Category Archives: Design

AIGA Here and There

AIGAJust a reminder for those in the Baltimore/D.C. area: I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday night at Villa Julie College for the Baltimore chapter of AIGA. I’m going to cover a wide gamut of stuff from what happens at NYTimes.com to my extracurricular projects to my philosophy on design management to a quick tour of my thinking on using typographic grids online. It’s going to be fun; so if you can make it, please come up to introduce yourself.

In other — much bigger — AIGA news, I’m very pleased — ecstatic, actually — to announce that the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman will have a night of his own in mid-October for the New York chapter of AIGA as a part of our Small Talks series. Small Talks is a long-running tradition of the New York chapter, in which we invite a series of highly esteemed design figures to talk about subjects near and dear to their hearts in intimate settings. We purposefully limit the number of seats available to these events in order to allow the speakers to do their magic in as casual and friendly an environment as possible, so book your ticket early before they’re sold out.

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Illustrate Me for August

Illustrate Me for August 2006It takes a little time to get back into the swing of things after summer. At least that’s the reason I’m giving for why this announcement for the August Illustrate Me is so late. But it may be some consolation that this latest entry in my ongoing series featuring custom illustrations for my blog archives is a contender for the title ‘best yet.’

The creator is Louise Ma, an extremely talented young designer who’s in her last undergraduate year at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art here in New York. I can’t take any credit for being so well tuned into emerging talent that I zeroed in on Louise before she’s even made a splash in the professional world. Rather, she was recommended to me by Mike Essl, who runs Cooper’s design program, at the beginning of the summer for an internship with us at the NYTimes.com design group.

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What Everyone’s Swearing This Season

Hel-Fucking-VeticaFinally, right? Those long-awaited “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” tee-shirts that I printed this summer are done and available for sale. You can buy yourself one this very minute over at the brand new Store.subtraction.com. There’s only one hundred and fifty of them — that’s all I printed this time around — so hurry and get yours now.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting patiently for them; I had to put a little extra effort into this to make the shirts really worthwhile. It’s pretty important to me that they all sell, and not just because I don’t want to be stuck with dozens of profane tee-shirts on my hands.

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What Everyone’s Swearing This Season

Hel-Fucking-VeticaFinally, right? Those long-awaited “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” tee-shirts that I printed this summer are done and available for sale. You can buy yourself one this very minute over at the brand new Store.subtraction.com. There’s only one hundred and fifty of them — that’s all I printed this time around — so hurry and get yours now.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting patiently for them; I had to put a little extra effort into this to make the shirts really worthwhile. It’s pretty important to me that they all sell, and not just because I don’t want to be stuck with dozens of profane tee-shirts on my hands.

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Home Page Heroics

Notwithstanding my own lack of clarity regarding the five year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, I’m not immune to the occasion’s obvious significance. It’s as moving a date for me as anyone, and as it approached, I personally wanted to make sure that the NYTimes.com design team should make our own, humble contribution in honoring it. That’s why I wholeheartedly agreed when one of the designers in my group suggested he put some extra hours over the weekend towards some special presentations of the home page for Monday.

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Forest for the Banners

The Urban Forest ProjectIf you’re in the Times Square area anytime between Friday and Halloween, look upwards to the nearly two hundred colorful banners hanging from the lampposts. They’s all part of the Urban Forest Project, a collaboration between AIGA’s New York chapter, Worldstudio Foundation, and the Times Square Alliance. The public art project features visual work from one hundred and eighty-five designers, artists, photographers and illustrators, including some by friends of mine and some by area students who have been mentored by professionals like my friend and colleague on the AIGA NY board, Emma Pressler. Emma has been a major force behind AIGA New York’s mentor program, and an article in yesterday’s Times talks about the work that she and her student partner, Wednesday Trotto (real name!) did for Urban Forest. It’s an event that ties together design, New York City, AIGA, The New York Times and a friend of mine… I call that a great story.

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Meetings in Progress, Lots of Them

One topic that I covered in my speaking appearance at An Event Apart NYC last month — and also in the interview I did for Signal v. Noise in which I compared workplace notes with Google᾿s Jeffrey Veen — was my meetings calendar. I attend a lot of meetings at The New York Times: standing meetings, impromptu meetings, managers’ meetings, work meetings, development meetings… lots of them. For better or worse, the company culture is one that breeds a surfeit of meetings.

A lot of people would think this is bad. The prevailing wisdom in business talk today is that meetings are uniformly counter-productive, maybe even destructive. I’m not sure that I would argue with that; I can’t deny that, with a schedule like mine, I occasionally sit in on some meetings that just aren᾿t all that necessary. But neither can I say that I agree that meetings are a wholly bad thing.

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AIGA Wants YOU

AIGAThings are moving quickly for me since joining the board of directors for AIGA New York. I’ve been hard at work putting together some events that I hope will spark a bit of interest from designers who, until now, might not have thought of AIGA as being the sort of organization that pays a lot of attention to their particular needs. This was the number one concern I heard when I first informally polled readers about the organization a few months ago, and I’m doing my best to fix the situation. The first of these events will take place in October and it’s going to be small yet huge; it’s too early to talk about it in any detail now, so stay tuned.

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Veerle for Illustrate Me

With only seven entries written and posted here last month, things were a bit quieter on Subtraction.com than I typically like. I was just too busy to blog very much, what with my appearance at An Event Apart NYC and my vacation to California late in the month.

But I can make up for it with a treat: the incomparable Veerle Pieters graciously agreed to create original artwork for July’s edition of Illustrate Me, the ongoing project where I invite designers and illustrators to dress up the Subtraction.com archives. You can see Veerle’s artwork right now on the archive page for July; it’s a really fun illustration that combines soap bubbles, cycling and a pretty girl for a satisfyingly summery effect that almost makes you forget about the heat.

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Vinh vs. Veen at Signal vs. Noise

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!

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