Category Archives: Subtraction

Basic Maths Updated

Over a year ago my friend Allan Cole and I released Basic Maths, our theme for WordPress, which was an instant hit. This week we’re releasing a new update — Basic Maths 1.1.

This new version includes a slew of significant enhancements, including: full compatibility with WordPress 3.0, easier logo customization, improved CSS support for embedded video, smarter conditional logic for widgets and article-to-article navigation and more. Read more about it or buy your copy at the official site.

Maybe the coolest part of Basic Maths 1.1 is the brand new, iPhone-friendly view. Any user viewing a site running this newest version of our theme will see a mobile-optimized presentation of the exact same content. As a blog publisher, the only configuration you have to do is — nothing. It all happens automatically.

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I Wrote a Book

I’ve been in the Bay Area all week for work, and I’ve been meaning to post this news since Monday when I finally made my deadline: my forthcoming book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design” is now officially complete and in the hands of my publisher, New Riders. According to the listing over at Amazon, it’ll ship in early December, so you can pre-order your copy today and have it in time for the holidays. At some booksellers the current pre-order price is over a third off of the cover price, plus if you buy it through any of these links, its humble author gets a little kickback: Amazon (US), Barnes & Noble or Borders.com.

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Thoughts on News and User Experience

As promised, Tina Roth Eisenberg has posted video of my talk from last Thursday morning at FREITAG am Donnerstag in Zurich, Switzerland. If you didn’t get to make it to the event, or you just want to relive the good times, it’s all available for viewing at Swiss-miss.com or over at Vimeo. The videographer who recorded my talk did a terrific job giving you a sense of what the space was like, capturing the contrast between my ideas about digital news and the old world sensibility of the print shop-style showroom in which the lecture was held. Also, very helpfully, some of the slides from my Keynote deck were laid into the video directly, so you can follow along with the specific points I was making.

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Back on Deck

Just a note to say that as of Sunday, I’m officially back in the fold with Jim Coudal’s excellent ad network, The Deck. Once again, in the right column of this site, you’ll find small, hopefully unobtrusive but nevertheless effective and worthwhile ads from one of The Deck’s many well-vetted advertisers. You can find out more about the network here. I was a member of The Deck a few years ago but, in compliance with justly cautious ethics policies at my former employer, I removed the ads. I’m indebted to Jim for reaching out to me almost as soon as I announced my resignation to ask me to rejoin.

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The New New Typography

This coming Monday, I’ll have the honor of speaking at The Museum of Modern Art here in New York City as part of their PopRally event series. This particular event highlights MoMA’s current exhibition “The New Typography,” which includes a selection of seminal works from the eponymous design movement of the 1920s and 1930s. All of the pieces included in the exhibition are drawn from the personal collection of the legendary designer Jan Tschichold. Though the show is fairly small and intimate, there are some legendary and amazing selections to be seen there.

I’ll be joining Stephen Doyle of Doyle Partners, Chester Jenkins of Village, and moderator Juliet Kinchin (MoMA Curator of Architecture and Design), on stage in a conversation about typography in the twenty-first century and how it both draws upon and departs from the work of the New Typography from nearly a century ago. Needless to say, I’m very humbled. The event begins in one of the auditoriums at the museum’s main galleries on Fifty-third Street, and then continues upstairs with a private group viewing of the exhibition. I hope you can join us! Get your tickets here.

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Boston Bound

This coming Wednesday, I’ll be giving the 36th Annual William A. Dwiggins Lecture in Boston, Massachusetts for The Society of Printers. It’s an unbelievably humbling honor, as past speakers for this event have included Milton Glaser, Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter and Sumner Stone, among other luminaries. Gulp.

If you’re in the Boston area, I hope you can make it, especially as the event is in fact free, with a reception following the lecture, to boot. Details follow after the jump, excerpted from the poster.

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Layer by Layer

Truth be told, I was pretty nervous before facing off against Nicholas Felton in our Layer Tennis exhibition match last Friday afternoon. I’d never played the game before, and its structure, in which two visual artists volley a collage-like series of images back and forth under the scrutiny of a stopwatch, seemed very high pressure. Plus, my opponent was none other than Feltron himself (as Nicholas is sometimes better known), a designer famous for autobiographical annual reports in which he creates gorgeous visual narratives from nothing more than the statistical mundanity of everyday life.

Layer Tennis

All that trepidation wasn’t without good reason, as it turned out. You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is.

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Layer Tennis, Anyone?

Tune in this coming Friday afternoon for Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis, in which I will have the honor of matching my graphical prowess against Nicholas Felton of the famously self-aware Feltron Annual Reports. It’s sure to be a cornucopia of wild, free-ranging visual expressionism. ’Cuz y’know, that’s what both Nicholas and I are known for. What’s more, the venerable John Nack of Adobe will be providing the commentary as Nicholas and I parry back and forth.

Layer tennis, for those unfamiliar with it, is that curiously un-aerobic Internet sport in which two graphically adroit competitors, armed with Photoshop, swap a single image file back and forth, embellishing each volley with collage-like visual ornamentation. Oh, and it’s all done under the watchful eye of a stopwatch, so the pace can get kind of frenetic; each volley is fifteen minutes long, and the match is over after just ten volleys. Fun stuff. Check out the archive of previous matches to get a sense of what’s ahead. And point your browser to Layertennis.com on Friday to see Nicholas probably kick my ass.

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Having Fun with Pains

Last week, The Hype Machine, a sort of combination music meta-blog and playlist, published its round-up from the year just ended, including its listing of the top fifty bands of 2009, with each of the fifty slots illustrated by an invited visual artist. If you skip ahead, you’ll see that the indie pop contenders The Pains at Being Pure at Heart came in at number thirteen, and that the illustration was done by none other than yours truly.

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