The weather is hot but it’s beautiful out nevertheless, a great day to head to the beach or lounge on a shady lawn somewhere and enjoy the gorgeous lack of inertia that often characterizes summer Sundays. It used to be that I’d spend these days — every Sunday — reading the newspaper. Once upon a time, I had the luxury of declaring that Sundays were my time and mine alone, and as such it was therefore my prerogative to spend as much of the day as I liked doing something immensely enjoyable but also good for my brain.

These days I have a young family, and a startup — and, let’s face it, ubiquitous Internet access that makes printed paper seem obsolete — so I can’t recall the last time I indulged myself with the Sunday paper anymore.

But jeez, the Sunday paper is still great, still an amazing product of a long, long tradition of careful editorial packaging and art direction and just general purposefulness. If I could afford to spend a whole day with it again, I would, and for anyone who finds themselves with a Sunday to kill, I recommend picking up the Sunday edition of your local newspaper.

Yes, of course we can get news from so many different outlets now, and we can manipulate the delivery of news so it’s so much more convenient than the huge, intimidating tome that is the Sunday paper. But we can also, from time to time, take out a day to enjoy it. Maybe not every Sunday, but once in a while we can find a day to benefit from this still amazing weekly product that’s designed to reward a few hours of our undivided casual attention. I bet if you do this you’ll come across a story you probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and spot an ad for something you would’ve missed otherwise, and, maybe best of all, you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time surfing aimlessly the way you would have had you spent those hours on the Web. Hurry up and give it a shot, because sadly the Sunday paper is not going to be around for much longer.

The Internet gives designers a soapbox like they’ve never had before, and that’s a wonderful thing. One of the most entertaining uses for these soapboxes is the unsolicited redesign, a kind of public demonstration of talent in which a designer overhauls a well-known Web site or digital product and shares it with the world at large. There is no invitation required or expected, and the same goes for credentials — anybody can undertake a creative reworking of any Web site, regardless of their experience or professional status. The only real qualification is whether they can produce something that they can substantively argue for as an improvement over the original. If the redesign is full of good ideas, well-executed and persuasively reasoned, the world beats a path to your door.

In the past week I’ve been asked numerous times to respond to one such unsolicited redesign that’s achieved not insubstantial notice within design and technology circles — a reworking of a site that I was closely associated with for some time. It’s a redesign that contains some genuinely good ideas and is executed professionally. But the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worst of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site.

I’m purposefully not identifying this person or the project or providing a link back to the redesign itself, mostly because I think it’s counter-productive to continue to reward this effort with more unwarranted attention. To me, it felt less like constructive criticism than link-baiting, and so I have tried to avoid making any public comment.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

Every super-hero movie requires a significant suspension of disbelief, but in 1978 when director Richard Donner brought “Superman” to the silver screen he infused the movie with considerable believability by imagining the Man of Steel’s Metropolis as a thinly-veiled version of late-twentieth century New York City. When the character defied gravity and soared over his adopted city, what laid below him was that uniquely beautiful, earthbound constellation of lights that is the Manhattan skyline — even including, during one sequence, the Statue of Liberty. In his secret identity of Clark Kent he clumsily made his way through the unmistakable congestion of midtown Manhattan to report to work at the real-life headquarters of The Daily News, which stood in for the fictional Daily Planet. Arch-nemesis Lex Luthor’s underground lair was an abandoned wing of the iconic Grand Central Terminal. Superman apprehended a burglar scaling the famous Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street. And so on.

Of course it’s not necessary to film absurdist fantasies — and super-hero movies are nothing if not that — in real locations, but imparting some sense of reality in these films can add so much, as they did for Donner. It’s fine to watch a super-human character negotiating an unreal world, but it’s more thrilling, more engaging, more entertaining to watch a super-human character negotiating a world that looks something like the world we know — the real world.

Mobile and tablet apps change all the time, but there is no public record of the way an app’s user interface evolves with each new revision. What we need is a version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for apps, but unfortunately because of the siloed nature of this class of software, it’s not possible to simply deploy bots to create one for us.

It occurred to me that one viable alternative would be to crowdsource something similar to the Wayback Machine by creating an app that would let any user upload screen grabs to a central archive on the Web. That sounds much more manual than the Internet Archive’s approach, l know, but in fact I think it could actually be fairly well automated.

Last week, I marked a year since my departure from The New York Times by starting to talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing (see this blog post). Today, I’m going to talk a bit about why I decided to jump into a startup, one in which we’re building a product of our own, rather than starting another design consulting business.

Some longtime readers will remember that about ten years ago I co-founded a design studio of my own. In fact, until I went ‘in-house’ at the Times, I had spent the entirety of my career in the design services industry, working with all sorts of clients doing all sorts of projects, and generally enjoying the variety of challenges and the exposure to many different kinds of businesses. But in the long stretch of months leading up to the day I resigned my position at the Times, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t return to that kind of work.

There were lots of reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that I think the design industry has undergone a significant and meaningful change, one that opens up opportunities that are not to be missed.

Tomorrow is July 16th and it’ll be a year to the day since I left my job at The New York Times. (More about why I left in this blog post.) I can hardly believe it.

Lots of people ask what I’ve been up to in that time. I admit I’ve been rather cagey about the specifics, but the outlines are more or less public knowledge. I spent the first several months finishing my book, “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” I also picked up a few freelance and part-time design consulting gigs, generating some transitional income while also spending a lot of time with my family.

What’s less well known is that I cleared away most of that freelance activity at the end of January, when I hunkered down to focus solely on a brand new venture that I started thinking about almost immediately after my tenure ended at The Times.

As I wrote yesterday, I’m encouraged by the recent design improvements that Google has made in its products, especially its new Gmail theme. I’m assuming — hoping — that Google will apply this new sensibility to its many other products too.

Number one on my list would be a refresh of the interface for Google Reader. Yes, I’m one of the diminishing devotees of RSS. Every morning and many, many times throughout the day (and often in the middle of the night when besieged by insomnia, too) I check the copious feeds that I’ve collected over the years, devouring all manner of updates from all corners of the Interweb. They’re a critical source of news, information, education and entertainment for me.

It’s only been a short while since Google co-founder Larry Page assumed the role of CEO but it’s safe to say that we now have a sense of what his vision of Google looks like. Apparently design is a key part of it.

The search giant’s recently launched, high profile social networking bid Google+ debuted with an unexpectedly thoughtful (though admittedly derivative) design, and evinces an attention to the finer details of typography, spacing and visual hierarchy that was previously absent across the vast majority of Google’s products. Similarly, the company has made additional refinements to its iconic home page that reflect a newfound respect for the intangible — the changes have been minor, but they’ve felt less beholden to the brutally analytical decision-making that has guided Google product design and aesthetics in the past.

If you’re a fan of popular culture and you’re not regularly checking out the copious wares that The A.V. Club is turning out at a furious, daily pace, then you’re missing out. This (mostly) non-satirical sister publication to the satirical newspaper The Onion brings a smart, intensive, critical focus to television, film, music, books, games and all manner of pop culture, and it generates what is probably the most consistently high quality and wide-ranging coverage of its kind out there. Many people are familiar with The A.V. Club as an insert within the print edition of The Onion, but the publication produces significantly more content on its Web site. You could explore it for hours, or you could subscribe to its RSS feed and find yourself inundated with great stuff on a daily basis, like I do.

Here are two examples. First, the site recently published this fantastic Robert Altman primer, which goes into extensive yet expedient detail on the legendary director’s ouevre, including lots of embedded video clips of his movie trailers. For anyone unfamiliar with this master filmmaker’s work, this is probably the most efficient, thorough and enjoyable crash course you could ask for. Even for someone like me who’s seen most but not all of his films, this was enlightening.

Example two: The A.V. Club’s recently inaugurated Pop Pilgrims video podcast is a great idea very entertainingly executed: A.V. Club hosts travel around the continental United States (in a sponsored Fiat, apparently) logging video essays on real world locations made famous by pop cultural milestones. The first episode, which won me over to the series immediately, took a look at the actual building that stood in for Nakatomi Plaza in the 1988 action masterpiece “Die Hard.” I mean, come on, that’s brilliant. Subsequent installments visited the diner from “Reservoir Dogs,” the Initech building from “Office Space,” the hotel from “The Shining,” the headquarters of Fantagraphics Comics, and others. See them all here.

By 11:00a this morning there were already over a dozen examples of what email professionals call bacn (pronounced like bacon) in my inbox. Bacn is the euphemistic term for subscribed email, automated mailings that a user has opted into, as opposed to the more commonly known spam, which is generally, but not always, unsolicited email. It’s not as valued as personal email written by real humans, but it’s better than junk mail.

Bacn includes newsletters, alerts, daily deals and assorted marketing messages from companies that I’ve transacted with in some form before. Most of these messages I ignore and some I will peruse occasionally, but the bacn that I pay the most attention to is the kind that updates me on activity from my social networks; notifications automatically generated when someone has liked or favorited one of my posts, when someone has tagged me in a photo or mentioned me in a tweet, when someone has added me to a group or list, etc.

Basically, the stuff that’s about me specifically is what interests me. But even then, the volume of these emails is too much to handle. I’ve already turned off bacn-generating settings in Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and others — and those are the networks that I actually use.