Subtraction

Results from the American Society of Magazine Editors “Cover of the Year” competition. Also see all of the entries here. It’s strange; I find editorial design to be a continual source of design inspiration, but these covers don’t excite me in the least bit.

“Aimed to launch on the the BlackBerry Storm’s version 4.7 operating system, the BlackBerry Application Center will allow the user to find, browse and install/upgrade third-party BlackBerry apps hosted by carriers.” Setting aside the fact that it’s aesthetically and typographically anemic compared to Apple’s, I wonder why RIM waited so long to do something like this. Can it really be that the idea didn’t occur to them until after the App Store launched? That they are really only executing in reaction to Apple’s moves instead of trying to get out ahead of the game? If so, a change in approach would seem to be warranted.

Tomorrow night at the Katie Murphy Amphitheater at F.I.T., I will be appearing with my friend Ian Adelman (of NYMag.com) and several other panelists to talk about the way forward for print publications in the digital age.

“Brown’s high-profile move to the Web from glossy print… [is] meant as a smart one-stop news shop, an effort to break new ground in news aggregation by mixing lots of outbound links with heavy doses of curation and original content.”Iit’s probably too early to tell whether it makes for a compelling user experience, but I’m not bowled over aesthetically, at least.

“A collection of world maps, where territories are resized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps.” The maps are sometimes confusingly labeled or keyed, but there are plenty of engrossing visualizations, including population in year one, geographic areas with poor sanitation, and where global refugees are going.

In advance of Frank Miller’s adaptation of this significant but little known comics character, these twelve examples are intended “to show once and for all why Miller can’t hope to bring [creator Will Eisner’s] genius to life.” Personally, I’m more optimistic about this film, but these pages do demonstrate Eisner’s visionary and ambitious facility with the comics medium — and make a compelling case for how inherently difficult it would be to translate that genius to the cinema.

Note that many of these splash pages rely on a masterful sense of typographic whimsy; in my opinion, they can hold their own against most of the finest examples in the wider canon of great graphic design. The comics medium in general owes much to Eisner, not least for the fact that he was probably the first and most faithful believer in the long-term potential of comics as a mature art form. So if nothing else, I hope Frank Miller’s film draws more attention to the man’s under-served legacy.

“My country has had crisis that has caused need for large transfer of funds of 700 billion of your dollars (US). If you would assist me in this transfer it would be most profitable to you.” A pretty hilarious and accurate (right down to the all caps) send-up of the familiar Nigerian email scam.

Mea culpa: I messed up on the feeds for this site during my move over to ExpressionEngine. It’s embarrassing, really, how badly I underestimated how important the RSS feed for this site had become in the many intervening years since I first set it up. It’s funny, too: countless hours were spent on tidying up all of the many, many Web pages that make up this site, and yet it’s really the nearly invisible — and in many respects, design-free — RSS feed that is the most critical lifeline for readers.

The fact is, I just don’t have enough expertise to competently manage and edit my feeds beyond very basic editing of existing templates. For the most part, I’ve always stumbled my way into some kind of acceptable solution, and that was my approach when I re-launched this site on Monday evening. It’s true that there were many things throughout that needed further attention and that I thought that was perfectly fine — there was no way I’d ever launch if I waited until they were all done — but a defective feed should not have been one of them.

Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff on removing eyesores from the city’s skylines. “True, the city is close to broke. But even with Wall Street types contemplating the end and construction of new luxury towers grinding to a halt, why give in to despair? Instead of crying over what can’t be built, why not refocus our energies on knocking down the structures that not only fail to bring us joy, but actually bring us down?”

The estimable Merlin Mann has been writing lately about a surprisingly under-explored topic: how to blog better. This particular post takes a look at what story arcs in “The Wire” can teach bloggers about themes in blog writing. Also includes, at the bottom, a terrific presentation deck outlining these ideas. But really, he had me at “The Wire.”

“Thirty designers create thirty posters and give you their thirty reasons to vote for Barack Obama.” I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from getting involved in the electoral process, but there seems to me to be something shortsighted and quixotic about choosing posters as a tool for change. Sadly, it also represents the limit of most designers’ imaginations. See also the on-the-ground, anecdotal evidence that a related graphic design tool, the political lawn sign, is irrelevant to winning votes.

Here’s what happens sometimes: you try your hand at blogging. You get kind of good at it and get on a roll for, oh, six or seven years. You start getting more enterprising with your blogging, maybe even launching a second or third blog, and you start to upgrade your blog software, with plans to make everything faster, better. It all looks like it’s going to be great. You’re unstoppable.

Then you get incredibly busy at work. Ridiculously busy. And then maybe you meet a really awesome new person, and you rearrange most all of the priorities governing your free time. And then you and your new girlfriend even decide to shack up, get an awesome new place and make a happy little home together. Then you spend several weekends in a row packing, then moving, then unpacking and setting up the new apartment and making runs to Ikea and Home Depot.

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

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

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.

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.

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?”

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

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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

“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.

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.

Saul Hansell contends that “the basic dynamics of the iTunes store are much better than those of Amazon,” and “the iTunes business model looks more profitable than that of eBay, which despite its current problems, has been the most successful e-commerce business in the world.”

Earlier this year, I quietly set out to prove Steve Jobs wrong. You may remember what I’m talking about: in that inimitably dismissive way that he has, the Apple CEO rejected the idea that the Amazon Kindle held much promise, contending that “Americans don’t read anymore.” It wasn’t that I wanted to prove him wrong on the Kindle (a product for which I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm). Rather, I wanted to disprove at least for myself his statement that “the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Jobs argued, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” But somewhere along the way I got it in my head that to really prove anything to, well, myself, then I’d have to read a book a month, at least. So it’s two-thirds of the way through the year now. Here’s my progress.

“Clearly, a growing number of companies are looking into outsourcing at least some of their IT infrastructure. Google says it signs up roughly 3,000 businesses a day for its online bundle of programs… Whereas Microsoft Office can cost as much as US$500 for each version installed, a premium version of Google Apps for businesses is available for US$50 a year per user. A standard version, which includes advertising, is free for small businesses.”

“I’m Dr. Ronald Chevalier, acclaimed author of science fiction novels and novellas such as ‘Cyborg Harpies,’ ‘Brain Cream,’ and the all-new novel ‘Brutus & Balzaak.’ Welcome to my official internet website.” Viral promo site for the forthcoming movie from “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess, called “Gentleman Broncos.”

“That’s how I roll…”

“Teeny versions of monumental chairs from the Rietvelt to Le Corbusier to all manner of Eames, from one to three inches high…” Just US$9 a pop.

Bill Drenttel rounds up the many excellent slideshows that the site has put together over its still young existence. A reminder of how very good Design Observer is.

Anybody still paying attention to what blog publishing system I’m using here at Subtraction.com probably figured that my previously mentioned intentions to switch to ExpressionEngine have foundered. Not so. Behind the scenes, I’ve been erratically but intently working on porting the entirety of this site over to that more modern publishing system.

Between all of the other interests competing for my free time, it’s taken a lot longer than I would have liked, but it’s on its way. How long will it be before it launches? Well, what’s that that they say when you need to order a part from the warehouse? Four to six weeks. Or something.

Aside from just being busy all the time, what’s taking so long is that, as I’ve rebuilt the functionality of this site (with invaluable contributions from EE expert Adam Khan), I’ve also been re-thinking a lot of the way the site works. I’m not changing the basic look at all; this is not a redesign so much as a reworking, and casual visitors may not notice much of a difference at all.

Really beautiful old school typographic designs. More on his blog.

Cute, retro-style imagery for places that you can’t actually go to.

“The best design movie of 2008 is not about a typeface. It’s about a tightrope walker… ‘Man on Wire’ shows how easy it is to have an idea, and how hard — and sometimes even miraculous — it is to see it realized.”

“According to officials with the National Venture Capital Association, not a single technology initial public offering was made in the second quarter — the first time this happened since 1978… Now, it seems, no one thinks the public will bite on any tech offering, no matter how cool.”

First foray into blogging from my favorite UK design magazine.

Sparingly elegant graphic work from Jason Munn.

For five months, the magazine indulged in “the new typography” by switching to Futura and doing away with all capital letters in headlines on columns and feature articles. Editor Frank Crownishield’s remarkably literate musings on the experiment are well worth a read.

As the presidential campaign heads into the fall, I’m returning again to this site on a regular basis (I used to check it regularly in 2004), which tracks polls and electoral votes on a daily basis, with excellent accompanying commentary.

Beautiful aggregation of 2008 presidential election polling charts, related Twitter tweets, related blog posts and related news.