Category Archives: Subtraction

What Everyone’s Swearing This Season

Hel-Fucking-VeticaFinally, right? Those long-awaited “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” tee-shirts that I printed this summer are done and available for sale. You can buy yourself one this very minute over at the brand new Store.subtraction.com. There’s only one hundred and fifty of them — that’s all I printed this time around — so hurry and get yours now.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting patiently for them; I had to put a little extra effort into this to make the shirts really worthwhile. It’s pretty important to me that they all sell, and not just because I don’t want to be stuck with dozens of profane tee-shirts on my hands.

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You Can Go Home Again

AIGA BaltimoreBeing from Maryland and all — I grew up in Gaithersburg — I’ve got a soft spot for Baltimore, for its cozy, rough and tumble neighborhoods, for that special ‘small town trapped in a big town’s body’ feel that it’s got, for the tarnished glory of the O’s. So it’s especially flattering for me to have been invited by AIGA Baltimore to speak for them in just a few short weeks. On Thu 21 Sep 2006, I’ll be appearing at Villa Julie College and giving a talk about work, play, NYTimes.com, and a little bit of my grand, unifying theory on design in the twenty-first century.

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Announcing Shorty

ShortyFor several months now, between my day job, writing for this blog and numerous other commitments, I’ve been working with some friends on a project called Shorty. Today, for the first time, it’s available as a free, public beta release over at Get-Shorty.com.

Shorty is a link redirection tool not unlike TinyURL or Url(x), which allows you to take ridiculously long URLs, like those you might encounter at Amazon.com for example, and create much shorter aliases for them. This is useful for all sorts of things, but handiest for passing these URLs along to friends and co-workers through email or in collaborative Web environments.

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Veerle for Illustrate Me

With only seven entries written and posted here last month, things were a bit quieter on Subtraction.com than I typically like. I was just too busy to blog very much, what with my appearance at An Event Apart NYC and my vacation to California late in the month.

But I can make up for it with a treat: the incomparable Veerle Pieters graciously agreed to create original artwork for July’s edition of Illustrate Me, the ongoing project where I invite designers and illustrators to dress up the Subtraction.com archives. You can see Veerle’s artwork right now on the archive page for July; it’s a really fun illustration that combines soap bubbles, cycling and a pretty girl for a satisfyingly summery effect that almost makes you forget about the heat.

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Coming Soon to a Torso Near You

This just in: real, honest-to-goodness, printed tee shirts featuring the “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” design that I produced for El Boton some months ago. The feedback I got back from that button was sufficiently positive that I decided to take a chance and run a limited number of these shirts to sell here at Subtraction.com.

They’re printed on high-quality, light blue American Apparel tees in super-sexy cyan and magenta, echoing the original button design without veering too far off into its divisive, hot pink color scheme. The good news is that they’ve literally just left the shirt printer’s yesterday afternoon, but the bad news is that I have about ten days of vacation starting tomorrow, so I won’t be able to start selling them until I get all my ducks in a row, probably sometime in August or early September. Stay tuned, and keep that credit card handy.

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Vinh vs. Veen at Signal vs. Noise

If you’ve got a great idea, you’d better do it quick, before the guys over at 37signals do it better and with more fanfare than you can. Take, for instance, this brainstorm I had a few weeks ago to start doing interviews with designers and technologists here at Subtraction.com. Not long after the idea occurred to me — and before I could share it with anyone, much less act on it — I got an email from Matt Linderman from 37signals, inviting me to face off with Jeffrey Veen, formerly of Adaptive Path and now with Google, in a side-by-side interview over at their own weblog, Signal vs. Noise. Rats!

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Illustrate Me for June

Illustrate MeThe June entry for Illustrate Me — the ongoing project where I invite designers and illustrators to create artwork for the archive pages of Subtraction.com — is now posted and available for your perusal. This month’s illustration was created by Brian Rea, an extremely talented freelance artist and designer who also happens to work with me at The New York Times.

Brian is the Art Director for the paper’s Op-Ed page, where he adds a visual wallop to our daily menu of opinion articles and editorials by coaching an eclectic array of other prolific illustrators — in effect, Illustrate Me is my minor league attempt to be the art director that Brian actually is. I’m a big fan of Brian’s work, and the illustration he created for June 2006 is a beauty — exactly the kind of work that I was hoping to generate when I started this project.

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Plagiarism in Our Schools

This modest little slice of fame I’ve gotten comes with its drawbacks. One of them is the periodic plagiarism of the design of Subtraction.com by unscrupulous or unintentionally errant individuals. I handled my first exposure to this phenomenon last year rather ham-fistedly, overreacting to the essentially innocuous emulation of this site’s design by a basically well-meaning young guy abroad. I rather indignantly and publicly blogged about his offending site, and he graciously removed it — the same effect could have been achieved without the hoopla had I just sent him a private, polite email instead.

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After An Event Apart

An Event ApartIs the term “radio silence” too anachronistic for the Web age? Whether or not it is, I inadvertently fell into a kind of radio silence recently here at Subtraction.com, and for that I apologize to regular readers. Partly, it was due to the fact that last week was very pleasantly halved by the extra-long Fourth of July weekend — it seemed like the ideal time to kick back, so I took a kind of an unscheduled holiday away from this blog. The other part of it was I was busy preparing for a speaking appearance at An Event Apart New York.

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Illustrate Me for May

Max RiffnerIt took me a little while to get this together, but I’ve just uploaded the May 2006 entry in my ongoing “Illustrate Me” project, which I debuted last month. As a refresher: at the end of each month I’m inviting one illustrator to create artwork to illustrate at least three of the posts I wrote in that month. The only stipulations are that the piece must be black and white, and it must feature the title and dates of the posts it’s representing.

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