Timoni Grone is the senior visual designer at Scribd where she creates websites that blend responsible web practices with classic design & typographical philosophies. She also co-founded the monthly design MeetUp and work session Chromatic where Bay area designers meet to network share ideas and design challenges. It’s part of her effort to expand the reach of user-centric design and make your web experience just a little bit better. Timoni is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes on Design: How did you get your start?

Timoni Grone: I was an English major in college but talked about art and design enough that a friend encouraged me to take an art class, and I’ve been making sites and designing for friends since 1999. I’m largely self-taught—I looked at course syllabi and taught myself design fundamentals.

My second job was as a web editor for the State Department creating mockups for sites to expand dialogue with the Arabic world. I didn’t expect that I’d ever work on security and public diplomacy, and it was eye-opening.

NoD: Wow! Not your typical design gig. Where did you go from there?

Timoni Grone: I ultimately left to work at a DC branding agency in the research sphere before moving to San Francisco, where I’d wanted to be since I was using early social media tools in Nebraska while still in college.

NoD: And in San Francisco you began working at Scribd where you are now the Senior Visual Designer and have been largely responsible for their redesign effort. What other sites that you frequent are you itching to redesign?

Timoni Grone: Twitter, no doubt about it, so that people wouldn’t have to use third party applications to have a good experience. I’d improve the leading on Facebook, but on Tumblr I wouldn’t change much beyond the implementation.

NoD: Can you expand on your comment regarding third party apps and how Twitter could improve if it did not require them? Isn’t Twitter improving because of third party apps..and is that built-in flexibility not what makes it, in part, so hugely popular?

Timoni Grone: I didn’t mean to say that Twitter could improve only if third-party apps didn’t exist. Twitter started as an SMS-based social site, and a web interface has never been their priority.

Having said that, twitter.com is currently #14 on Alexa’s top 500–so, like it or not, a lot of people are *seeing* the web interface. And it’s still a bad experience. There’s a lot of functionality that you can get in third party apps that you simply don’t have on the site, and so far as I know, there’s no reason to not include things like:

1. Searching for a particular user name within your followers/followees (useful for @-replies when you forget a user’s nickname)
2. Options to sort followers/followees
3. Showing reciprocal relationships (particularly in the initial notification emails)
4. Showing @-conversations as a thread
5. Direct messages in a threaded “conversation” view
6. Expanding shortened URLs
7. An easy way to view media embeds (like Twitter-based photo sharing services)
8. Allowing users to save favorite searches
9. Showing the number of favorites on one’s tweets

None of the things I’ve mentioned would, or should, fundamentally change the way the site looks or behaves now. Twitter.com has the capacity to do all these things; it simply needs to make them available in a user-friendly way.

As to whether Twitter is improving because of third-party apps, absolutely it is. The API makes it easy for developers to do great things, which is awesome for all Twitter users, because then you have really brilliant developers who want to make apps, but maybe not work at Twitter, contributing to the overall experience and raising the bar for the next generation of Twitter clients. I’m not sure that potential users come to Twitter solely because they really enjoy checking out Twitter desktop clients, but there’s no question that using Twitter is a much smoother, more enjoyable experience if you use a third-party client rather than twitter.com.

NoD: Beyond your full time role redesigning Scribd, how do you make time for your freelance and personal projects?

Timoni Grone: After work at Scribd, I work on freelance projects from about 9 PM to 2 AM. It’s really a question of how happy you are—if you take on projects you like, you’ll make it work. I generally do back end work and tease sites for startups, and I like to pick things I can make better than their current iteration.
I’m a big fan of taking a break from projects I’ve been wrapped up in. If I take two or three days off and am able to look at something I’ve been working on again, I immediately know if I like the way it works or not. I think that what bothers you day after day is what you most need to fix, and approaching it with fresh eyes can you help you recognize that.

NoD: Whose work has most influenced you?

My biggest old-design influences by far are Eric Gill and Josef Müller-Brockmann.

For new designs, my absolute favorite web design right now is Ray Glover’s Cynosura. That website is just phenomenal–the level of detail is completely incredible. I’ve also been digging on Mike Kus’s stuff. He has great use of type and color. Does It Float is a collective and a great experiment in design/type/space. Dave Emery’s type and layout experiments are also very fresh & exciting.

NoD: What’s your philosophy around worthwhile web design?

Timoni Grone: Personally, I want to make products that are a delight to use. I like to work with designers who focus on the end user more than those who are just interested in the fidelity of their own designs. I tend to work well with engineers because I know enough about their work to collaborate. Really, the most important thing is partnering with people who are also committed to creating products that people will love.

I think people who make good designers are those who are extremely observant. A natural inclination to know what works and what doesn’t in terms of influencing people helps too. The Internet has made this a more level playing field—now you can be a great designer and not have a lick of fine art talent, and that wasn’t always the case.

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- View Timoni Grone’s personal site here: http://timoni.org/
- This interview was conducted by Emily Goligoski. View Emily’s Arts and Culture blog here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Interviews, PEOPLE, Usability, work process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.