Category Archives: Subtraction

A Brief Message, Briefly

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.

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Not Moving from Movable Type

Movable TypeFor 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).

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Technical Brief

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.

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A Lengthy Message About A Brief Message

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.

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Now Fully Cooperating with Google

If you’ve ever used the built-in site search on Subtraction.com then, well, my apologies. Believe me, I was fully aware that searching this site via that creaky old CGI script was more or less the equivalent of mailing in a question to the Library of Congress and checking your mailbox every day for a reply after working in the fields. That is, it was slow search. I just didn’t have the means to fix it.

All that’s changed, because searching this site is now powered by the brute, irrepressible and undeniable force of Google. They’re a little company on the West coast that specializes in helping you find stuff on the Interweb. And they’re quite good at it too, so the results should be pretty satisfying. Give it a spin; you’ll notice a bajillion-fold speed increase. Now all you have to do is figure out what you’re going to do with all that extra time.

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Mail Bonding

One of the revelations of working at a large-scale content site is how effective email newsletters are as a tool for driving traffic. Duh. I admit I had really underestimated this, but it makes sense; your email client is open all day and, spam aside, the inflow of messages is more or less tailor made for your interests.

Partly as a result of that discovery, I’ve been toying a while with the idea of creating a Subtraction.com email newsletter that would be released monthly — or perhaps more frequently, if the demand is there. This would be a simple recap of each of the blog posts I published leading up to each newsletter’s release, along with some overview of the conversation that ensued in the comments. The idea is to give occasional or lapsed readers of the site a concise method of catching up. I’d also add in relevant notices pertaining to my various speaking appearances and side projects — including any updates on the long rumored, still pending, but for-sure-on-its-way-someday reprinting of my infamous Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee shirt (I promise!).

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Seen in Seattle

An Event ApartI’m leaving for Seattle, Washington this afternoon for an appearance at the latest An Event Apart conference tomorrow. The two-day design and technology event actually starts today, and I’m sorry to have to miss the opening, but duty calls here at the office. If you’re attending, please introduce yourself and say hello to me tomorrow, I should be around all day. I’m always happy to meet readers.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to stay in Seattle very long, as I’m heading back to New York on Saturday morning. I’d stay a little longer, but I’m a bit tired of traveling already for the year (though I’ve taken only a half-dozen trips or so) All those airport security measures really get to me, as does all that interminable waiting around — what I call ground time. Summer is short, and I really want to enjoy as many weekends as I can back in my new neighborhood. To be honest, the older I get, the more I appreciate just hanging out at home with Mister President.

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Writing at No Great Length

The blog post I wrote yesterday was really hard to write, as it turned out. There were lots of revisions, and I nearly abandoned it once or twice because it kept going on and on and on. In its final form, it clocks in at about four hundred and fifty words. I’m not saying that’s svelte, exactly, but in one earlier draft, I was pushing well past eight hundred words without an end in sight.

I get caught up a lot over-explaining things when I write. It took me several tries to compress that post’s third paragraph, which outlines the basics of my critique of the new elevator system at my work, down to a relatively compact hundred-plus words. At one point, I was detailing my usability complaints in almost excruciating detail — recounting every minutiae of interacting with the system — the prose equivalent of watching a slow motion replay. It was so bad it was tiring even for me to type it, so be glad I didn’t make you read it.

Why do I do this? I blame design. A lot of my job is about creating visual and interactive presentations that accurately and effectively communicate information. In practice, that often calls for simplicity and explicitness, constantly reminding myself that I must go through great lengths to ensure that users understand every component of the experience I’m constructing.

When I transfer that value to writing though, it seems too often to inspire a long-winded, expository style that feels like homework: laborious, plodding, overly careful. Writing should be fun; the more fun it is, the more fun it’ll be to read. Anyway, it goes back to something Jeffrey Zeldman told me once: it’s a lot harder to make something short than it is to make something long.

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Illustrate Me for March

March’s Illustrate Me is by Liz Danzico, the multi-talented interaction designer, writer, editor and information architect who is partly responsible for, among other things Boxes and Arrows and AIGA Voice, serves as a senior development editor at Rosenfeld Media, and on the advisory board for The Information Architecture Institute. Whew. To say that she’s prolific is an understatement; there are about a dozen other significant things on her résumé that I don’t have room to mention here, but somehow she made time to produce a really wonderful, whimsical interpretation of three of my posts for last month. Go see it right now on the March 2007 archive page.

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