left the country for what would be a three-year surfari. Some of that trip is chronicled on my hobby site, Coastalsurvey.

By June of 2000 I landed in Sydney, Australia, nearly broke. In that lucky country I was fortunate enough to find a job with Telstra, the Australian national phone company. The task at Telstra was huge: to organize a multimillion dollar website that sprawled across a half-dozen different domains and nearly 100 servers. My title was information architect.

As part of a small team of IAs, designers and coders, I set about trying to impose order on Telstra’s site. I wrote a dozen or more standards that covered everything from how XML should be employed to where ads could be placed. I instituted policies that limited the number of domains and I worked on a project to rationalize the header.

Telstra’s header, or top navigation unit, was a layer cake of links, each representing a different business unit. Through rounds of user testing, prototypes — both working and wireframes — and endless meetings we were able to put forward a simple and functional header that became the model for Telstra’s current navigation scheme.

Since returning to the States in 2002, 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.

Greenpoint Design is a way to gather up this disparate experience and present it in a cohesive manner.

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 (theme switcher TK), 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, handheld 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 more 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.

GD also uses several plug-ins from the growing library of WordPress extensions. They include: WP-contactform, Rust-asides and Sitemap. Each page in the site validates as CSS and XHTML. Scroll to the bottom of the page to check it out. CID is designed for Firefox and Safari, but it will even work on dodgy browsers like IE5.