Even with all the email that I receive, I’m still the kind of person who finds it very difficult not to reply to a message that someone has sent me, especially if the sender has posed a question of some kind. As a result, I often find myself writing familiar replies to queries that come in over and over, from different people. These are generally earnest questions about the way I work, where I draw inspiration from, advice on design, etc.

I’m more than happy to provide answers and to give something back in my small way, but it’s becoming a harder and harder job to pull off. I have a continual backlog of emails flagged for follow-up, and catching up feels like a kind of treadmill sometimes.

So I’m going to start, here, publishing an occasional series of blog posts covering answers to some of those frequently asked questions. When I get around to it, I’ll collate them and post them in an evergreen spot on the site.

The question I want to tackle in this inaugural post is commonly posed something like, “Can I use the design of Subtraction.com for my site?” Variants include, “Can I make a WordPress theme (or similar template) from your design?” or, “I just redesigned my site and it looks a lot like Subtraction.com, do you mind?”

The answer to the first two questions is “no,” and the answer to the last is, “yes.” But with comments.

There was such an encouragingly substantive response to my post about the apparently problematic quality differential between panels and lectures at South by Southwest Interactive this year that I felt compelled to do something useful with them. Specifically, I felt that I should share the comments with Hugh Forrest, the indefatigable and remarkably responsive Event Director who somehow manages to move mountains to make the festival happen year after year.

It only seemed appropriate to do so, because Hugh, based on my limited contact with him, has always seemed to be a good guy open to reasonable feedback on how to improve the festival that he’s been involved with for years. So I sent him an email pointing him to the post on Sunday night and received a lengthy and very thoughtful response the very next day.

We exchanged a few more emails, debating the ideas in my original post as well as those from the comment thread, and I found myself in the opposite position from where I’d been before: having shared Subtraction readers’ comments with Hugh, I now wanted to share Hugh’s comments with readers. So, with his consent, I’m going to excerpt a few of his remarks from the email thread here.

What kind of photographer am I if I don’t bring my camera around with me wherever I go? Not much of one, apparently. Lately, I’ve been frustrated with the total bulk that my Nikon D70 requires when I travel — lenses, flash, batteries, etc.

In fact, I didn’t bring it with me to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival, choosing to leave it at home so that I could move more quickly through the airport (bringing it along would have required me to check one bag). This is why I have no photographs from the show, but if you’re looking for visual documentation, there’s some wonderful shots from Lisa Whiteman at her Flickr account, and similarly beautiful work from Naz Hamid on his Flickr account, too.

It’s been about a year now since I first started thinking about creating some kind of definitive documentation about my approach to designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool. I spent a few weeks last summer putting a lot of those thoughts down on paper, but nothing much became of them.

Then, a few months ago, in preparation for a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference, I started thinking about how to visually represent the problem-solving process that I go through when designing new interfaces with grid layouts. At first, I started thinking about disassembling and then reassembling one of the designs in my portfolio. But that seemed as if it wouldn’t be quite satisfactory, as I wanted the ability to talk openly about all the different factors that go into a design solution, without worrying about offending colleagues or clients.

Here’s where I come clean a bit and stop vaguely assigning blame to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival panel participants as a faceless group. The truth is that I’m guilty of exactly what I outlined in my previous entry — the unconscientious lack of preparation and conversational inexactness that can torpedo a panel discussion. And worse.

On Saturday afternoon, almost immediately after doing a two-person, twenty-five minute lecture with Mark Boulton called “Grids Are Good,” I joined my former colleague and business partner Chris Fahey on his panel, “High Class and Low Class Web Design.”

It goes without saying that the concept of class is a touchy topic. In a series of blog posts last year, Chris wrote at length about why we, as designers, don’t talk about class, and why we may be operating within the constraints of class-mindedness without realizing it or acknowledging it. These were complex, ambitious and thoughtful articles, and if you work in Web design and have interest in this subject, you’d do well to read them for yourself.

As a way of making up for the fact that I did very little (read: zero) blogging from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival this year, I’m going to try and offer a somewhat hefty post this evening about it. Rather than recounting all of the individual events that occurred between late last Friday evening, when I arrived, and Monday afternoon, when I left, I’m going to sort of give a high-level summary of my major complaints about this year’s festival content and how I, personally, contributed to that problem. This entry is going to be so substantial, in fact, that I’m going to split it into two parts. Read on for the first, and be sure to read the second when you’re done.

Whew. I’m back from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival and feeling a bit burnt out, in part because the show was bigger than ever this year. While I can’t say that its ferocious growth has caused South by Southwest to lose its singular usefulness as the friendliest and most thoroughly stimulating of digital conferences, scaling up nevertheless has its pluses and minuses.

That’s getting ahead of myself, though. I’m a little too fatigued to fully expand on that, but you can expect a post about this year’s experience in Austin in a day or two.

In the meantime, I’m going to offer up a little something from one of my appearances at the festival: my presentation at Monday night’s 20x2 event, the annual adjunct to the festival proper in which twenty participants are asked to answer a single, purposefully vague question in two minutes flat, using whatever creative powers they can summon.

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

Okay, it’s true, I don’t blog enough. I used to think I was a fairly active blogger, but looking over the frequency of my posts for the past few months, it’s pretty obvious that I only manage to publish two or three times a week. And if that weren’t evident enough before now, this complaint about infrequency is the one thing that I heard loud and clear yesterday, sprinkled in amongst all the gratifyingly supportive commentary on my decision to start running ads from The Deck and Authentic Jobs on this Web site.

The problem is that, as an amateur writer, I have a particular weakness: an inability to be brief. Almost without fail, when I sit down at my computer to ‘dash off’ a post that I think will run only two or three paragraphs, I end up writing six or eight of them. What should take me ten minutes too often turns into an hour and ten minutes, and so I often can’t find the time to even start.

What I want to avoid, naturally, is the idea of quantity trumping quality — I don’t want to delude myself that readers will continue to tune into Subtraction.com just to read, for instance, that tomorrow evening I’m heading out to Austin, Texas for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where, on Sunday, I’ll be doing a power session and a panel on “High Class and Low Class and Web Design,” and that if you’re there as well, please come up and introduce yourself before Tuesday afternoon, when I fly back to New York. I mean, that’s what Twitter’s for, right?

Still, I will take the feedback to heart and try and post more often, and in doing so, I’ll do my best at striking some kind of balance between brevity, quality and quantity. Here’s an example: a post like this one would normally ramble on for another several paragraphs, but for tonight, it’s going to stop right here.

Some readers will have noticed that, starting several weeks ago, I began running job posts from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs. This evening, for the first time, I’ve also started running ads from The Deck, Jim Coudal’s design-focused advertising network.

Truth be told, with the first move, I tried to sneak it through, without acknowledging it in any blog posts. Aside from the fact that they’re advertising, I figured that those job postings, being in black and white and being styled in such a way as to be very similar to the rest of the site, were visually innocuous. The ads from The Deck, however, are in color, and not so easily ignored.

I’m bracing for some scathing feedback from readers, so please, let me know how you feel if you find these changes to be offensive. We’ve been living with advertising on the Internet for over a decade now, but it’s still a topic that can inflame passions among reasonable people, and I respect that.

One of the advantages of being employed at The New York Times is that I get access to some of the best design minds out there. And by access, I mean I can walk right up to them (if they’re not busy) and talk to them, and they’ll actually talk back to me. It’s pretty awesome. If they’re a talented designer working in publishing, at some point or other, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll come work at The Times, at least for a spell.

With a little bit of cajoling, once in a while I somehow manage to get a few of these designers to contribute to Illustrate Me, my ongoing project where I invite outside contributors to create illustrations for Subtraction.com’s monthly archives pages. It’s a kind of windfall when I pull it off, sort of like getting a Major League ballplayer to join you for a game of stickball.

Last year, Op-Ed art director Brian Rea turned in a fantastic piece for the June 2006 archives. This time out, I’m lucky enough to have a brand new piece for the February 2007 archives from none other than Nicholas Blechman. See it for yourself on the archive page.

In addition to being the Art Director for The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas is one of the most prolific and talented young art directors and illustrators out there. He’s amassed an impressive body of work in design and illustration, some of which you can see at Knickerbockerdesign.com. I’ve long been a fan of his spare, exceedingly intelligent and yet satisfyingly simple approach to visual communication, and as ever, I feel very fortunate he was able to create something typically splendid for display here.