What I did on my summer vacation: I indulged my inner nerd at the annual Comic-Con International festival in San Diego, California. With a friend, I flew into town late on Thursday evening and spent two days among a teeming population of comic book, fantasy and science fiction devotees, wandering the crazy and enormous exhibit hall and attending some of the dozens and dozens of panel discussions and film events.

Though I have a special place in my heart for comics, I don’t buy or read them regularly, not since I was a teenager. My continued fascination lies mostly in the idea of them as outsized vehicles for adolescent imagination, as an imperfect, parallel reality to which my adult self might retreat in order to recover the comforts of childhood.

It’s an abstract notion, and not one I regularly take action on. To be sure, New York and the East Coast see their share of comic book conventions, but none of them have ever interested me much. What I wanted to do was to see the world’s biggest comic book convention, the apotheosis of adolescent fantasy. So, in planning a trip to see family in Southern California, I scheduled a slight detour to San Diego for a few days and caught the mother of all nerd festivals.

Continue Reading

This just in: real, honest-to-goodness, printed tee shirts featuring the “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” design that I produced for El Boton some months ago. The feedback I got back from that button was sufficiently positive that I decided to take a chance and run a limited number of these shirts to sell here at Subtraction.com.

They’re printed on high-quality, light blue American Apparel tees in super-sexy cyan and magenta, echoing the original button design without veering too far off into its divisive, hot pink color scheme. The good news is that they’ve literally just left the shirt printer’s yesterday afternoon, but the bad news is that I have about ten days of vacation starting tomorrow, so I won’t be able to start selling them until I get all my ducks in a row, probably sometime in August or early September. Stay tuned, and keep that credit card handy.

Continue Reading

If you’ve got a great idea, you’d better do it quick, before the guys over at 37signals do it better and with more fanfare than you can. Take, for instance, this brainstorm I had a few weeks ago to start doing interviews with designers and technologists here at Subtraction.com. Not long after the idea occurred to me — and before I could share it with anyone, much less act on it — I got an email from Matt Linderman from 37signals, inviting me to face off with Jeffrey Veen, formerly of Adaptive Path and now with Google, in a side-by-side interview over at their own weblog, Signal vs. Noise. Rats!

Continue Reading

The June entry for Illustrate Me — the ongoing project where I invite designers and illustrators to create artwork for the archive pages of Subtraction.com — is now posted and available for your perusal. This month’s illustration was created by Brian Rea, an extremely talented freelance artist and designer who also happens to work with me at The New York Times.

Brian is the Art Director for the paper’s Op-Ed page, where he adds a visual wallop to our daily menu of opinion articles and editorials by coaching an eclectic array of other prolific illustrators — in effect, Illustrate Me is my minor league attempt to be the art director that Brian actually is. I’m a big fan of Brian’s work, and the illustration he created for June 2006 is a beauty — exactly the kind of work that I was hoping to generate when I started this project.

Continue Reading

Following up on a May blog post I wrote about revising our feed icons at NYTimes.com, we’ve since implemented the slightly altered version of the emerging standard for the visual indication of XML-based content subscriptions. They’ve been propagated to many areas of the site, though not all of the old ones have yet been removed.

Though it’s not clearly in evidence, I actually did take to heart some of the feedback garnered by that post which suggested that NYTimes.com should be looking to simplify our feed offerings rather than continuing to provide feeds in multiple, potentially confusing flavors (e.g., Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, etc.). Ideally, we’ll soon do a bit of fine-tuning for our entire RSS/XML offering, but that’s a discussion for sometime in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

Continue Reading

This modest little slice of fame I’ve gotten comes with its drawbacks. One of them is the periodic plagiarism of the design of Subtraction.com by unscrupulous or unintentionally errant individuals. I handled my first exposure to this phenomenon last year rather ham-fistedly, overreacting to the essentially innocuous emulation of this site’s design by a basically well-meaning young guy abroad. I rather indignantly and publicly blogged about his offending site, and he graciously removed it — the same effect could have been achieved without the hoopla had I just sent him a private, polite email instead.

Continue Reading

Is the term “radio silence” too anachronistic for the Web age? Whether or not it is, I inadvertently fell into a kind of radio silence recently here at Subtraction.com, and for that I apologize to regular readers. Partly, it was due to the fact that last week was very pleasantly halved by the extra-long Fourth of July weekend — it seemed like the ideal time to kick back, so I took a kind of an unscheduled holiday away from this blog. The other part of it was I was busy preparing for a speaking appearance at An Event Apart New York.

Continue Reading