The Mark of a Good Designer

While listening to Debbie Millman interview Michael Arad, the designer of the World Trade Center memorial, I was impressed by his ability to adapt to his original vision for the project so many requests and requirements that would seemingly conflict with that vision. Designers are constantly complaining about clients who get in the way of designers’ ability to create good work for them; but while listening to Arad I was struck by this aphorism:

“The mark of  a good designer is the ability to create good work for clients who ask you to do bad work.”

What do you think? True or no?

Redesign: TweetChicago

I’ve blogged before about a project at the University of Chicago Law School that we call TweetChicago; it’s a page that aggregates a number of student and faculty tweeters in a single place, to provide the viewer with a snapshot of life at Chicago Law.

After nearly three years of service, it was time for the page to get a facelift. We ditched the HTML/Javascript widget that we had been using to import our Tweeters’ feeds and went with Twitter’s new standard widget, which, unlike the previous version, will actually display retweets, and updated the look a bit.

Before

After