Archives

Get Your Swede On

CAP & DesignRush out to your local newsstands and get a copy of CAP & Design magazine — that is, if your local newsstand is in Sweden, as it’s a Swedish language design publication. The latest issue features a rather shockingly large feature article on me, along with a rather shockingly large photograph of me sitting in an East Village café, with a silly grin on my face. The article is about my design career, my thoughts on design, and of course my early experiences as Design Director at NYTimes.com. If you can read the language, I’m sure you’ll find the article, written by Swedish journalist Pierre Andersson, to be very illuminating. English-only readers will have to wait for my forthcoming, full-length profile in The New Yorker. Be prepared to wait a while.

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A Glass House on Fifth Avenue

As an Apple fan, I think the company’s retail stores are awesome in theory, but I’m not the kind of guy to spend hours hanging out within them, nor the sort to make dutiful treks to their openings, like many Apple fans do. Still, I thought it was worth stopping by this evening’s grand opening for Apple’s new flagship store on Fifth Avenue, here in New York. It’s not exactly on my way home from work, but the fact that the company had decided to put such a huge, public stake in the ground in such a high-end retail district, and with such a prominent architectural statement… well, my curiosity was piqued.

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Why Didn’t They Call It the MacBook Amateur?

As replacements for Apple’s iBook line of consumer notebooks, the just announced and released MacBooks look like they’ll do nicely. They update yet another spot on Apple’s product matrix to Intel-based technology, and they’re quite attractive, to boot. That’s true especially in the super-sexy black model, which has a seductively evil look to it — more K.A.R.R. than K.I.T.T., if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of people, though, I’m disappointed that Apple has effectively mothballed the idea that their professional notebooks ought to ship in a compact form factor too, as there’s nothing in the current product line that inherits the niche filled by the now obsolete 12-inch PowerBook.

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Why Didn’t They Call It the MacBook ?

As replacements for Apple’s iBook line of consumer notebooks, the just announced and released MacBooks look like they’ll do nicely. They update yet another spot on Apple’s product matrix to Intel-based technology, and they’re quite attractive, to boot. That’s true especially in the super-sexy black model, which has a seductively evil look to it — more K.A.R.R. than K.I.T.T., if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of people, though, I’m disappointed that Apple has effectively mothballed the idea that their professional notebooks ought to ship in a compact form factor too, as there’s nothing in the current product line that inherits the niche filled by the now obsolete 12-inch PowerBook.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

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The Illustrated Man’s Blog

From time to time, I’ve been known to complain that the craft of illustration is largely missing in action on the Web. It’s not that there’s no illustration out there, because some truly talented illustrators have embraced the Internet and done very well establishing themselves. It᾿s just that the art form isn᾿t nearly as prevalent as it should be; the practitioners of the craft that have come online are, by and large, promoting their services for other media. Work that’s been commissioned and produced exclusively for the Web is few and far between.

I should talk, right? There’s practically zero illustration anywhere on Subtraction.com. Even if you count the oversize image of Mister President at the top of the home page as a photographic illustration (which is stretching it), it would still be less than what could be there. I originally designed that marquee area to be a showcase for my drawings, but I quickly realized that my ability to create pictures by hand is in a state of arrested development — it’s been far too long since I’ve done it seriously enough to be able to produce anything satisfactory when I sit down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. That’s something that I need to resolve, but not today.

Instead, I have another solution: with this post, I’m introducing illustrations for each of the past six months of my archives created by an esteemed colleague, and going forward, I’ll be posting a new illustration after the close of each month. It’s a little showcase I’ve been calling “Illustrate Me.” You can see it right now by starting at last month’s archive page and working your way backwards to November 2005.

Continue Reading …

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How Much Is That Browser in the Windows OS?

Internet ExplorerSoftware has a cost, no matter what anyone tells you, no matter even if it ships without a price tag of any kind. Years ago, Microsoft made that momentous decision to give us Internet Explorer for free, but I was thinking today about how truly free it really was — which is to say, it’s not free at all when you think about it.

Just how many hours of productivity have been lost to making Web page code work inside of Internet Explorer? Personally, I know that I’ve spent the equivalent of hundreds of man hours coaxing standards-compliant code to render properly in the I.E. world view, and the companies I’ve worked for have probably logged tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of man hours doing the same. When you add up all the effort similarly expended by designers, studios and corporations of all kinds all over the world and over the past five or ten years, it’s got to be an enormously expensive number; if you were to assign hourly rates to all that time, it might total in the billions of dollars.

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Dear Apple, Please Cell Out

Treo 650Caveat lector: This is a rant, and it contains no facts.

Seemingly forever, there have been persistent and vague rumors that Apple is going to build some sort of handheld device — based on the Palm operating system, based on the iPod, based on the Newton, based on smoke and mirrors, whatever — and I’m sick of them not being true. There’s even recent evidence that certain Apple patents strongly suggest a forthcoming announcement of some sort. The time for a truly user-friendly portable device is now and that device should be, at least in part, a mobile phone… mostly because all of the mobile phones now in the market are just terrible.

I have a Treo 650 that’s bulky and over-featured, but the only reason I hang onto it is that it’s truly the best of the worst. It has a reasonably good user interface for call management and text messaging, but the only crucial thing it does really right is integrate my contacts on the phone with my contacts from Apple’s Address Book, via iSync. For me, that’s the whole ball of wax.

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Blockwriter

As we all know, the surfeit of distractions available on a personal computer these days can make it exceedingly easy to get nothing done. There’s the constant haranguing of emails, the intrusions of instant messaging, and the endless nagging of countless other attention-hungry applications and utilities.

In looking for ways to defuse this, I noticed a few years ago that some serious writers, at least in the early drafting stages of their work, were turning to manual typewriters as a method of sidestepping all of those distractions. It’s a great solution: what better way to thwart a computer than to step away from it completely? There’s no email to check on a typewriter, no beeps and pop-up reminders from other applications, and no access whatsoever to the Internet and its tantalizing abundance of productivity-killing diversions.

What’s more, a manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph — thereby imparting the feeling of working without really working — instead of continuing to write new sentences or paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors, manual typewriters don’t allow you to easily re-edit, insert and revise a sentence once it’s been committed to paper. This makes for an entirely different writing experience: the ideas come first, and the act of finessing them, of word-smithing, comes after all the ideas have been set to paper.

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