Subtraction

Over the past two weeks or so, I have for some reason been mistaken a few times for someone who is actually paying attention to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But, sadly, I’m not paying much attention to them at all, mostly because I’m getting ready to move to a new apartment at the end of this month. (For those who are paying attention though, you can find few richer sources of coverage than the truly multiple-media reporting we’re painstakingly publishing at NYTimes.com/olympics.)

I have nothing against the Olympics, though. In fact, it makes complete sense to me how the combination of the West’s growing fascination with China and the spectacular winning performances of Michael Phelps makes for a damn compelling international spectacle. Especially when viewed in high-definition; these are really the first games being watched by the newly prevalent audience of HDTV owners, which I think accounts at least in part for NBC’s unexpected rating success — and by the way the games look great at 720p.

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There has been some changing of the seating chart at my office recently, and in the process, I’ve seen some of my colleagues — art directors on the print side of the organization — moving the contents of their flat files back and forth along with their seats. Watching them do this in the background, I realized that since we first took up residence in our our new building last year, I’ve barely paid attention to those file cabinets, which store critical samples of printed pages and reference material in wide, shallow drawers. But for a print designer, they’re critical tools.

In fact, I realized, it’s been years since I’ve paid attention to or felt the need for flat files at all, to say nothing of ‘traditional’ art supplies of any kind. This is what it means to practice design on the Web, I guess. On the digital side of the business, we’re admittedly still a long way away from a paperless office, but we’re getting there. I rarely ever print out my own work these days, and I’ve made it a habit to throw away nearly every single piece of paper handed to me by colleagues before the end of that same day — and I can’t recall a single time that practice has made it harder for me to do my job the next day.

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Not long ago I downloaded a new productivity application that recently emerged from a prolonged beta period. Finally, the 1.0 version had arrived, and I was eager to get my hands on it, play around with its features and see what it had to offer. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

To be fair, this application, which shall remain nameless, had clearly been designed with great attention to detail. Its interface is not unattractive and its fit and finish is commendable; you wouldn’t be remiss in regarding it as a completely professional product.

However. I kept staring at it, and kept clicking on interface widgets and pushing buttons, but the more I explored, the less likely it seemed that I would ever really master it. I’m sure that its workflow makes sense, that with some investment in time, a user could realize some significant benefits from it. I just had a hard time thinking that one of those users would be me.

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I’m already on the record about how I believe email can be a powerful interface to other applications. A large part of what makes that possible, for me, is Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. I’ve been accessing my email account via this method for a few years now and it’s made the whole concept of email drastically more useful to me, primarily by liberating me from the specific location where I might have sent or received an email. It works so well, in fact, that now I want it for all the other kinds of messaging that I do too.

For those unfamiliar with it, IMAP leaves messages on the server as well as storing copies locally on your hard drive. It basically gives you the same in box (and sent folder, trash folder, etc.) on any computer you use regularly, or even when you access your account via webmail. Especially for receiving and replying to email from both the office and at home, it’s a huge improvement over its predecessor, POP, which can’t reflect a message sent or received from one computer onto another. What I’d like to see is an extension of the IMAP concept, if not its specification, to similarly manage all the other various kinds of messaging in which I engage regularly.

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In a recent blog post, my friend Chris Fahey raises the question of whether or not an interface designer is a salesman. In a way, he’s tackling more seriously a subject that I wrote about three years ago in a post titled “Window Dress for Success,” in which I only half-jokingly inferred possible marketing motivations from the then-proliferating varieties of chrome in Mac OS X applications.

In his post, Chris cannily argues that it’s the designer’s job not only to create a solution that is easy to use, but also to create a solution that looks easy to use. He writes:

“A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).”

With some qualifications, this statement about the role of designers — and especially, from where I sit, the role of interface designers — strikes me as insightfully true. As I somewhat cheekily suggested in that June 2005 post, it’s my opinion that interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.

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Proving Steve Jobs wrong for myself, anyway. Read this post…

Coming soon: fewer parts of this Web site. Read this post…

Freezing and crashing on devices ”that need to work.“ Read this post…

The underrated power of a hidden-in-the-open interface. Read this post…

Troubleshooting .Mac’s little improved successor. Read this post…

Mycrocosm from M.I.T. Media Lab

“A Web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutiae of daily life in the form of simple statistical graphs.”

L.A. Time: The Porsche Kitchen for Men

Slideshow look at an aggressively sleek, modernist kitchen designed through a collaboration between the sports car manufacturer and the cabinetry manufacturer Poggenpohl.

Illustrated Typography on Dark Backgrounds

Seemingly odd criteria for collecting design samples, but the result is surprisingly coherent. And frequently gorgeous. A caveat to anyone who would get carried away with this technique: it’s pretty much the founding principle behind black velvet paintings.

New York Mag: First Look Inside JetBlue’s New Food Court at JFK

The airline has been busy renovating the iconic Eero Saarinen-designed terminal at JFK and plans to open it later this fall. The food promises to be very good… or at least, it won’t give you air sickness before you even leave the ground. Which is saying a lot for eating at the airport.

Adobe: Peter Hall on Architecture as Interface

Examples of interface displays on the huge scale of real buildings. “What if the building could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists?”

Dear Adobe

Clever tool for submitting and perusing short gripes penned to the graphics software company we all love to hate.

Assistance in the Procurement of Bachelor Party Services

Todd Levin hilariously ponders the difficulty of finding ‘entertainment’ for a friend’s bachelor party. “In an effort to do proper diligence in researching this kind of specialty service, I decided to draft a questionnaire to help me screen any potential candidates for bachelor party entertainment.”

GQ: Interview with Aaron Sorkin

The screenwriter is out to promote the forthcoming, 10th anniversary re-issue of his fantastic, under-appreciated “Sports Night” series on DVD. Regarding his more recent, failed series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” he says: “I made too many mistakes. I would give anything to go back and get another bite of that apple. Basically, to use a sports analogy, you can have the best team in football playing the worst team in football. But if the best team in football throws four interceptions, they’re not going to win.”

Speak Up: Dear Lulu

Armin Vit reports on a student-produced test book for the online, print-on-demand system Lulu. Its pages include photographs in CMYK, RGB, grayscale and half-tone, line and pattern tests, type specimens at varying sizes, and even crop marks — all so that designers working with Lulu can get a sense of what its digital presses are and aren’t capable of. Best of all, anyone thinking of using Lulu can purchase their own copy.

Merlin Mann: What Makes for a Good Blog?

A list of nine best practices. One of the smartest: “Good blogs are the product of attention times interest.”

NYT: Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle

Jon Rubinstein, a veteran of Steve Jobs’ current reign at Apple, is trying to reinvigorate the former PDA and smart phone leader, notably with today’s release of the Treo Pro.

Tru Blood: Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage

Mildly clever marketing campaign for HBO’s forthcoming “Tru Blood” vampire drama.

Anti-Populism and Indie Antiquity: Whit Stillman

An excellent interview over at the Spout blog with the director of two of my favorite films. One of them, “Metropolitan,” became available for viewing at Hulu.com as of last week. The other, “Barcelona,” is well worth queuing up at Netflix. Via Vanderwal.net.

Typographic Research

My friend Rob Giampietro, formerly of Giampietro + Smith, teaches a class at Parsons called “Typographic Research.” Each student publishes at least three times a week to a a blog of the same name, resulting in many posts full of beautiful stuff.

Radiohead’s “House of Cards” Video Translated into Lego

In case you had missed it, the band released the source code to their unconventionally animated music video some weeks ago. This rendition uses that source code as physical choreography for Lego blocks, animated via stop-motion photography. Really beautiful.

Washington Post: Why NBC’s Olympic Coverage Doesn’t Mention Who Designed the Bird’s Nest

“During the fantastic opening ceremonies, as well as many hours of broadcasting this week, I never heard NBC mention the stadium’s architects, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron… If a story concerns a building but not its design per se, then journalists generally assume that their audience has no interest in knowing who designed the building, especially if the designer is not well known. Design authorship is usually considered factually irrelevant.” Sniff.

National Geographic Map of the Day

Once a day, a zoomable map from their archives depicting an historical news event or milestone, accompanied by a short article and a related trivia question.

Hands-on Review of New BlackBerry Bold Phone

BlackBerry’s 3G response to the iPhone looks much nicer, but I’m not sure it breaks any paradigms.

Why Apple Doesn’t Create ‘Concept’ Products

“Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.”

SimpleBits: Use the Best Available Ampersand

Dan Cederholm proposes a simple and clever solution for specifying ampersands in CSS. Also includes visual chart of some of the “more interesting italic ampersands available as default fonts on Mac and Windows.”

Boing Boing: How to Buy a New Car without Getting Screwed

A six-minute primer on avoiding dealer treachery. I may actually be in the market for a new car soon.

Edward Tufte’s Critique of iPhone Interfaces

In which the authority on information visualization discusses “computer administration debris” and his maxim “to clarify, add detail.”

Otl Aicher and the 1972 Munich Olympics

Holy moley. A treasure trove of iconic, exquisitely designed posters, tickets, stationery, pamphlets and more Games-related collateral from a modernist master.

NYT: Rolling Stone to Switch to Smaller, Rack-Friendly Format

“Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer for Wenner Media, pointed to Vanity Fair, which has lower overall circulation than Rolling Stone, but nearly three times the single-copy sales. With a standard format, he said, it should be possible to raise newsstand sales significantly.” Probably a smart but nevertheless a somewhat sad economic decision.

Jean-Louis Gasée on MobileMe, Synchronization and “Launchpad Chicken”

Insightful if not conclusive commentary on what went wrong with Apple’s shaky launch of the MobileMe service, from a veteran of Apple. Gasée accurately characterizes seamless synchronization as an underestimated challenge, but lets Apple off too easily, in my opinion. They had more than just the lead up to MobileMe to get synching right; they also had the several years when they were running nearly the exact same service as .Mac. And it was hardly seamless then, too.