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Now Fully Cooperating with Google

If you’ve ever used the built-in site search on Subtraction.com then, well, my apologies. Believe me, I was fully aware that searching this site via that creaky old CGI script was more or less the equivalent of mailing in a question to the Library of Congress and checking your mailbox every day for a reply after working in the fields. That is, it was slow search. I just didn’t have the means to fix it.

All that’s changed, because searching this site is now powered by the brute, irrepressible and undeniable force of Google. They’re a little company on the West coast that specializes in helping you find stuff on the Interweb. And they’re quite good at it too, so the results should be pretty satisfying. Give it a spin; you’ll notice a bajillion-fold speed increase. Now all you have to do is figure out what you’re going to do with all that extra time.

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A Subway System in Your Pocket

If you’re an iPhone owner and you live in New York City, you want to be able to carry around the official Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on your iPhone. There are a few options for this, including using a tool like FileMarker which locally saves a PDF copy of the map to be accessed through Safari. It’s a clever approach, but it seems too tricky for me.

Instead, I prefer using Photo Albums in my iPhone to view cropped versions of the subway map, a simple but effective technique I first saw demonstrated by Mike Essl, and which doubtless many others have also used.

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Sunday in the Times: Choking

Choking on GrowthThe front page of tomorrow’s New York Times will feature the first installment in a series called “Choking on Growth,” an in-depth examination of “the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China’s epic pollution crisis.” It’s a major piece of reporting, and as usual you can find it at NYTimes.com alongside similarly excellent, complementary video, multimedia and interactive infographics.

There’s a little more value add this time, though, in the form of a special section on the site devoted to “Choking on Growth.” It’s essentially a micro-site that showcases the entire series — traditional journalism as well as Web-only content — as a coherent package, and it will be updated and added to over the coming days and weeks as the series continues. It’s also the result of a tremendous and not-as-frequent-as-I’d-like instance of our designers collaborating with editors from both the print and Web side, and with our multimedia, video and information graphics teams.

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Four Pictures

I’ve had family visiting all week, and I’ve been doing my duty as tour guide. We’ve seen the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Yankee Stadium, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and went around Manhattan on the Circle Line Cruise, among other things.

Throughout, I’ve had my camera with me, mostly for the sake of documenting my totally awesome nephew. Setting aside those several dozen pictures, I just sorted through a week’s worth of photography and came up with exactly four mildly interesting shots to share here.

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Mail Bonding

One of the revelations of working at a large-scale content site is how effective email newsletters are as a tool for driving traffic. Duh. I admit I had really underestimated this, but it makes sense; your email client is open all day and, spam aside, the inflow of messages is more or less tailor made for your interests.

Partly as a result of that discovery, I’ve been toying a while with the idea of creating a Subtraction.com email newsletter that would be released monthly — or perhaps more frequently, if the demand is there. This would be a simple recap of each of the blog posts I published leading up to each newsletter’s release, along with some overview of the conversation that ensued in the comments. The idea is to give occasional or lapsed readers of the site a concise method of catching up. I’d also add in relevant notices pertaining to my various speaking appearances and side projects — including any updates on the long rumored, still pending, but for-sure-on-its-way-someday reprinting of my infamous Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee shirt (I promise!).

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The Start Is at the Finish

Speaking of movies, I did in fact go to see “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which was fantastic. With my perpetually critical designer’s eye, though, I noticed two things: first, that the movie’s titles are actually quite bad. They use a simplistic, somewhat retrograde graphical animation that amounts to pretty much what I imagine the titles for “Freejack” must have looked like.

But if you saw the movie too, you might not have paid much attention to the titles, because of my second observation: like a lot of films released in the past half decade, the titles follow at the end of the film, after the final frame of action. Though they are designed very much in the same way as titles that precede the film — you could almost move them to the start of the picture and they would work as is — they’re inserted as parting gestures instead of opening salutations.

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Little Shops of Horrors

Late last week, the Business Day section of The New York Times ran a great story on Netflix’s customer service strategy. Faced with unexpectedly effective pressure from Blockbuster Video (who have turned Netflix’s own mail order model on its head by allowing their customers to return movies not just by mail but at the rental chains’ physical locations as well), Netflix has counter-intuitively invested millions of dollars in domestic telephone support facilities and staff.

Where the number of companies outsourcing customer service by telephone to Third World locations is only increasing, Netflix has instead chosen to hire two hundred workers in Oregon to man their hotlines in the hopes that a renewed, more responsive focus on customer service will win the day for them. They’ve even given these representatives enough operational latitude to allow them to function not just as telephonic automatons, but as real, empathetic human beings who help other human beings solve their video rental-related problems. Imagine. It’s a winning strategy, in my book.

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This Way to the Web, Print Designers!

Some of my best friends are print designers. Really. Here in New York, there’s a vague segregation between online and offline designers, but the local design community is still sufficiently cozy — and the island of Manhattan sufficiently small — that it’s not unusual for print and digital designers to intermingle freely. Dogs and cats, living together. Insane but true.

It’s great, actually. Especially for me. While I have an obvious partiality towards all things digital, my romance with graphic design originally started with print, obviously. That’s all we had in the pre-TCP/IP dark ages. I enjoy the two worlds immensely, even if I do believe the one is going to completely decimate the other like an atom bomb before the decade’s out. Kidding!

Over the past few years, too, I’ve come to see that the purpose of my career (in at least one aspect) is to do what I can to help bridge the two worlds. Part of this is my design sensibility, which hopes to borrow the best of print to help inform the evolving digital world in a way that’s true to the new medium. Part of it is the mission that I set out for myself when I joined the board of directors at AIGA New York, which to me plays a crucial role in our industry’s transition. And part of this is the fact that I work at a company that employs dozens of print designers even as we’re transforming ourselves into a digital enterprise.

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Passing on Periodicals

Speaking of magazines, does anybody read them anymore? Which is to say that while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who continue to buy, subscribe to and read traditional periodicals, I realized recently that I’m not among them.

The other day, I was over at a friend’s house and was surprised to see that she had copies of Monocle and Good Magazine on her coffee table. Well, I wasn’t surprised by that so much as I was surprised by how interesting I found them, at least for the short spell in which I was flipping through their pages as my friend and I chatted. I have complaints about the art direction in Monocle, but between those two, I can’t deny that compelling stuff is happening in magazine design these days. Add just about any given week’s issue of New York Magazine to the mix, and you have a pretty good survey of some of the most absorbing design happening anywhere. The problem is that they’re like lipstick on a pig: some of the best design being done today is being wasted on magazine content.

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Graphic Design at 70 M.P.H.

In case you missed it, there was a really terrific piece in yesterday᾿s New York Times Magazine called “The Road to Clarity.” Ostensibly a report on how the Federal Highway Administration is transitioning Interstate highway signage away from the typeface Highway Gothic and to the better optimized Clearview, its writer, Joshua Yaffa, manages to elegantly transition the angle of this article into an excellent primer on the nuances and importance graphic design. It’s actually quite slyly done.

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