Category Archives: Subtraction

A Short Film About Me

Last year director Raafi Rivero of The Color Machine asked me over email if I would be interested in being the subject of a short film project. By way of an example, he showed me this beautiful short that he had made about cinematographer Bradford Young. Flattered, I said yes, and not long afterwards he and a small crew filmed an interview with me in the beautifully arcane MEx Building, located on a still-ungentrified stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

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Subtraction.com and The Syndicate

I’ve just joined The Syndicate, a newly launched advertising network that delivers ads through RSS feeds. The other launch partners in The Syndicate are like-minded blogs focusing on technology, design, development and business: Marco.org, Asymco, ShawnBlanc.net to name just a few.

Starting 31 Oct, you’ll see ads in the Subtraction.com RSS feeds. The aim is to provide a space for relevant advertisers, so hopefully these ads will be a complement to the content I publish, rather than a distraction from it. Read more here.

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What Comes After Reading on iPad

I’m bullish on the iPad. Some people have assumed the opposite, based in part on my frequent criticism of the way publishers have risen to the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

But I really do believe that the iPad is a truly transformative device, an innovation that’s going to re-make the way we work with and play with technology. Looking back at its introduction in January of last year, it’s fitting that it debuted at the start of what I believe we’ll look back on as ‘the tablet decade’ — if we don’t end up thinking of it as just ‘the iPad decade.’

On the other hand, I think it’s still too early to know exactly how these devices are going to shape the next ten years. We’re all still discovering and exploring how different a multitouch tablet is from laptops and desktops. As that collective understanding progresses, we’re sure to see some unexpected if not startling new uses for them. There’s one safe likelihood though, and that is that the things that are attracting so much attention on the iPad today will probably become less exciting to us tomorrow.

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The End of Client Services

Last week, I marked a year since my departure from The New York Times by starting to talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing (see this blog post). Today, I’m going to talk a bit about why I decided to jump into a startup, one in which we’re building a product of our own, rather than starting another design consulting business.

Some longtime readers will remember that about ten years ago I co-founded a design studio of my own. In fact, until I went ‘in-house’ at the Times, I had spent the entirety of my career in the design services industry, working with all sorts of clients doing all sorts of projects, and generally enjoying the variety of challenges and the exposure to many different kinds of businesses. But in the long stretch of months leading up to the day I resigned my position at the Times, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t return to that kind of work.

There were lots of reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that I think the design industry has undergone a significant and meaningful change, one that opens up opportunities that are not to be missed.

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Suddenly, One Year Later

Tomorrow is July 16th and it’ll be a year to the day since I left my job at The New York Times. (More about why I left in this blog post.) I can hardly believe it.

Lots of people ask what I’ve been up to in that time. I admit I’ve been rather cagey about the specifics, but the outlines are more or less public knowledge. I spent the first several months finishing my book, “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” I also picked up a few freelance and part-time design consulting gigs, generating some transitional income while also spending a lot of time with my family.

What’s less well known is that I cleared away most of that freelance activity at the end of January, when I hunkered down to focus solely on a brand new venture that I started thinking about almost immediately after my tenure ended at The Times.

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Listgeeks Interviews Yours Truly

Listgeeks is a recently launched social list-making application that lets anyone create a list about anything, and every list can in turn be re-edited into new lists by other users. Listgeeks has its work cut out for it, as lists and list-making are an increasingly crowded space — see Top10, List.ly, Listverse and others — but Listgeeks has, at least, a beautiful, spare aesthetic.

That’s probably no accident, as its founders seem clearly interested in design in general. To help launch the product, they’ve conducted a series of interviews with an eclectic gallery of creative folks including illustrator and author Christoph Niemann, Flip Flop Flyin’ artist and illustrator Craig Robinson and several others.

This morning they’ve published a short interview with yours truly . You can read it here and have a look at the lists I’ve made — and even re-edit them — over on my Listgeeks page.

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Commented Out

Last week I had to shut down the comment thread for a post I wrote about The Daily when it turned into an unexpectedly snarky exchange on the merits of various approaches to iPad publishing. To look at the twenty comments that were published before I shut it off you’d think the discourse wasn’t that bad, but I had to filter out several fairly nasty and thoroughly unconstructive comments that some less diplomatic readers tried to post.

I don’t mind debate and disagreement and even outright refutation of my opinions, but I really do mean it when I implore commenters to “Please be nice.” In fact, that’s the only instruction I offer in my comments form, simply because I feel like it’s short and simple enough to set the right tone for 99% percent of the people who comment here. When commenters don’t adhere to that, the fun of running a site with open comments is drained away for me.

Luckily, this hasn’t happened very often. In fact I can’t remember the last time it did, and I doubt I’ve had to take this measure more than two or three times in the decade or so I’ve been running this blog. So I’m very grateful to the vast majority of the readership here who have had the decency to be nice in the comments.

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An Illustration for Stack America

Stack America is a neat service in which subscribers get a curated bundle of independent magazines sent to them every other month. The titles change with each delivery, but all are selected by editor Andrew Losowsky from among the best of the many eclectic, hard-to-find titles produced by the independent press.

The subscription also includes bi-monthly installments from what Stack America calls “The Designers Series”: graphic prints created exclusively for Stack America by invited designers. Andrew asked me last year to create something for this series, but I was reluctant to say yes for lack of a good idea.

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Fast Talk

I was fortunate enough to see a really healthy audience turnout last Saturday afternoon at my South by Southwest Interactive 2011 talk, where I spent an hour unpacking many of the ideas in my book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” Thanks a million to everyone who showed up to listen to me talk about what I always thought was a topic of fairly narrow interest. I was incredibly gratified to find out that I was wrong.

Later that same afternoon I made another appearance at the conference, this time on the Fast Company stage where I was interviewed by my good friend, the design writer Alissa Walker. This was a much smaller venue and not as widely publicized, so only a handful of people got to watch it in person.

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SXSW 2011

It’s awesome to be in Austin again for this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival. I just got in last night (thanks in part to a free ride in from the airport courtesy of the great folks at Food on the Table), registered for my badge and had a quick look around before heading to dinner with friends. Based on that brief scouting alone, this year’s show looks even bigger than ever. It’s going to be crazy here.

You can find me at three events during this yeaṟs festival. On Saturday I’ll be doing a talk at 12:30p about the ideas in my book “Ordering Disorder.” Later than afternoon I’ll be interviewed by Fast Company on the PepsiCo stage. Then on Sunday morning I’ll be doing a book signing at the South by Bookstore in the Austin Convention Center. Come out and say hi!

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