As I mentioned on Wednesday, it’s quiet around here this week. That’s why I’m going to dump a bunch of links into another round-up post, and then set off to enjoy the three-day weekend… though I may be back at my desk as soon as tomorrow. Anyway, just a warning that some of these are older tidbits I’ve had kicking around for a while. That’s why I’m burying them here on the last Friday in August!

New took from Ambrosia Software allows you to “quickly transfer custom ringtones for your iPhone — without modifying, hacking or having to reset your iPhone.”

Are you on vacation these last few days of August? If so then what are you doing staring at a computer screen, reading my blog?

Me, I’m at the office throughout this slow, concluding week of the summer. But if I weren’t, if I had time off, I think I’d do what I haven’t done yet all year, even on the ostensible holidays I’ve taken: fall off the grid entirely and relax properly — without telephones, without text messages, without the Internet.

We don’t do that enough in the States and I sometimes regret it painfully. European readers know what I’m talking about. Just before the calendar turns to September, the cities empty out and the shops close in a kind of workers’ solidarity like no labor strike ever seen on American shores.

You said you wanted HUMONGOUS icons, right?

“We’re searching for a repository for the many facets of [digital identity], constructed with an open standard. A database and application that lives on my own server with an API that allows organizations and companies to access the sets of information about me that I explicitly allow. This information doesn’t get stored by these organizations or companies, because it’s mine.”

“A Dreamweaver extension that gives the user tons of options and outputs pretty darned clean markup and CSS.”

Eye-tracking-backed best practices for the placement of “Submit” and “Cancel” buttons in forms.

Formatted by Randy Plemel, based on my NYC Subway Map for iPhone.

If you’ve ever used the built-in site search on Subtraction.com then, well, my apologies. Believe me, I was fully aware that searching this site via that creaky old CGI script was more or less the equivalent of mailing in a question to the Library of Congress and checking your mailbox every day for a reply after working in the fields. That is, it was slow search. I just didn’t have the means to fix it.

All that’s changed, because searching this site is now powered by the brute, irrepressible and undeniable force of Google. They’re a little company on the West coast that specializes in helping you find stuff on the Interweb. And they’re quite good at it too, so the results should be pretty satisfying. Give it a spin; you’ll notice a bajillion-fold speed increase. Now all you have to do is figure out what you’re going to do with all that extra time.

Alice Twemlow sheds a little light on the history of critical writing about design.

Interview with the writer, photographer, and urban explorer responsible for Vanishing Point (the site seems to be rather slow at the moment). These images are breathtaking.

Photo documentation of the Brazilian city’s campaign to remove outdoor advertising. Beautiful.

“[Our primers] are meant to be a fun introductory overview of major film genres and movements, and to serve as handy guides in your rental selection process.” Via Lined and Unlined.

If you’re an iPhone owner and you live in New York City, you want to be able to carry around the official Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on your iPhone. There are a few options for this, including using a tool like FileMarker which locally saves a PDF copy of the map to be accessed through Safari. It’s a clever approach, but it seems too tricky for me.

Instead, I prefer using Photo Albums in my iPhone to view cropped versions of the subway map, a simple but effective technique I first saw demonstrated by Mike Essl, and which doubtless many others have also used.

She’s easy on the eyes, but like nails across a chalkboard to the ears.

The front page of tomorrow’s New York Times will feature the first installment in a series called “Choking on Growth,” an in-depth examination of “the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.” It’s a major piece of reporting, and as usual you can find it at NYTimes.com alongside similarly excellent, complementary video, multimedia and interactive infographics.

There’s a little more value add this time, though, in the form of a special section on the site devoted to “Choking on Growth.” It’s essentially a micro-site that showcases the entire series — traditional journalism as well as Web-only content — as a coherent package, and it will be updated and added to over the coming days and weeks as the series continues. It’s also the result of a tremendous and not-as-frequent-as-I’d-like instance of our designers collaborating with editors from both the print and Web side, and with our multimedia, video and information graphics teams.

Thoughtful tips on how to optimize icons at smaller sizes.

Posted earlier this month, so I’m a late on it. But it’s still worth reading.

Design study and prototype imagines the archetypal work accessory as relaxation chair.

Beautiful typefaces from Jean François Porchez. Via FontShop.

This new, nearly full-frame digital SLR camera checks in at 12.1 megapixels and is as sensitive as ISO 25,600, supposedly.

≴A directory of New York City restaurants organized by subway stop.”

New site from The Robot Co-Op.

I’ve had family visiting all week, and I’ve been doing my duty as tour guide. We’ve seen the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Yankee Stadium, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and went around Manhattan on the Circle Line Cruise, among other things.

Throughout, I’ve had my camera with me, mostly for the sake of documenting my totally awesome nephew. Setting aside those several dozen pictures, I just sorted through a week’s worth of photography and came up with exactly four mildly interesting shots to share here.

A calendar of design-related events. Hence the title. Via Unbeige.

One of the revelations of working at a large-scale content site is how effective email newsletters are as a tool for driving traffic. Duh. I admit I had really underestimated this, but it makes sense; your email client is open all day and, spam aside, the inflow of messages is more or less tailor made for your interests.

Partly as a result of that discovery, I’ve been toying a while with the idea of creating a Subtraction.com email newsletter that would be released monthly — or perhaps more frequently, if the demand is there. This would be a simple recap of each of the blog posts I published leading up to each newsletter’s release, along with some overview of the conversation that ensued in the comments. The idea is to give occasional or lapsed readers of the site a concise method of catching up. I’d also add in relevant notices pertaining to my various speaking appearances and side projects — including any updates on the long rumored, still pending, but for-sure-on-its-way-someday reprinting of my infamous Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee shirt (I promise!).

“Just create a Ping, set a date and you’ll receive a reminder by E-mail or TXT to your phone.” I’ve needed this; I’m going to give it a try.

Very interesting new technique for dynamically resizing and cropping imagery.

“…Older, often unpopular, and sometimes unknown films that merit a second look.”

Brief question-and-answer with one of my favorite design studios of the moment.

Speaking of movies, I did in fact go to see “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which was fantastic. With my perpetually critical designer’s eye, though, I noticed two things: first, that the movie’s titles are actually quite bad. They use a simplistic, somewhat retrograde graphical animation that amounts to pretty much what I imagine the titles for “Freejack” must have looked like.

But if you saw the movie too, you might not have paid much attention to the titles, because of my second observation: like a lot of films released in the past half decade, the titles follow at the end of the film, after the final frame of action. Though they are designed very much in the same way as titles that precede the film — you could almost move them to the start of the picture and they would work as is — they’re inserted as parting gestures instead of opening salutations.

USB thumb drive hidden in a cassette tape-like case.

Thanks to Gong for the tip.

Late last week, the Business Day section of The New York Times ran a great story on Netflix’s customer service strategy. Faced with unexpectedly effective pressure from Blockbuster Video (who have turned Netflix’s own mail order model on its head by allowing their customers to return movies not just by mail but at the rental chains’ physical locations as well), Netflix has counter-intuitively invested millions of dollars in domestic telephone support facilities and staff.

Where the number of companies outsourcing customer service by telephone to Third World locations is only increasing, Netflix has instead chosen to hire two hundred workers in Oregon to man their hotlines in the hopes that a renewed, more responsive focus on customer service will win the day for them. They’ve even given these representatives enough operational latitude to allow them to function not just as telephonic automatons, but as real, empathetic human beings who help other human beings solve their video rental-related problems. Imagine. It’s a winning strategy, in my book.

Review and vote for proposals for next year’s festival. Be sure to cast your ballot for my panel: “Design Control in a Digital World: Getting It and Losing It.”

Some of my best friends are print designers. Really. Here in New York, there’s a vague segregation between online and offline designers, but the local design community is still sufficiently cozy — and the island of Manhattan sufficiently small — that it’s not unusual for print and digital designers to intermingle freely. Dogs and cats, living together. Insane but true.

It’s great, actually. Especially for me. While I have an obvious partiality towards all things digital, my romance with graphic design originally started with print, obviously. That’s all we had in the pre-TCP/IP dark ages. I enjoy the two worlds immensely, even if I do believe the one is going to completely decimate the other like an atom bomb before the decade’s out. Kidding!

Over the past few years, too, I’ve come to see that the purpose of my career (in at least one aspect) is to do what I can to help bridge the two worlds. Part of this is my design sensibility, which hopes to borrow the best of print to help inform the evolving digital world in a way that’s true to the new medium. Part of it is the mission that I set out for myself when I joined the board of directors at AIGA New York, which to me plays a crucial role in our industry’s transition. And part of this is the fact that I work at a company that employs dozens of print designers even as we’re transforming ourselves into a digital enterprise.

“…Guides to usage, troubleshooting information, pertinent news and more” from TechTracker, Inc.

Mac OS X application helps you make your own customized sheets.

“I have not seen a better iPhone website than this one… A lot of startups are going to look to this as the gold standard. At least for now.” Agreed.

“Our agency receives its share of RFPs, and sometimes these requests stipulate that our proposal include layouts. Even if the project looks promising, we just say no.” Agreed. It’s a terrible practice that harms all designers.

Speaking of magazines, does anybody read them anymore? Which is to say that while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who continue to buy, subscribe to and read traditional periodicals, I realized recently that I’m not among them.

The other day, I was over at a friend’s house and was surprised to see that she had copies of Monocle and Good Magazine on her coffee table. Well, I wasn’t surprised by that so much as I was surprised by how interesting I found them, at least for the short spell in which I was flipping through their pages as my friend and I chatted. I have complaints about the art direction in Monocle, but between those two, I can’t deny that compelling stuff is happening in magazine design these days. Add just about any given week’s issue of New York Magazine to the mix, and you have a pretty good survey of some of the most absorbing design happening anywhere. The problem is that they’re like lipstick on a pig: some of the best design being done today is being wasted on magazine content.

Monthly round-up of Web design-centric links.

In case you missed it, there was a really terrific piece in yesterday᾿s New York Times Magazine called “The Road to Clarity.” Ostensibly a report on how the Federal Highway Administration is transitioning Interstate highway signage away from the typeface Highway Gothic and to the better optimized Clearview, its writer, Joshua Yaffa, manages to elegantly transition the angle of this article into an excellent primer on the nuances and importance graphic design. It’s actually quite slyly done.

Recommended! Thanks to Stan.

Martin Scorcese on Michelangelo Antonioni. Also see Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman.

Everyone picks on The New York Times.

Awesome!

Bring your “8mm, Super 8mm or 16mm films to Anthology where they will be inspected and projected for all to observe. Motion picture archivists will be on hand to discuss film preservation and to give tips on how to save your precious movies before it is too late.”

Graphic tee-shirts that “…pay homage to some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th century fiction — from the sunny shores of Amity Island (“Jaws”) to the frozen climes of Outpost #31 (“The Thing”&41;.

What are the least glamorous software tools for the Macintosh that you can’t live without? I’m not talking about the likes of Quicksilver, Adium or other high profile applications that, even if they don’t come from major league publishers, manage to get plenty of coverage already.

Rather, I’m talking about little known or little-discussed applications, widgets or utilities without which your productivity just plummets. I know that I’ve got a handful of these that I unequivocally must install on any Mac I use; I’m passionately dedicated to them. So it occurred to me the other day that lots of people probably have unsung favorites too; and by virtue of their modest dignity, I likely haven’t heard of them.

A case for why ITC Grouch Is the typeface of the season. Nice write-up.

Typically excellent.

It probably doesn’t need to be said, but yesterday’s announced upgrades to Apple’s perpetually anemic .Mac service left me, and probably many others, pretty disappointed. Surely, this level of underwhelming, incremental improvement can’t be the most serious response to the changing world of online services that the company could muster. Can it? If so, it’s pathetic.

But! Such is life under the reign of Steven P. Jobs. Which is to say, he can’t provide magic and wonder at every single product announcement, can he? Sometimes all he has to work with is his infamous skill for making sizzle look like steak. Usually, it’s a trick that’s less transparent than this.

See also McFly 2015.

Interesting answers, makes for a good resource.

Grids are good. I’ve said so many times, and I think people are catching on. Not that I’m taking credit for the rising stock of this creative tool among Web designers, mind you; I just wanted to say how happy I am that more and more thought is being put into what it means to use typographic grids as a layout principle in digital media.

What’s even better, a lot of this new thought goes far beyond what I myself would be capable of contributing to the conversation. Take the Blueprint framework, for example (not to be confused with the promising Blueprint content management system from Inventive Labs). It’s a foundation for developing typographic grids using Cascading Style Sheets that was developed by Norwegian tech student Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy and released last Friday after several months of development. It’s an impressive piece of work that’s leagues past what I could have offered in terms of technical insight into how to build grids more efficiently for today’s browsers.

Supposedly there are updates to Apple’s .Mac service due to be announced tomorrow. I can only hope it’s true, but I’m not sure if I’ll be enraged or depressed if they don’t happen. Fingers crossed.

Speaking of rumors, here’s an idea about the rumor that floated several weeks ago in which it was suggested that Apple might sometime in the future release a smaller, less expensive version of its iPhone in order to reach a wider consumer base.

Unannounced changes in Apple’s first software update.

Highly detailed bespoke men’s tailoring via the Internet.

Oof. I had a look at my handwriting the other day, when I scribbled a note to accompany a package I was sending off. My chicken scratch looked horrible, nearly illegible, even. After years and years of keyboard use, my penmanship has clearly deteriorated.

It’s not that I write by hand so rarely that it was a shock for me to see how poorly formed my letters are. But I was writing at a moderately greater length than usual, and it made an impression on me how malformed many of the letters turned out. I had to go back in and add missing strokes and stems to many of the otherwise inscrutable letters just to make sure I didn’t come across as some kind of maniac.

“This Friday, August 3rd, PONG will be having its season-ending LES Cup. The top-ranked players from PONG will battle it out to discover the true Lower East Side table tennis champion.” Thanks to Clarence.

Interesting audio slideshow but the best part is listening to the reporter try a sample.