A Few Questions with Shaun Inman

I recently asked Shaun Inman, creator of Mint, a few questions about design and the web.

What are your thoughts on Paul Rand’s point that a logo “cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint?”
While I think the statement is a little too reductive I agree with the sentiment. A logo should be trimmed of all visual fat, down to a lean communicating machine. The survival of a logo is dependent more on consistent branding (not to mention the continued existence of the parent entity) than the simplicity and restraint of the mark itself.
Do you have your own design philosophy?
I’m not sure I have an established philosophy but I definitely have aesthetic and hierarchal leanings. I prefer order over disorder. Surface complexity over hierarchal complexity. Consistency through modularization. I never mix vertical and horizontal lines.
What are some of your pet peeves when it comes to web design and layout?
Elastic layouts and blurry (anti-aliased) pixel fonts kill me.
Elastic layouts (without a max-width defined) assume that if you browse full screen you enjoy reading 1280 pixel wide lines of type. I just don’t want to have to look at my desktop and background apps and documents while reading an article online!
Blurry pixel fonts are unforgivable. They whole point is crisp, well-defined characters. Be sure to set the type at the prescribed size, usually 8px, or a regular multiple of that size (eg. 16px, 32px, 64px). Turn off anti-aliasing in Photoshop and make sure that your type is set on a round coordinate in Flash when using pixel fonts (eg. x: 2, y: 2, not x: 1.7, y: 2.3).
Who are some of your favorite contemporary artists, both in the design field, and in general?
The Cuban Council guys. Joshua Davis. Khoi Vihn. I like pixels. I like programmatic art. I like grids. I might be a structural fetishist.
How did you feel about your time spent at Savannah College of Art and Design?
It was a good experience. I met some great friends, including my wife, at SCAD. As far as higher education goes I don’t have anything to compare it too but I think like any type of learning environment you get out what you put in. When I was at SCAD the Graphic Design department didn’t offer much in the way of web design courses beyond Nesting Tables with Dreamweaver 101 and Slicing Images in Photoshop 102. I did a number of independent studies with O’Reilly books in hand to piece together what I know about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and MySQL.
What do you think of the “Web 2.0” style?
Meh, it is what it is. As a style it’s not going to make or break an application or website.