Category Archives: Subtraction

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Day but Were Afraid to Ask

An Event ApartMy speaking session on day one of An Event Apart New York City is called “Dawn ’til Dusk with a Design Director.” The idea is to compress one of my typical work days into a breezy little talk, with the hope that eighteen waking hours of activity will make for at least fifty-five minutes of entertainment. Heaven help me if it doesn’t.

I’ll be chronicling everything design related that happens to me, starting more or less from the moment I wake up, through my day at the office, and into the evening, as I slave in front of my computer in service to this blog and other extracurricular projects. Along the way, and with some humility, I hope to convey at least a few interesting lessons on how good design is created and managed, the various ways design informs those activities not explicitly design related, and maybe even how to have a life outside of design.

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Get Your Swede On

CAP & DesignRush out to your local newsstands and get a copy of CAP & Design magazine — that is, if your local newsstand is in Sweden, as it’s a Swedish language design publication. The latest issue features a rather shockingly large feature article on me, along with a rather shockingly large photograph of me sitting in an East Village café, with a silly grin on my face. The article is about my design career, my thoughts on design, and of course my early experiences as Design Director at NYTimes.com. If you can read the language, I’m sure you’ll find the article, written by Swedish journalist Pierre Andersson, to be very illuminating. English-only readers will have to wait for my forthcoming, full-length profile in The New Yorker. Be prepared to wait a while.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

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State of Subtraction.com

Subtraction LogoThe estimable John Gruber has taken the plunge into full-time, self-employed blogging, and I envy him. As I wrote in the link I posted to the Elsewhere section of Subtraction.com, this is a win all around: readers will get more of Gruber’s uniquely detailed and exquisitely reasoned Macintosh punditry, and Gruber will get to focus on Daring Fireball, the central passion of his professional talents.

He writes, “There’s nothing I want to do more than this.” I can empathize, because while I’m genuinely engaged by many things in life — including the daily and deeply satisfying challenges at my job — there are few things I enjoy more than working on this weblog. As a designer, authoring a weblog is more or less like landing a dream project with a client who’s always in agreement with your own creative judgment. It’s no accident that the design profession and the blog phenomenon have been intimately entwined since this whole thing started. It’s the first medium that has allowed unfettered access to publishing for a population of craftspeople who have almost always had publishing just beyond our reach.

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Wrapper’s Delight

There’s a new “Links” sub-section at the bottom of the Subtraction.com home page, which is more or less what you would expect: literally, a list of sites that I think are interesting. I haven’t had it before, in part because I think such lists are a little show-offy for my taste, and also because I always feared I’d snub someone by inadvertently leaving out a link to them. But, as time has gone by, I’ve come to feel that such lists are de rigeur for weblogs, and it’s a little impolite not to have one on mine. So here you go; I’m sure I’ve accidentally missed someone, but I’ll be trying to update this regularly — or soon, anyway.

The presentation style of these links is the manifestation of an idea that I had for showing lots of blog links by making use of the favicon, a concept that I had wanted to use for a project at work. As it turned out, we opted not to use it, so I thought I’d put into service for the links section. I’m fond of it because it’s a nice use of some very standardista-friendly elements — a simple, unordered list and favicons — expressed in a manner reminiscent of typographical tricks more commonly associated with print design (the drawback, of course, is that I can only list sites and feeds that feature unique favicons; not for technical reasons, but for editorial ones).

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Wrapper’s Delight

There’s a new “Links” sub-section at the bottom of the Subtraction.com home page, which is more or less what you would expect: literally, a list of sites that I think are interesting. I haven’t had it before, in part because I think such lists are a little show-offy for my taste, and also because I always feared I’d snub someone by inadvertently leaving out a link to them. But, as time has gone by, I’ve come to feel that such lists are de rigeur for weblogs, and it’s a little impolite not to have one on mine. So here you go; I’m sure I’ve accidentally missed someone, but I’ll be trying to update this regularly — or soon, anyway.

The presentation style of these links is the manifestation of an idea that I had for showing lots of blog links by making use of the favicon, a concept that I had wanted to use for a project at work. As it turned out, we opted not to use it, so I thought I’d put into service for the links section. I’m fond of it because it’s a nice use of some very standardista-friendly elements — a simple, unordered list and favicons — expressed in a manner reminiscent of typographical tricks more commonly associated with print design (the drawback, of course, is that I can only list sites and feeds that feature unique favicons; not for technical reasons, but for editorial ones).

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I Am the Answer

Almost forgot about this until I was cleaning out my travel bag this morning: on my way to throwing out the mostly superfluous contents of my 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival goodies bag, I ran into Jeff Croft and Wilson Miner in the lobby of the Hampton Inn. They pointed out that I might want to hang on to the “SXSW Activity Book,” a “cheeky” collection of nerd-friendly, rainy day-style games included amongst the ad flyers and industry magazines stuffed inside the bag. The back of the four-page booklet featured a trivia question, the answer to which is actually my name. I got a kick out of that.

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Talk Amongst Ourselves

Traditional Design & New TechnologyFor some weeks, I’ve been working hard to make a spectacular contribution to what I’m sure will be a spectacular discussion panel at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. It’s called “Traditional Design & New Technology” and it examines the questions of whether and how the aesthetic and functional principles that guided graphic design throughout its pre-Internet existence make sense on the World Wide Web. How do the vastly differing criteria between offline and online media determine what makes for ‘good design’? How has the shifting role of designers affected the expectations that audiences set for design quality? How do changing tools and techniques influence the relevancy of traditional design values?

As far as design topics go, these are some of the thornier ones, at least in my estimation. For this, I have the formidable Mark Boulton to thank — or to blame, as it’s turned out, for all the extracurricular hours we’ve spent preparing for this session. The original brainstorm was his; then he and I did the initial planning together. But the whole affair has come much further than we could have ever hoped thanks to the work of our co-panelists: Jason Santa Maria and Toni Greaves, and our moderator, Liz Danzico.

These people are all very, very impressive, and if I weren’t on this panel, I’d be in the audience just to watch them. For real! I’d even be there at the very early time and date of 10:00a on Saturday morning, 11 March, which just happens to be when “Traditional Design & New Technology” will take place. Yes, that’s the first day and the first time slot in the festival — we’re even on before the opening remarks, if you can believe it. The way I like to look at it: I once went to see Spiritualized open up for The Jesus & Mary Chain in the early nineties: I don’t regret seeing the Mary Chain, but I’m really glad I saw Spiritualized. You’ll be glad too, if you show up for this panel. Hope to see you there.

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Awards Season

BloggiesQuite unexpectedly, I woke up this morning to an email from Nikolai Nolan alerting me to the fact that Subtraction.com is one of five finalists nominated for the title “Best Designed Weblog” in this year’s Annual Weblog Awards — it’s amazing, but I can now make an authentic claim to being “Bloggie-nominated.” I’m quite flattered by the whole thing of course, having never expected to achieve enough notoriety to ever register on the same level as a site as universally well-read and well-regarded as fellow nominee Kottke.org.

Of course, it’s a short distance from incredulous surprise to shameless self-promotion, so I’m beggin’ you: won’t you please vote for me? Head on over to Bloggies.com and cast your vote to make this the most successful colorless Web site ever. And be sure to attend the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, where the Bloggies award ceremony will be held in person with a real audience and everything — the single funnest place where you can find out for yourself whether or not a roomful of bloggers really do glow in the dark. Thanks for your support.

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