There’s a crucial part of interface design that vexes me and it’s iconography, the discipline of crafting highly communicative, aesthetically efficient pictorial symbols in miniature. It takes a special combination of artistry, patience and visual economy in order to get it right, and I’m in awe of everyone who has this skill. (I’ll say also that there are many folks who are competent at this art form, but exceedingly few who are truly good at it.)

What confounds me about iconography, though, is only partly the fact that I’m astoundingly no good at it. It’s also the idea that the idiom of icons, at least in its current state, stands at a polar opposite to my own sensibility. To be specific: the majority of commonly accepted and commercially functional icons in use today are visually literal — they represent objects or combinations of objects, even if they are intended to stand in for abstract concepts — and they’re almost exclusively dimensional.

By contrast, I like incredibly abstract and minimal graphical elements. For me, a simple, one-pixel straight line is practically a revival of the Rococo style. If I had my way, the only pictorial components of my design work would be the pictures: photographs or illustrations. Everything else would be simple and elementally native to the browser, or whatever other rendering mechanism I’m working with. Which is to say, you’d only ever see lines and boxes — and flat ones at that. No shading, please, and no three-dimensional modeling.

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in print, so I don’t often think about the wonderful world of paper. As a print designer working in a design studio, you tend to think a lot about the stuff; what paper to run a job on, what it costs, who stocks it, where it comes from, etc. To be honest, it bored the living heck out of me; there were few things that I found more tiresome than rifling through an endless and disorderly stack of paper samples, each one obtusely named in a vain attempt to differentiate white from, um, really white.

I almost never think about paper companies, either. Until I got heavily involved with AIGA again, I had almost forgotten about their enormous influence in the design community. And their deep, deep pockets. In spite of the portents of doom for printed matter, paper companies continue to spend freely to promote their wares, or at least that’s my outsider’s impression.

Okay, I need to set all modesty aside for a moment in order to write this post, mostly so that I can start with the premise that, all in all, I get a lot of crap done. I’m not saying it’s all amazing, wonderful crap, but I’m pretty proud of most of it. Somehow I manage to work a demanding, full-time job; I write fairly lengthy posts for this blog; I keep up with a nontrivial set of duties at AIGA New York; I design and co-publish A Brief Message; I maintain a robust enough social life that I get to see friends I genuinely like several days a week; and, not least of all, I take pretty damn good care of my dog.

Now we’ve established that, I can address the fact that, fairly frequently, people ask me how I get all of it done. It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard, either, mostly because there’s not a thing on that list that I don’t care about passionately. I like my life, my career, my work, my friends and I love my dog. All things considered, I feel like a pretty lucky bastard.

One of the more popular posts that I wrote in July was “Designed Deterioration,” in which I observed that digital hardware is rarely intended to get more beautiful as it gets older.

Governed mostly by the modern business principle of planned obsolescence, today’s hardware products are meant to get scrapped and replaced when they age beyond the near future. By contrast, older hardware goods — like the cast iron skillet I mentioned in my original post — often seem to have been designed with their eventual deterioration in mind. As they get older and become more heavily used, they get better.

That post might have led many to believe that what I’m advocating is that digital products should all be developed with designed deterioration in mind. While I wouldn’t object to that, I wouldn’t expect it to happen any time soon. By now, planned obsolescence is too strongly rooted a concept to allow for that.

I also happen to think there’s a lot to be said for designing for the current moment, designing something that addresses today’s values without feeling the pressure to create something that will last for all time. Which is to say that I have a bias towards what I consider to be ‘timeless’ design, for sure, but I also believe that our craft and our culture don’t progress when everything tries to appear timeless.

There’s one more part of this discussion I want to bring to light. So far, I’ve been harping on hardware and industrial design. But my original thought, when I sat down to write that post, was that designed deterioration seems like an idea that software could benefit from, too.

When you live with a dog for five years, as I have with Mister President, you get to know him pretty well. They’re a beautiful, complex species, but really, they have some fairly simple, predictable behaviors: eat, sleep, play, eat some more. That’s part of what makes them so lovable.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at how straightforward and consistent Mister President’s behaviors are. I often joked with my ex-girlfriend how easy it would be to plot out most of his operating logic in flowchart form; heck, his decision-making flow is so simple I could describe it to most folks in a few words and they’d get it.

No big ideas or design insights today; just a few Mac-related things I wanted to clear off my notepad.

First, I tried hard to spend my US$100 iPhone rebate at the Apple Store in SoHo yesterday — without going over the hundred dollar-mark. So I bought myself a Contour Design Showcase for my iPhone, and one of those slick new Apple keyboards.

Total price, including tax: US$90.98. So close; now I need to find something for US$9.02 to spend the balance on. I know I can just put it towards something of a greater value that I probably would’ve bought from Apple anyway (e.g., iWork ’08) but for some irrational reason, I’m feeling defiant. I guess I don’t want to feel like a sucker for letting Apple’s rebate offer trick me into some larger purchase… though as one of those faithful drones who waited in line to buy an iPhone in the first place, it’s hard to make the argument that I haven’t already got “SUCKER” written all over my face.

When Liz Danzico and I launched our new site A Brief Message last week, it was also effectively the end of Illustrate Me. That project, which started in May of last year and ran more or less into early this year, was my first attempt at trying to actively integrate illustration into my online work; each month I invited a designer or illustrator to create art to accompany the previous month’s archives of this site.

I had a great time doing it, and I was lucky enough to get some truly wonderful contributions from some terrific artists. Ultimately, however, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t yet and was unlikely to ever reach a point where Illustrate Me achieved that satisfying effect that I look for in the meaningful use of any illustration.

Back in June, I wrote a rant about the unorthodox and not entirely successful innovation baked into the elevators at the new Times building. As I learned afterwards, they were designed according to a principle of elevator service called destination-based dispatching. The basic idea is that, rather than putting passengers on the first elevator car that arrives, the system routes passengers to the cars that will deliver them to their destinations most quickly.

This approach somewhat upends the traditional way passengers interact with elevators. Instead of hopping on the first car that arrives and punching a button for a floor, a passenger punches the button for her floor first, on a keypad available at the elevator bank. The system then directs her to, say, car number three, along with other passengers heading to the same floor. Once on the elevator, there are no buttons, nothing to push. It’s a little strange. At least the way it’s been implemented at our building, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

After raising the possibility of a Subtraction.com Email Newsletter last month, I did some hunting around at the various email list services out there and settled on two main contenders: the well-regarded Campaign Monitor and the similarly capable Mail Chimp. They’re basically comparable, though I admit that I felt compelled to give the latter a try first because, well, chimps are just cuter than monitors.

That said, I’ve passed on both of them for the time being. Instead, I took the cheap route and opted for the built-in announcement list functionality provided by Dreamhost. Say what you will about Dreamhost’s spotty uptime record and sluggish performance, but they offer a terrific feature set for one-person Web empires like Subtraction.com. Their fairly complete if unglamorous set of tools for mailing lists, publishing software, ecommerce and other digital empire-building endeavors are really easy to set-up, and they come at no additional cost.

AIGA Executive Director Ric Grefé has written a powerful piece for us over at A Brief Message. It’s a timely reminder for today, the sixth anniversary of September 11th, in which he encourages designers to take advantage of the unique opportunity we have to effect change in the world. I found it to be stirring and quite inspiration, and I think it’s well worth reading. Plus there’s a beautiful illustration by Viktor Kohen, a true master of the medium, that quite remarkably interprets Ric’s words.

Also, in case you missed it, last Thursday, we ran a terrific Message from Debbie Millman about design and beauty, which was illustrated by the singularly talented Felix Sockwell. As it happens, Felix will be appearing for AIGA New York tonight at the first of this season’s Small Talks. He’ll be joined on stage by Peter Bell and Herman Miller, Inc.’s Steve Frykholm to talk about how they collaborated together on that company’s “Be” product line. I’ll be there and please say hello if you’ll be too — though unfortunately it’s sold out if you don’t have tickets already.

Okay, I promise not to alert you here every time we post updates to A Brief Message. For now, you’ll just have to forgive my continued excitability; we’re having a lot of fun on this project.

This morning I woke up and dressed myself all wrong. I don’t know why, but I dressed like an idiot. I put on a short-sleeved, collared shirt that, once I arrived at the office, seemed entirely inappropriate for the workplace; a pair of light brown corduroys that somehow seemed more ill-fitting today than anytime I’ve worn them before; and a pair of black, Chuck Taylor All-Stars-style sneakers more fit for a playground than a meeting room.

If I recall vaguely amid my early morning brain fog, my intention was to fancy the whole ensemble up a bit with a pair of the dress shoes that I keep at the office, but when I got there I was reminded that I kind of hate those shoes. I thought maybe I’d add a blazer I keep in the closet and sort of cover up my shame, but all of a sudden this blazer, which I’ve had for a few years, made me look as big as a house. So I resigned myself to going through the day looking like some kind of “Leave It to Beaver” reject stuck in design school. Pick me for your artsy kickball team!

For the time being, I’m sticking with Movable Type as the publishing system for Subtraction.com as well as A Brief Message. It’s not that I’m still enamored of it; as anyone who’s been patient and persistent enough to post remarks on my posts lately (thank you, by the way) will attest to, my particular installation of Movable Type is often painfully slow, and the version that I’m using, 3.33, gets longer in the tooth every day.

I’ve complained about this before, but the reason I’m staying put is that the switching cost is too high for me at the moment. I just can’t imagine investing the time necessary to re-create these templates in another publishing system; that’s a project for when I get laid off. I’m also holding out hope that a coming revision to its promising but not quite ready for prime time fourth version will modernize Movable Type sufficiently that switching to a competing package will offer fewer advantages. I still maintain that going over to WordPress would be trading in one set of problems for another (I know there will be many people who disagree with me on that point).

If you design Web pages with any kind of transactional component and you’re not paying attention to this, then you should: the talented interface designer Luke Wroblewski is currently in full promotional mode for his upcoming book “Web Form Design Best Practices,” to be published soon from Rosenfeld Media.

Clearly, they’ll have to come up with a sexier title than that if they ever adapt the book into a major motion picture, but at least it makes no bones as to what it’s about: designing highly intuitive and efficient forms for capturing user inputs on the Web. You can get a kind of preview of the content over at his blog, where this one essay on optimizing sign-up forms for wireless networks will teach you more about the art of interaction design than most courses will teach you in a year.

Let’s not even talk about the horrible wincing I did when I learned that Apple lowered the price of its iPhone today by US$200 — a mere eight and one-half weeks after I dutifully and idiotically waited in line to buy one. Apparently, there are some avenues of recourse available to us early adopters, but here’s my take: I have neither the time nor the energy in my life to go charging back up this particular hill. I knew what this thing cost when I bought it, and I knew it was going to go down in price one day, and so here we are.

In a tangentially related matter, the lower iPhone prices and the introduction of the iPod touch presumably means that more and more customers will soon be exposed to the wonders of Apple’s multi-touch, software keyboard. On that, I have something to say.

Wow, the response to A Brief Message so far has been terrific. Thanks to everyone who posted comments on the site, on last night’s post, or who wrote in to me with your support — and to everyone who read the site, too! My partner-in-crime Liz Danzico and I worked long and hard to make this happen, and the encouragement has been deeply gratifying.

I just wanted to take the time to write a few additional notes about the site to clarify some points, and also to hash out some technical details.

Welcome back from the summer holidays, everyone. If you’re ready to dive into fall, then I have just the thing for you: a brand new Web site that I’ve been cooking up for several months now with my good friend Liz Danzico. The site is called A Brief Message. As of 11:45p tonight, it’s live, so you can go and visit it right now and read the inaugural article from the incomparable Steven Heller.

If we did our jobs right, you’ll get the gist of A Brief Message in about thirty seconds, tops. You can also read the introduction from Liz, who is the site’s editor-in-chief, for more insight. (She also has a great write-up on her site.)

I’ve been toiling away all weekend to get this launched — and the whole concept of the site is brevity — so I don’t want to go into too much detail here. But I will add a few comments that, hopefully, will round out the ideas driving this new entry into the arena of sites about design.

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!