Excerpt from NM Special Report: UX Jon Lucas

Berlin, 2022

If you’re on the New Models website, you will see the logo changing form. It goes from totally blacked out to its regular letters. That kinetic activity is correlated to real-time Citi Bike availability in New York, year-to-date dolphin sightings, the weather in Berlin, recent Bitcoin transactions, and asteroids near Earth. Based on these parameters, a mathematical equation dictates whether the logo is active or not active at all.

I remember a couple of months after launching, I got an email from you saying “the logo is broken, can you check it out.” I did some debugging and realized there were no Citi Bikes at the first docking station, which had zeroed out the entire equation. I looked into why there were no bikes, apparently New York was expecting a blizzard the next day, and in anticipation had pulled all the bikes from the streets, so the New Models logo stopped working until the blizzard passed. That’s when I thought, this is a weird logo.

This is one of the things that I really appreciate about all of the work that you do. It has a way of linking to something that is real, chaotic, unpredictable and that’s evident in the most simple way.[…] Generally the sites feel low bandwidth. Do you design with efficiency in mind?

Yes. I recently visited the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to see their Mars rover and was surprised to find a lab of 1990s Dells running JavaScript. I thought, if they can send stuff to Mars using this, we don’t need fancy frameworks.

I think that’s a good ethos especially for the internet which is of course changing all of the time. Stay light, don’t over complicate it. […] Often clients want something totally pre-determined. Is that a difficult dynamic to work with?

You give them what they want, then you have this other thing and say, “or you could have this.” Then they realize that maybe they don’t want what they originally wanted anymore.

I wonder what your working process is. I know you work with different kinds of clients, some are a bit more experimental, some are a bit more traditional, do you have a certain working method that you’ve settled on?

It’s never the same twice. I like going with my initial impulse, that’s always a good starting point. When you meet a client you might have a better idea of what they want than they do, then it’s about rationalizing your design decisions.

I see, so the work is less design than social engineering. Are there any design peeves that you have? What’s the worst trend right now?

In school, some students were avid about finding the newest and coolest fonts and didn’t understand why designers in New York used Helvetica and Arial so much. In our defense, we use it because we don’t want to draw attention to the font, we want the design concept to come through. If you’re distracted by the font, it’s likely blocking out the larger concept.

Are there any design features that have become obsolescent that you wish would return?

The web operates on a very cyclical basis. There are moments when people want slick, smooth transitions and others when they want something more direct. For example, the interface for Foundation is basically white. They’ll use a drop shadow, and that’s pretty much it, I think it’s circling back. Not as raw, more sophisticated, but just as direct.

It’s somewhere between Brutalist and bespoke. It’s like a straightforward but slick aesthetic, you want it to look a little candy-coated and friendly.

I remember the pitch for Bjarne Melgaard’s website was one sentence. He said “I want it to be crazy, but work very well.” I feel like that’s what I do best, on one hand it’s crazy and on the other it needs to work very well.

My last question is, first answer that comes to mind, what does the internet smell like?

A hyper steely Chablis.