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Long Live the King

Jack Kirby, the legendary artist, writer, and so-called “King of Comics,” would have turned ninety-six this week. Though he built one of the most vaunted bodies of work in the industry, there are still plenty of folks outside of comics fandom who have at best only a passing idea of who he was or why he is so revered — even if they’ve paid out of their own pockets many times for the movies, toys, books and countless other forms of paraphernalia that have been adapted from his many, many creations.

Thankfully, there are lots of points of entry for those curious about the man and his work. Here are just a few off the top of my head.

Over at The A.V. Club yesterday they ran a very helpful beginners’ guide to Kirby’s career, which is relatively brief but still comprehensive. This is a good place to start, as is the Web site for The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, which is currently virtual-only but has ambitions to “manifest itself in the physical realm.”

A few years ago I picked up a copy of Mark Evanier’s beautiful, oversized hardcover monograph “Kirby: King of Comics” from a Barnes & Noble bargain bin. It’s a brisk, engaging read and a visual delight. Kirby drew in a style designed to deliver a maximum of drama within each of the many panels on a page. He could get a whollop out of just a few square inches, but in this book’s huge reproductions, his work is practically explosive. It’s a beautiful way to pore over the artist’s very particular way with scale, composition, line, depth, and human anatomy.

Finally, for those curious about Kirby’s somewhat tortured role in the evolution of the American comic book industry, I highly recommend Sean Howe’s “Marvel: the Untold Story,” an account of the business and editorial side of the company that was the platform for Kirby’s greatest run of work. It’s essentially the secret origin for this huge strain of pop culture, tracing the emergence of comics from seedy, early-20th Century publishing, through their initial golden age in the late 1930s and 1940s, their rebirth in the late 1950s and 1960s, and on to the industry’s lurching growth through the ensuing decades.

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Coming Soon: Facebox

My friend Matt and I spent a few days earlier this week working on a new side project. It’s called Facebox and it’s almost ready. Starting today if you sign up for the launch at Facebox.io, we’ll give you a discount on the debut pricing too.

Facebox

Technically Facebox will live on the Internet, but part of its appeal to us was that it was a project that would let us get up from our desks and get into the real world. In fact, it practically required us to walk all over New York City in order to get it done. We lucked out; the weather around here has been unseasonably, almost unconscionably pleasant for August.

So what is Facebox? I’m not going to explain too much about it now except to say that it’s built for designers. It’s also decidedly not huge or world-changing in any respect; it’s small and specific, focused on a relatively minor problem that nevertheless plagues designers everywhere. It’s one of those things that Matt and I have both found ourselves wanting many times, but we never found that anyone had bothered to build it, so we decided to do it ourselves. Anyway, you’ll find out when it launches, which should be in just a week or two. For now, sign up to hear about the launch.

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Square v. Portrait

This photo I put on on Instagram last week turned out to be one of my more liked posts.

Windows on Instagram

Though I’m a sporadic Instagram user, I think it’s an amazing product. Their early selection of the square photo format was a genius response to the constraints of the camera phone and a spot on insight into how to simplify photo composition for a mass audience.

All the same, I often lament the success of the Instagram square. Rectangles just make pictorial storytelling more interesting. Here’s how I would have cropped the same image in a portrait-oriented frame. (I had to recreate the vintage effects, so they don’t match the photo above perfectly.)

Windows Portrait

I’m not arguing that Instagram should allow portrait images. I’m just saying the world is more interesting than just squares.

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Recreating Photoshop Blend Modes

It’s kind of ironic, but one of the things that has made it easier to move away from Photoshop is the immense popularity of some of its very own features. A good example is the program’s blend modes — darken, multiply, color burn, lighten, screen, color dodge, etc. These have become so popular that when other graphics programs like Acorn, Pixelmator and Sketch implement similar functionality, they generally replicate them almost exactly. Switching made simple.

My favorite of these blend modes, by far, is multiply. As the name suggests, this mode gives you the product of two or more layers, multiplying each pixel on the top layer by the pixel or pixels in the layers directly beneath it. The result is a darker image that is usually quite visually rich. I use it all the time.

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Designer Founders and Choosing Problems

Now and then, designer founders of new startups ask me for advice on the companies they’re building. Having tried and failed to build a sustainable business as a designer founder myself, I feel a little leery about offering advice. At the same time, with the benefit of hindsight, I can recognize some of the same missteps that we made with Mixel.

The most prevalent one is not putting the user at the center of the company. This is somewhat ironic, because designers often pride ourselves on being advocates for the user experience. But there is a difference between user-centric design and building a user-centric business.

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iPhone 5 Button Issues

One of the so-called “geniuses” at my local Apple Store told me that the iPhone’s home button, which was so problematic on the iPhone 4 is now a serviceable part on the iPhone 5. Apple apparently identified the root causes of that problem and accounted for them in the design and manufacturing of its current model. The new home button shouldn’t become unresponsive over time as its predecessor so frequently did — but if it does, Apple can repair the button itself rather than replacing the entire unit, as it used to do.

It’s been almost a year since the iPhone 5 was introduced, so why should I care? Well, I had to bring my own unit into the Apple Store for repair recently, which is when I learned about this incremental bit of hardware progress. Thankfully, my iPhone 5’s home button has been working without a hitch, but sadly the same can’t be said of its power button. That piece recently started losing responsiveness, just like the iPhone 4’s home button used to, often requiring two or three hard presses to turn the unit on or off. For me, just one person, that’s frustrating. But from anecdotal evidence, lots of folks with iPhone 5s of similar vintage have been experiencing the same troubles, which leads me to believe this is a common hardware defect.

Apple’s solution? Well, unfortunately the iPhone 5’s power button is not a serviceable part, so the entire unit had to be replaced. Apple did this for me under warranty, thankfully, so I can’t complain too much about getting a brand new phone for free. But if I can gently offer a little advice to our friends in Cupertino: someone wise once said, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

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Six Years with Todoist

There was a time that I thought I’d be on the search for the perfect to-do management software forever. That’s what I wrote in this blog post back in 2007, when I first mentioned Todoist, a Web based to-do list application that was then fairly new to me.

But six years later, I find myself still using Todoist, which is kind of amazing to me. I’ve poured thousands and thousands of to-do items into it, and have been faithfully ticking them off and moving them around every single work day. In that time, Todoist has gone from a side project run by its founder, Amir Salihefendic, to a real, profitable company called Doist, with a staff scattered all over the world.

What’s even more amazing to me is that at its core, Todoist is still fundamentally the same; it remains a ridiculously simple bit of software that takes just moments to learn, and it’s still extremely effective. In spite of the many years it’s been in the market, and the many users who have sent in feature wish lists, and the many talented people who have signed on to Amir’s team, it hasn’t become encrusted with complex features geared towards specialized use cases. In the world of software, keeping your feature set essentially unchanged while also keeping it relevant is a real feat. It may not be glamorous, but it’s incredibly hard.

Actually, Todoist has changed in one important way: it’s become more readily available on every platform. Whether you use Chrome or Safari, Android or iOS, Mac or Windows, Todoist is available and fully functional. In fact, today the company just released a brand new version of Todoist for iOS, a fully-fledged, native, beautiful overhaul of its iPhone experience. (At one time, Todoist for iPhone was just a native wrapper around a Web view, and it was exactly as flaky as that sounds. It’s come a long way.). Even better, this new version is optimized for the iPad, too. I fully expect to be using Todoist for the next six years, at least.

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J-Cord Headphones

A few years ago I accidentally bought a pair of earbud-style headphones with what I later came to learn was a “J-cord” design — one side was longer than the other, so that you could wrap the longer side around the back of your neck and let the earbuds hang off your shoulders when they weren’t in your ears. They were a little awkward to manage at first, but when I eventually mastered them I also became a huge fan of the asymmetrical design. It’s incredibly convenient if you pop your earbuds in and out regularly.

Apparently, J-cords have fallen out of fashion now, as it’s become almost impossible to find a manufacturer that still makes them. Several weeks ago I asked Twitter for recommendations on finding new models, but got back almost nothing — there were plenty of suggestions for good earbud headphones, but almost all of them were the more traditional, symmetrical Y-cord style.

I did get one useful suggestion though: @joranovski recommended RHA’s MA450i earbuds, which sound excellent and are reasonably priced. They have a traditional Y-cord style design, but the cord is long enough that you can wrap it around the back of your neck before splitting the two cables, giving you much of the benefit of a J-cord. It’s not quite as elegant because I find myself sometimes losing track of which way I’ve wound the cord, and unwrapping it can be somewhat comical. The cording is also made of a braided fabric material which is quite pleasing to the touch, though it will pick up ambient sound on a blustery day, echoing a bit like a faint, howling wind. On a busy New York street, though, it’s hardly noticeable.

Anyway, there’s no big moral to this story other than J-cords are great. Someone should bring them back. In the meantime, though, the RHA MA450i’s are a decent substitute.

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Saying Goodbye to Google Reader

Barring a miraculous, last-minute reprieve from its corporate parents, Google Reader will shut down in just a few days. I’ve been trying out a few alternatives: Feedly, Feedbin and Digg Reader (in beta for the Web but just out today for iOS), among others. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, but I’m struck by how much they all look like Google Reader — a list of feeds and folders occupying the left third of the screen and a stream of articles in the right two-thirds.

When Google Reader’s demise was announced, in my head I pictured a slew of new products vying to take its place by reinventing the very idea of an RSS reader. I was looking forward to seeing some radically new user interface approaches that would challenge my notions and habits around feeds. I haven’t seen that, at least not yet.

However, when I think more carefully about what I like and don’t like about these contenders, I realize that in truth I’m actually not looking for something different at all. What I want are the very same paradigms that Google Reader used, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same auxiliary features — basically the exact same interface. When one of these products omits something that Google Reader featured, or takes a slightly different approach, I think to myself, “Well that’s not right.”

Changing habits is hard, especially with something that’s as geared towards expert usage as RSS. It just goes to show how biased towards advanced users Google Reader was; acclimating yourself to its quirks took some time, but once you adopted Google Reader-specific habits, they become ingrained and you never wanted to give them up. Software for experts tends be like this, I find, and in many ways that is exactly the opposite of what a software company wants if they want to build a huge audience. I guess Google Reader never really had a chance.

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Requiem for a Back Button

iOS 6’s Back ButtonI’m working up to writing at greater length about iOS 7 because, well, blogging. In the meantime, I thought I’d make one specific point. The thing that bothers me most about the new operating system is the completely revised back button, which is now less of a button and more of a left-facing arrow that looks a bit like a compressed bracket, plus a text label. I’m not going to critique it extensively right now, except to say that my least favorite thing about it is that it’s not the old back button.

If you ask me, that back button, the one that has been with us since the iPhone debuted, was the best back button design of all time. Most back buttons, like the ones in desktop browsers, are just an arrow-shaped icon with a text label above or below that says only “Back.” If you want to know where they’ll take you, you usually have to click and hold on the button to reveal a list of the screens you previously viewed.

The pre-iOS 7 back button consolidated these things into a single button shape that tapers into an arrowhead on the left side, and it housed a text description of where the button would lead you. It basically did three jobs with a single element. First, it visually signaled the way back, so that even if you didn’t read the descriptor text, you would still recognize the button’s function instantly. Second, if you did read what it said, it gave you the title of the previous view, without forcing you to tap and hold or take some secondary action to reveal that information. And finally, unlike the new back button in iOS 7, it was explicit about what you could tap and where; the target area was clearly demarcated by the button shape, and managed to do so without crowding the title of the view to its right (by contrast iOS 7’s new back button text often seems to run right into the title of the screen).

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