Fall Ball

Though I follow it passionately, I don’t write a lot about baseball here. This is mostly owing to the fact that, in contrast to those others in the blogosphere who write both more eloquently and/or more precisely about the subject, I generally feel that anything I have to offer runs along the lines of ‘blowing smoke out of my ass.’ I came late and unexpectedly to this passion, and while I have a lot of opinions about it, I feel much more like a student of the game than a sage expert.

Which is why I hesitated, really, to write about the Yankees’s 6-0 loss last night to the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series. They’re down in this five-game set now, 2-1, and they must win the next two games or summarize another season as a dismally oversold failure.

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Listen Up, Adobe

AdobeSeveral weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

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Ripped from the Headlines

NYPost.comAs of yesterday morning, there’s a new NYPost.com, and I like it a lot. It’s miles away from what we do at NYTimes.com, and it’s not exactly my taste in terms of graphic design, but its unabashed appropriateness and surprising sense of wit is kind of irresistible.

Then again, this is just me talking. A few people with whom I’ve expressed my enthusiasm about this site aren’t quite as enamored of it as I am. Like my good friend Liz Danzico, Director of User Experience Strategy at AIGA and editor of the information architecture magazine Boxes & Arrows, for one. Her reaction to my endorsement of the site was, “REALLY?” — all caps and everything.

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