Coming Soon to a Torso Near You

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 …

+

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!

Continue Reading …

+

Illustrate Me for June

Illustrate MeThe 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 …

+

Icon Do It

Feed IconFollowing 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 …

+