 Nicolas Barajas

A. The question of "What do you and your design team do?" is pretty hard to answer without resorting to a tremendous amount of off-putting and, frankly, loopy jargon. I'm going to try, but forgive me in advance if I lapse back into it.

When most people hear "design" and "NYTimes.com" together, they usually think of the wonderful interactive graphics or multimedia storytelling done by our colleagues on the graphics and multimedia teams. (In fact, Steve Duenes, the graphics director, offered lots of insight into much of this work in his own Talk to the Newsroom session some weeks ago.)

Though we do work with these teams in a support capacity, it's not the core of what we do. If you think of their work as design for the content that appears on our site, then you can think of the work that my team does as design for the framework for that content. Which is to say, we create the underlying platform on top of which the content sits.

Even setting aside the vast amounts of original reporting that we publish every day, our site is still under more or less continuous revision, so that framework is constantly being tended to. We're always looking at ways to improve various sections of the site, tweaking our templates, adding new features and tools and removing impediments to people's consumption and use of the news.

As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).

You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it's used by visitors to the site. Of course, it's not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it's really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.

Finally, my job doesn't involve as much hands-on design work as it would in an ideal world. The majority of my day is spent either in a supervisory capacity, reviewing and discussing work done by my staff, or sitting in meetings, planning for upcoming enhancements to the site and how design can make them happen. The way I usually put it is that my job as design director isn't actually to do great design, but rather to help create and sustain the conditions under which great design can happen.