Category Archives: Subtraction

Testing, One, Two, Tees

It’s Friday and everyone’s exhausted, so I just thought I’d throw this out there to maybe brighten up a few folks. Herewith, test prints for a brand new batch of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica shirts. Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to re-running them — or am nearly ready to get them run, anyway. With a little luck, they’ll be ready in time for holiday sales and shipping. What better way to celebrate during the December holidays than with a little typographic profanity?

Continue Reading …

+

The Elements of My Style

Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?

Continue Reading …

+

The Long Haul of Public Speaking

Over the weekend, I had my head down, frantically trying to finish my presentation for Adaptive Path’s MX East Conference in the Philadelphia area. (I attended MX East on Monday and had a great time.)

I spoke to a friend that morning who was thinking about going to Brooklyn’s Red Hook ball fields — the borough’s increasingly not-so-secret stash of outdoor hawker stands selling some of the very best Latino food in the city. As it turned out, it was the last day of the season that the stands would be open, and I didn’t make it.

Around midday Sunday, I took Mister President for a walk and ran into some friends in the neighborhood, who invited me to go for lunch with them in Brooklyn’s DUMBO area; just a short walk from my apartment on an unseasonably beautiful day. I had to decline and hurry back to my desk to continue banging away in Keynote.

Then, while finishing up in Philadelphia on Monday evening, I got a text message from some friends inviting me out to drinks after work, which I naturally had to decline too, as my train wouldn’t arrive back in New York until very late.

I feel like I’m missing out on my life.

Continue Reading …

+

New York to Boston to Denver, and Back Again

That was a busy weekend. Here’s how I spent it.

I woke up at about 4:00a on Friday morning and flew to Boston for the Society of News Designers conference, which was great fun. In our session just before lunchtime, Tom Bodkin and I had a very lively public debate about the merits and flaws of digital design, which I think some members of the audience recorded. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have stayed longer.

Then it was off to Denver for the AIGA National Design Conference. I got just a few hours of sleep that night before reporting to the impressive and immense Denver convention center (they have an awesome sculpture of a bear giving drivers-by the ass in front of the building) the next morning, to be introduced for my solo talk by the extremely classy Kurt Andersen, who asked me some sharp follow-up questions after I was done. It was a little frightening, too, to speak for twenty-five minutes in front of some 2,500 attendees, but I’m proud to say that I did not mess up, at least.

Continue Reading …

+

Crumpled Up

Lately, I’ve been trying to turn down invitations to collaborate on other people’s projects because I feel that I can ill afford the time. With four speaking appearances coming up in the next six weeks and no shortage of other distractions, I’ve been cramming like mad in preparation.

But not long ago, Chris Vivion and John Loomis of Blue Eyes Magazine asked me to design title cards for two of their routinely beautiful online exhibits of documentary photography: “Borderland” by Carolyn Drake, a look at Ukraine at a crossroads between the traditional and the modern; and “City of Fathers” by Dan Seltzer, a visit to Hebron, where a few hundred Jewish settlers live amidst 150,000 Palestinians. It was just the kind of challenge that I like: it revolved around substantive content and entailed a conceptual mode of thinking — illustration, of a sort.

Continue Reading …

+

Live and in Person

It’s going to be a busy few weeks coming up for me: next Friday morning I’m flying to Boston for an appearance at the annual Society of News Designers conference. I’ll be on stage with New York Times Assistant Managing Editor Tom Bodkin — who is the top dog when it comes to design at The Times.

The joint appearance is being billed as something of a “print versus digital” face-off, but in actuality Tom and I get along very well. He’s a brilliant guy whose seen The Times through more than a handful of major changes over the years, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him since I started working there. All the same, he and I have sometimes dramatically divergent approaches to our respective domains, and so our talk should be a lively one — if nothing else, Tom is deeply opinionated about the roles, responsibilities and rights of designers. This is a rare opportunity to see one of the most influential designers in media take me to task for all the compromises we make in the name of Web design. Come watch me sweat.

Unfortunately, I’ll only be in Boston for half a day, as I’m flying to Denver that evening to attend AIGA Next, the organization’s biennial design conference. I’ve been lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on the main stage which is a very flattering honor. In hopes of living up to the occasion, I’ve been working away on a brand new talk that wraps up much of my current philosophy about design and digital media. It’ll post it here soon after the conference.

Then, later in the month, I’ll be in Philadelphia with the Adaptive Path gang for their MX East conference. On Mon 22 Oct I’ll be giving a talk about my experience at The Times, hopefully offering some valuable insights on building a creative team. It’s going to be fun, but really, this is my chance to see some of the terrific speakers that Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett have assembled.

A little further off, in November, I’ll also be running a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Design conference, making its first appearance in New York City. Back in February, I spoke at Carson’s Future of Web Apps conference in London and had a great time, so this should be at least as fun. Oh, the topic of the workshop is, if you can believe it, grids, though it will be a revised and expanded version of the talks I’ve given earlier in the year.

Continue Reading …

+

Radio, Radio

Maybe the rule is that outdated media will skip a technological generation before coming back into vogue. Take radio, for instance, which was ailing for a while under the decades-long, imagistic regime of television. It’s not exactly back at full health, but with the advent of Internet audio, it’s more interesting than it has been in a long, long time.

If you count podcasts as radio, which I do, then you can say that I’m an avid radio consumer. In fact, many of the podcasts to which I subscribe are produced by the various public broadcasters available in the Western world: NPR, obviously, as well as PRI and the BBC too, so long as we’re using broad categorizations here.

Which is why I approached NPR’s new ‘youth-oriented’ program, “The Bryant Park Project,” with some trepidation. Any time a media outlet publicly declares its intention to reach a younger demographic, chances are good that the results will make me cringe. And I’m not even young anymore!

But as it turns out, “The Bryant Park Project,” which debuted on Monday, is not rife with affected jargon, zany sound effects or comedic narrative. To be sure, it’s cheekier than your average NPR show, and it has more than its share of ironic commentary. But it also happens to be substantive and entertaining — like a less stuffy version of “Morning Edition” that, hopefully, isn’t going to spend a lot of time interviewing Bob Dylan about why he’s such a genius. (At least I hope not.) The best thing about it is that it spends zero percent of its time condescending to its listeners. Well, okay, there is a fractional amount of condescension to be heard, true. But there’s far, far less than you’d expect from a program like this. I like it a lot and, more than ever, I’m convinced NPR knows what they’re doing in 21st Century media.

Continue Reading …

+

Illustrate Me No More

When Liz Danzico and I launched our new site A Brief Message last week, it was also effectively the end of Illustrate Me. That project, which started in May of last year and ran more or less into early this year, was my first attempt at trying to actively integrate illustration into my online work; each month I invited a designer or illustrator to create art to accompany the previous month’s archives of this site.

I had a great time doing it, and I was lucky enough to get some truly wonderful contributions from some terrific artists. Ultimately, however, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t yet and was unlikely to ever reach a point where Illustrate Me achieved that satisfying effect that I look for in the meaningful use of any illustration.

Continue Reading …

+

From Me to You

After raising the possibility of a Subtraction.com Email Newsletter last month, I did some hunting around at the various email list services out there and settled on two main contenders: the well-regarded Campaign Monitor and the similarly capable Mail Chimp. They’re basically comparable, though I admit that I felt compelled to give the latter a try first because, well, chimps are just cuter than monitors.

That said, I’ve passed on both of them for the time being. Instead, I took the cheap route and opted for the built-in announcement list functionality provided by Dreamhost. Say what you will about Dreamhost’s spotty uptime record and sluggish performance, but they offer a terrific feature set for one-person Web empires like Subtraction.com. Their fairly complete if unglamorous set of tools for mailing lists, publishing software, ecommerce and other digital empire-building endeavors are really easy to set-up, and they come at no additional cost.

Continue Reading …

+