The world of XML syndication is still a soup of acronyms and counter-intuitive terminology — RSS, Atom, XML, feeds, aggregation, ’casts, etc. — but at the very least, we’re inching towards visual standardization in how we represent it iconographically. Microsoft, in an uncharacteristic but laudable show of cooperativeness, agreed late last year to adopt Firefox’s orange RSS/XML icon — a rounded little square with featuring what might be best described as ISO-style broadcast waves — for its Internet Explorer 7 browser.

I like this icon, but it has its shortcomings: First, it too neatly sidesteps the issue of what flavor of XML feed it’s representing, which would require, in some instances, that it be accompanied by a text label. No standards or guidelines exist for such text labels, as far as I know. And second, even with a text label, it can be fairly diminutive on a page, causing it to get overlooked easily.

Inconclusive thoughts on what will replace record sleeves in the digital age.

Last night I went to a lecture by Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art᾿s Curator in their Department of Architecture and Design. The event was part of the AIGA New York’s long-running series of “Small Talks,” which features various luminaries of design speaking in relatively intimate venues — a really great program, by the way.

Antonelli is responsible for a series of acclaimed design exhibitions at MoMA over the past decade or so: “Humble Masterpieces,” which examined objects modest in size and price that also happen to be indispensable design accomplishments; “Workspheres,” which examined the evolving ideas behind the spaces in which we work; and a comprehensive retrospective of the legendary designer Achille Castiligioni, among others. They’re all original and impressive curatorial visions, but they also all focus on design in three-dimensions; architecture and industrial design have benefitted the most from the museum’s surveys of the design arts, while graphic design has suffered the most by neglect. In fact, the museum’s own permanent graphic design collection is somewhat narrow, devoted almost exclusively to twentieth century posters, which doesn’t exactly make for comprehensiveness.

Beautiful hack uses MacBooks’ sudden motion sensors to switch virtual desktops.

Very attractive looking cellular handset with two drawbacks: it runs Windows Mobile, and it’s being promoted with the most ridiculously bombastic advertising campaign I’ve seen in a long time.

The Adobe Design Center, an online magazine exploring all manner of digital creativity, has just published an interview that I conducted with 37signals front man Jason Fried. At first glance, the presentation of the article looks misleadingly as if it focuses on me, when in fact it’s actually a serious conversation about Fried, 37signals and their “Getting Real” approach to Web application development. I tried to pose a string of serious questions as to the practicality of “Getting Real,” both to satisfy my own curiosity and also to try to get Jason to respond to some of the contradictory experience and feedback that I’ve heard about the approach. I think I did a pretty decent job that sheds a little bit more light on this emerging developmental philosophy, but you be the judge. You can read the interview here.

My speaking session on day one of An Event Apart New York City is called “Dawn ’til Dusk with a Design Director.” The idea is to compress one of my typical work days into a breezy little talk, with the hope that eighteen waking hours of activity will make for at least fifty-five minutes of entertainment. Heaven help me if it doesn’t.

I’ll be chronicling everything design related that happens to me, starting more or less from the moment I wake up, through my day at the office, and into the evening, as I slave in front of my computer in service to this blog and other extracurricular projects. Along the way, and with some humility, I hope to convey at least a few interesting lessons on how good design is created and managed, the various ways design informs those activities not explicitly design related, and maybe even how to have a life outside of design.

“Presentation given at the St Bride Library Newspaper Design Day in Fleet Street, London, addressing newspaper design and the Internet” by Nico Macdonald, with some quotes from me.

Hilarious short film by Todd Levin.

Rush out to your local newsstands and get a copy of CAP & Design magazine — that is, if your local newsstand is in Sweden, as it’s a Swedish language design publication. The latest issue features a rather shockingly large feature article on me, along with a rather shockingly large photograph of me sitting in an East Village café, with a silly grin on my face. The article is about my design career, my thoughts on design, and of course my early experiences as Design Director at NYTimes.com. If you can read the language, I’m sure you’ll find the article, written by Swedish journalist Pierre Andersson, to be very illuminating. English-only readers will have to wait for my forthcoming, full-length profile in The New Yorker. Be prepared to wait a while.

Supplement to Gladwell’s excellent, illuminating profile of Millan in this week’s issue of the magazine. Unfortunately, the editors have not put it online.

As an Apple fan, I think the company’s retail stores are awesome in theory, but I’m not the kind of guy to spend hours hanging out within them, nor the sort to make dutiful treks to their openings, like many Apple fans do. Still, I thought it was worth stopping by this evening’s grand opening for Apple’s new flagship store on Fifth Avenue, here in New York. It’s not exactly on my way home from work, but the fact that the company had decided to put such a huge, public stake in the ground in such a high-end retail district, and with such a prominent architectural statement… well, my curiosity was piqued.

As replacements for Apple’s iBook line of consumer notebooks, the just announced and released MacBooks look like they’ll do nicely. They update yet another spot on Apple’s product matrix to Intel-based technology, and they’re quite attractive, to boot. That’s true especially in the super-sexy black model, which has a seductively evil look to it — more K.A.R.R. than K.I.T.T., if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of people, though, I’m disappointed that Apple has effectively mothballed the idea that their professional notebooks ought to ship in a compact form factor too, as there’s nothing in the current product line that inherits the niche filled by the now obsolete 12-inch PowerBook.

“There’s often a wealth of information to be found [in blogs]: information that is frequently buried deep within archives and comments. This article looks at ways to bring that information forward.”

Geeks only.

The latest in my string of side projects is now shipping today: a modest contribution that I made to El Boton, a limited edition set of one-inch pins brought to you by Naz Hamid and Andrew Huff. This is the second set of buttons that they’ve put out under the El Boton banner, and it includes six unique designs from Jim Coudal, Dave Shea, Jason Santa Maria, Greg Storey, Naz himself, and yours truly.

“There are many problems with [red-blue electoral maps] maps, but what always irritated me the most about those maps [was] how they over-emphasized large, thinly populated expanses of land.”

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

A documentary on Swiss graphic design. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see it.

What Apple fixed in its notoriously broken professional photography software.

Seems available only in French, unfortunately. (Woops, my mistake, it’s available in English, too. Thanks to Julian Stahnke for letting me know.)

Sigh.

Software has a cost, no matter what anyone tells you, no matter even if it ships without a price tag of any kind. Years ago, Microsoft made that momentous decision to give us Internet Explorer for free, but I was thinking today about how truly free it really was — which is to say, it’s not free at all when you think about it.

Just how many hours of productivity have been lost to making Web page code work inside of Internet Explorer? Personally, I know that I’ve spent the equivalent of hundreds of man hours coaxing standards-compliant code to render properly in the I.E. world view, and the companies I’ve worked for have probably logged tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of man hours doing the same. When you add up all the effort similarly expended by designers, studios and corporations of all kinds all over the world and over the past five or ten years, it’s got to be an enormously expensive number; if you were to assign hourly rates to all that time, it might total in the billions of dollars.

Which begs the question: can Microsoft create a piece of software so complex that not even Microsoft can complicate it even further? Something to think about.

Is there any doubt that the company is watching everything we all do?

Nicely done grid-work.

Caveat lector: This is a rant, and it contains no facts.

Seemingly forever, there have been persistent and vague rumors that Apple is going to build some sort of handheld device — based on the Palm operating system, based on the iPod, based on the Newton, based on smoke and mirrors, whatever — and I’m sick of them not being true. There’s even recent evidence that certain Apple patents strongly suggest a forthcoming announcement of some sort. The time for a truly user-friendly portable device is now and that device should be, at least in part, a mobile phone… mostly because all of the mobile phones now in the market are just terrible.

I have a Treo 650 that’s bulky and over-featured, but the only reason I hang onto it is that it’s truly the best of the worst. It has a reasonably good user interface for call management and text messaging, but the only crucial thing it does really right is integrate my contacts on the phone with my contacts from Apple’s Address Book, via iSync. For me, that’s the whole ball of wax.

Mmmm, mangoes…

As we all know, the surfeit of distractions available on a personal computer these days can make it exceedingly easy to get nothing done. There’s the constant haranguing of emails, the intrusions of instant messaging, and the endless nagging of countless other attention-hungry applications and utilities.

In looking for ways to defuse this, I noticed a few years ago that some serious writers, at least in the early drafting stages of their work, were turning to manual typewriters as a method of sidestepping all of those distractions. It’s a great solution: what better way to thwart a computer than to step away from it completely? There’s no email to check on a typewriter, no beeps and pop-up reminders from other applications, and no access whatsoever to the Internet and its tantalizing abundance of productivity-killing diversions.

What’s more, a manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph — thereby imparting the feeling of working without really working — instead of continuing to write new sentences or paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors, manual typewriters don’t allow you to easily re-edit, insert and revise a sentence once it’s been committed to paper. This makes for an entirely different writing experience: the ideas come first, and the act of finessing them, of word-smithing, comes after all the ideas have been set to paper.

Just to follow up on my wildly popular report from day one of Creative Good᾿s Good Experience Live (Gel) Conference, here are some notes on day two: this was the heart of the whole thing, a tightly orchestrated, ten hour marathon of speakers, hosted by the generally impressive Mark Hurst. Each person spoke for twenty minutes a piece, and Hurst was gracious and firm in keeping them on schedule — it seemed unnecessary at first, given how expensive the tickets were; I felt that if anyone had something to say that it should be said regardless of the clock. But I had to admit, the time constraints kept things lively and entertaining. What also helped was the diversity of the talks; Hurst did a knockout job of bringing together folks from unexpected walks of life, many of them truly inspirational, and most all of them thoroughly entertaining.

Design details that get lost in the translation from comp to code.

Simple re-skinning makes this excellent browser ever more excellenter. Too bad he’s decided to stop pre-empting that lackluster OmniWeb globe icon, though.

Gallery of sites that have ripped off Panic.

“We are working on upgrading the android with the aim of making it move its legs by the end of this year.” Sci-fi fans can rejoice.

Today was the first of two days of the Gel (“Good Experience Live”) Conference, a production of Phil Terry and Mark Hurst of Creative Good. It’s the fourth year for the conference but my first year attending. I’ve always found the tickets to be somewhat prohibitively priced, and if it weren’t for the fact that lots of my management peers at the Times are very enthusiastic about their prior experiences attending, I’m not sure I would have spent the money for a ticket — even though it doesn’t comes out of own pocket but rather from my group budget at the Times. But the advance word was good enough for me to give it a try; so far, so good.

I suspect not a lot of readers of this blog are also subscribers to NYTimes.com’s Times Select, a service that allows access to the Times’ opinion and editorial columnists, access to up to one hundred articles per month from the archives, access to special, Times Select-only blogs written by guest journalists, and assorted other goodies. It’s a pretty divisive feature, I know, and I’m not trying to sidestep the arguments against it here — but today, under the heading of “assorted other goodies,” we debuted a new, monthly feature from the legendary illustrator and designer Maira Kalman which I think is pretty great.

On the first Wednesday of each month, Kalman will publish a new set of her quite amazing drawings and paintings in an “illustrated column” called “The Principles of Uncertainty.” There are six of them posted today, and they’ve already garnered over seventy reader comments posted to the page, which, I think, is pretty amazing for pay-only content.

In general, I’m pretty enthusiastic about illustration appearing just about anywhere on the Web, so I’m very happy about this. It’s unique, somewhat unexpected stuff, literate and playful at once, and one of the reasons I came to work at The New York Times. You could make a pretty convincing argument that “The Principles of Uncertainty” is made possible only through the particular economics of Times Select; it’s Web-only content that might otherwise be a tough sell to advertisers (as part of Times Select, it’s advertising free). But I’m not trying to invite a critique of the service. Really.

“From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.”

Among social networking applications on the Web, one thing has puzzled me: why is it so difficult to go from friend to friend? Take Flickr, for example: a tremendously successful example of social networking that relies heavily on the idea that it’s your friends who are producing the content (photos) in which you’re most interested. The very latest of your friends’ photos are available in a meta view, which is handy, but there’s no apparent way to simply skip from one friend’s photos to the next without using the browser’s ‘back’ button to return to your list of contacts.

This seemed wrong to me somehow, and, admitting that I’m hardly the world’s foremost expert on constructing interaction models for social software, I thought I’d try and understand better why I was so frustrated. I quickly determined that, when it comes to organizing your network contacts — friends, basically — in a social networking application, there are basically two models.

“ Here is a small collection of Web design trends that I predict we will all be completely sick of in about six months.”

“Madison Avenue has become obsessed with using the word ‘my’ — along with ‘your’ and ‘our’ — in advertising slogans, as well as in the names of brands, products and even a new television network.” Notwithstanding the fact that my employer is launching a new feature called “My Times,” I’ve never been a big fan of this branding ploy.

“ The real problem with popularity-driven models is that they reduce both the breadth and depth of the sources, topics and viewpoints being expressed across a community.”

It’s the sixth annual May 1st Reboot today, in which designers all over the Web launch visual makeovers of their Web sites. You can go and see the sites that have launched under the rubric of the original campaign at May1Reboot.com, and you can see the campaign’s less Flash-intensive, more standards-friendly offshoot at CSSReboot.com. Together, both efforts can boast of literally hundreds of participants; a heck of a lot of designers have been busy nights and weekends over the past several weeks.

But the only one you really need to go see is the brand new JeffCroft.com, which is a major home run of a redesign if I ever saw one. It’s perhaps the deftest and most cohesive user experience yet fashioned from all of the various de rigeur weblog features, circa 2006: there’s a blogroll, a list of shout-outs, an integrated Flickr feed, comments on everything, a “tumblelog” that orders everything Croft touches, apparently, into a single, chronological view — not to mention a good ol’ fashioned weblog of stuff he writes, too.

It’s a kit of parts that could have easily produced chaos, but Croft unifies everything with a particular élan that has the feeling of a breakthrough. The interface is thoroughly unified and orderly, yet pleasing inventive at all levels — there’s a bold and striking effect to the whole presentation that can be taken in instantly, but it’s a nuanced performance, too (I’m not sure if anything Croft has done before has balanced gestalt and minutiae so successfully; if it has, I want to see it soon). This is the kind of design that thrills me; completely self-motivated and yet unfailingly conscientious in its attention to detail. And it makes me think that things around here are starting to look a little long in the tooth.