Category Archives: Subtraction

Making Your Site Look Like Mine

Even with all the email that I receive, I’m still the kind of person who finds it very difficult not to reply to a message that someone has sent me, especially if the sender has posed a question of some kind. As a result, I often find myself writing familiar replies to queries that come in over and over, from different people. These are generally earnest questions about the way I work, where I draw inspiration from, advice on design, etc.

I’m more than happy to provide answers and to give something back in my small way, but it’s becoming a harder and harder job to pull off. I have a continual backlog of emails flagged for follow-up, and catching up feels like a kind of treadmill sometimes.

So I’m going to start, here, publishing an occasional series of blog posts covering answers to some of those frequently asked questions. When I get around to it, I’ll collate them and post them in an evergreen spot on the site.

The question I want to tackle in this inaugural post is commonly posed something like, “Can I use the design of Subtraction.com for my site?” Variants include, “Can I make a WordPress theme (or similar template) from your design?” or, “I just redesigned my site and it looks a lot like Subtraction.com, do you mind?”

The answer to the first two questions is “no,” and the answer to the last is, “yes.” But with comments.

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Oh Yeeaahh!

Yeeahh!It’s been about a year now since I first started thinking about creating some kind of definitive documentation about my approach to designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool. I spent a few weeks last summer putting a lot of those thoughts down on paper, but nothing much became of them.

Then, a few months ago, in preparation for a workshop at Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference, I started thinking about how to visually represent the problem-solving process that I go through when designing new interfaces with grid layouts. At first, I started thinking about disassembling and then reassembling one of the designs in my portfolio. But that seemed as if it wouldn’t be quite satisfactory, as I wanted the ability to talk openly about all the different factors that go into a design solution, without worrying about offending colleagues or clients.

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Missing Class at SXSW

SXSW 2007Here’s where I come clean a bit and stop vaguely assigning blame to this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival panel participants as a faceless group. The truth is that I’m guilty of exactly what I outlined in my previous entry — the unconscientious lack of preparation and conversational inexactness that can torpedo a panel discussion. And worse.

On Saturday afternoon, almost immediately after doing a two-person, twenty-five minute lecture with Mark Boulton called “Grids Are Good,” I joined my former colleague and business partner Chris Fahey on his panel, “High Class and Low Class Web Design.”

It goes without saying that the concept of class is a touchy topic. In a series of blog posts last year, Chris wrote at length about why we, as designers, don’t talk about class, and why we may be operating within the constraints of class-mindedness without realizing it or acknowledging it. These were complex, ambitious and thoughtful articles, and if you work in Web design and have interest in this subject, you’d do well to read them for yourself.

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Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

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Shorter, Faster, Better

Okay, it’s true, I don’t blog enough. I used to think I was a fairly active blogger, but looking over the frequency of my posts for the past few months, it’s pretty obvious that I only manage to publish two or three times a week. And if that weren’t evident enough before now, this complaint about infrequency is the one thing that I heard loud and clear yesterday, sprinkled in amongst all the gratifyingly supportive commentary on my decision to start running ads from The Deck and Authentic Jobs on this Web site.

The problem is that, as an amateur writer, I have a particular weakness: an inability to be brief. Almost without fail, when I sit down at my computer to ‘dash off’ a post that I think will run only two or three paragraphs, I end up writing six or eight of them. What should take me ten minutes too often turns into an hour and ten minutes, and so I often can’t find the time to even start.

What I want to avoid, naturally, is the idea of quantity trumping quality — I don’t want to delude myself that readers will continue to tune into Subtraction.com just to read, for instance, that tomorrow evening I’m heading out to Austin, Texas for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where, on Sunday, I’ll be doing a power session and a panel on “High Class and Low Class and Web Design,” and that if you’re there as well, please come up and introduce yourself before Tuesday afternoon, when I fly back to New York. I mean, that’s what Twitter’s for, right?

Still, I will take the feedback to heart and try and post more often, and in doing so, I’ll do my best at striking some kind of balance between brevity, quality and quantity. Here’s an example: a post like this one would normally ramble on for another several paragraphs, but for tonight, it’s going to stop right here.

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A Commercial Message

Some readers will have noticed that, starting several weeks ago, I began running job posts from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs. This evening, for the first time, I’ve also started running ads from The Deck, Jim Coudal’s design-focused advertising network.

Truth be told, with the first move, I tried to sneak it through, without acknowledging it in any blog posts. Aside from the fact that they’re advertising, I figured that those job postings, being in black and white and being styled in such a way as to be very similar to the rest of the site, were visually innocuous. The ads from The Deck, however, are in color, and not so easily ignored.

I’m bracing for some scathing feedback from readers, so please, let me know how you feel if you find these changes to be offensive. We’ve been living with advertising on the Internet for over a decade now, but it’s still a topic that can inflame passions among reasonable people, and I respect that.

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Illustrate Me for February

Illustrate Me for FebruaryOne of the advantages of being employed at The New York Times is that I get access to some of the best design minds out there. And by access, I mean I can walk right up to them (if they’re not busy) and talk to them, and they’ll actually talk back to me. It’s pretty awesome. If they’re a talented designer working in publishing, at some point or other, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll come work at The Times, at least for a spell.

With a little bit of cajoling, once in a while I somehow manage to get a few of these designers to contribute to Illustrate Me, my ongoing project where I invite outside contributors to create illustrations for Subtraction.com’s monthly archives pages. It’s a kind of windfall when I pull it off, sort of like getting a Major League ballplayer to join you for a game of stickball.

Last year, Op-Ed art director Brian Rea turned in a fantastic piece for the June 2006 archives. This time out, I’m lucky enough to have a brand new piece for the February 2007 archives from none other than Nicholas Blechman. See it for yourself on the archive page.

In addition to being the Art Director for The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas is one of the most prolific and talented young art directors and illustrators out there. He’s amassed an impressive body of work in design and illustration, some of which you can see at Knickerbockerdesign.com. I’ve long been a fan of his spare, exceedingly intelligent and yet satisfyingly simple approach to visual communication, and as ever, I feel very fortunate he was able to create something typically splendid for display here.

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Back from the Future (of Web Apps, and from Paris)

I start out with the best of intentions when I travel, but as you can see, I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I’d have liked to while on this trip — which, ideally, would have been more than zero posts. Tomorrow, it’s back to the States, winding up this London/Paris tour after just over a week, so I’m squeezing in this update.

London was lots of fun, but a little stressful; spreading a panel appearance, a solo talk and a half-day workshop across three days turns out to be one of the less relaxing ways to see a city, as it turns out. Still, I had a great time there, thanks in part to the warm hospitality of the folks at Carson Systems, who really know how to put on a terrific conference. It’s pretty amazing what their small team manages to pull off, and if you’re thinking of heading to their upcoming Future of Web Design or Future of Online Advertising conferences, you’ll be just as impressed, I’m sure of it.

I did a lot more kicking back here in Paris, where the food, wine and décor is a world apart. Amazing, is the word. No offense meant to London town, but this city gets further under my skin with each visit; it’s thoroughly — at times unconscionably — beautiful. I like it here a lot. If only I’d paid attention in eighth grade French class, I might actually be able to carry on a conversation here, as well. At the very least, I was able to be here for my father’s sixty-ninth birthday, which makes me very glad. All around, a worthy leg of the journey.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m off to get one more ridiculously, ridiculously good meal. I’ll be back in the blogging seat within a day or two, and before too long, publishing some more substantive posts in which I’ll share some of what I presented in London.

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Loose Comments Sink Ships

Take a look at this Akismet graph charting the precipitous rise in comment spam across the blogosphere over the past few months, and you’ll see one reason Subtraction.com has been recently besieged by similar problems. Whatever percentage comment spammers are finding in what many might consider a sisyphean activity, it appears to be enough incentive for them to persist, and persist, and persist still, and their commercial litter is everywhere.

I thought I had my comment spam problem more or less locked down late last year, when my friend Su from House of Pretty helped me install AutoBan for Movable Type. That managed to tamp down the flood of comment spam for a while, but as per the aforementioned Akismet graph, the Internet-wide volume of this crap has increased nontrivially in just the past three months.

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Two or Three Things You Know About Me

With apologies to Jean-Luc Godard.

What is it about podcasters that allows them to make what looks like such a difficult medium seem so effortless? Brian Oberkirch is a great example: he’s the brains and voice behind the consistently fascinating and highly professional Edgework podcast, in which he hosts terrific dialogues with some of the best creative minds on the Internet. Last night he interviewed me via Skype at 10:00p EST, and he had the completed podcast episode up and available for download by 10:00a this morning. Wow, how do they do it? Anyway, it was a blast to talk to such a pro; Brian really knows how to run an interview. Have a listen and let me know how badly I stammered.

In other news, please vote for Subtraction.com in the 2007 Bloggies competition, where I’ve been very, very generously nominated for the “Best-Designed Weblog” category. That’s a huge honor, and I’m totally touched. I’m up against some formidable competition — not the least of whom is Veerle. I couldn’t possibly be saddened to lose to someone of that stature, because her blog is so clearly awesome. Still, it would be really nice to win, so if you can spare the time to vote for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Finally, you have two opportunities to come hear me ramble on about design: First, in just a few weeks I’ll be appearing in London at The Future of Web Apps conference (one of Ryan Carson’s many influential Carson Systems projects), where I’ll be talking about everything I know (and some things I don’t) about the topic of “Managing User Interfaces.” I’m pretty excited for that. I’ll also be doing a so-called ‘power session’ at South by Southwest Interactive in March, which will offer up for public appropriation everything I’ve ever appropriated myself about designing with grids. Mark Boulton will be sharing the stage with me, too, to provide the real substance. And of course, I’ll be available for hanging out afterwards, which after all is the real point behind the conference, right? Hope to see you there, or somewhere…

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