I know this is a site redesign, not logo redesign, but I’m a perfectionist…

Happy Cog opened up the site so that its content became much more accessible and did it with a visual attitude that felt, to us, open and inclusive. Some have been critical that the site itself is not a more splendid design artifact. This was not our intention. Our brief was to make it an inviting lens through which visitors discover our members’ and others’ examples of great design. Intentionally, we approached this as an information architecture challenge. The design of the site is not a marketing tool for AIGA, the content is. The staff’s design sensibility does not define AIGA or the profession, our members’ does. This is why AIGA does not have a designer on staff—too easily associations begin to think they define the profession, instead of being simply a means of helping the profession express itself in a collective vision.

Similarly the design of the site and its templates have been created with an eye toward the scores of authors/designers who will populate it, as we draw from our volunteer members to take on the role of creating content, substantive and visual, for various segments of the site.

For us, the site redesign is a blazing success in achieving the objectives we set for it. AIGA does not seek to be authoritative by virtue of its selection of its own designers; it seeks to be authoritative on profession practices, yet open and inclusive in representing the best that the profession can achieve.

Thank you, Happy Cog.

Yes. I was hoping he’d come back and share URLs of pages that briefly and clearly articulate why this long accepted treatment of login and password information is a problem, just how serious a problem it is, and what experts in the area recommend doing instead.

I don’t mind a person responding to a six-month-long design project by sputtering wetly about a minute technical aspect of it that wasn’t our doing. But I would expect that person to come back and educate me and this page’s readers if he is serious about helping this community better serve its users. To rant and then stomp out of the room forever is bad manners and worse evangelism.

Like I said though, it falls down to the content you are protecting. I’m not sure if AIGA warrants SSL but at the same time you could do something similar to yahoo relatively cheaply (depending on your host as low as $5-20/month) and provide an https offset to the login with a link similar to ‘login securely’ or whatever but by default you log in using http.

As far as articles why its approriate, its always appropriate depending on your feelings on your content you are putting behind authorization. I wouldn’t need Secunia or Securityfocus etc to tell me that. The reality is non ssl login sends the password as plain text in the request and is simple for anyone intercepting the stream to obtain. Another reality is the average user tends to condense their passwords into only a handful across multiple sites… so providing a secure log-in is also indirectly polite to their internet security to possibly their banking website.

Required? Like I said, I contend its based on the owner of the content and their feelings about said content. Courteous? extremely imho.

I believe he is referring to the non ssl login so the passwords would be sent as plain text in the clear vs ssl encrypted.

Yes. I was hoping he’d come back and share URLs of pages that briefly and clearly articulate why this long accepted treatment of login and password information is a problem, just how serious a problem it is, and what experts in the area recommend doing instead.

I don’t mind a person responding to a six-month-long design project by sputtering wetly about a minute technical aspect of it that wasn’t our doing. But I would expect that person to come back and educate me and this page’s readers if he is serious about helping this community better serve its users. To rant and then stomp out of the room forever is bad manners and worse evangelism.

I know it may not be in the majority opinion but stylistically I have a hard time differentiating the last couple sites from one another.

Well, common goals, filtered through limited web means, may produce works that have some commonalities. The Happy Cog redesign and the AIGA redesign, if those are the ones you mean, share certain goals such as inviting you to linger and read the content. (Most of our sites—even a web app like Ma.gnolia—have that goal.) This typically means biggish type, not small; generous leading and margins; a slightly wider measure than normal; and a nigh-universal typeface that is designed for legibility, such as Georgia or Verdana.

It also often means strong but not extreme contrast (you will see this on A List Apart as well) and a warm color palette to psychologically invite viewers to linger (as seen on Happy Cog and Ma.gnolia, for instance).

Each design we do comes out of the brand and the site’s goals, but some things (legible type, whitespace, leading) are part of our tool kit on every job. We are not going to create a purple site with green 9 pt Arial any time soon. :D

No need to beat around the bush about the outstanding architecture put out by HC but I am always left with a desire for more from them.

One aspect of Happy Cog’s designs I love and try to emulate is the ease of finding information. It all breaks out into easily manageable chunks for quick scanning but sometimes seems to falter when it comes to design that speaks to individuals.

The sites they design can seem to be overly reliant on clean semantic code. It reeks of planning the structure rather than design that inspires one to design with more gusto.

That being said, I do love the work done on the redesign. I can definitely fall in love with the code rather than the design.

Great job! Thanks for the years of inspiration!

Still, even when we’re not doing back-end development, the more we know about issues of security and identity, the better we can design the front end. So please share some knowledge here. Thanks.

I believe he is referring to the non ssl login so the passwords would be sent as plain text in the clear vs ssl encrypted. I’m not sure if it matters for a site like AIGA myself though.

I know it may not be in the majority opinion but stylistically I have a hard time differentiating the last couple sites from one another. Thats a good and bad thing I suppose depending on perspective. The design and flow of AIGA doesn’t sit well with me from a purely aesthetic sense, but to each their own. Organizationally its an improvement over what it was definitely.